Law and Mimesis in Boccaccio's Decameron

In Boccaccio's time, the Italian city-state began to take on a much more proactive role in prosecuting crime – one which superseded a largely communitarian, private approach. The emergence of the state-sponsored inquisitorial trial indeed haunts the legal proceedings staged in the Decameron. How, Justin Steinberg asks, does this significant juridical shift alter our perspective on Boccaccio's much-touted realism and literary self-consciousness? What can it tell us about how he views his predecessor, Dante: perhaps the world's most powerful inquisitorial judge? And to what extent does the Decameron shed light on the enduring role of verisimilitude and truth-seeming in our current legal system? The author explores these and other literary, philosophical, and ethical questions that Boccaccio raises in the Decameron's numerous trials. The book will appeal to scholars and students of medieval and early modern studies, literary theory and legal history.

Justin Steinberg is Professor of Medieval Italian literature at the University of Chicago and Editor-in Chief of the journal Dante Studies. He is the author of Accounting for Dante: Urban Readers and Writers in Late Medieval Italy (2007), recipient of the MLA's Scaglione Publication Prize, and Dante and the Limits of the Law (2014), recipient of the MLA's Marraro Prize. He is co-editor with Roberto Rea of the handbook Dante (2020). He has previously held named visiting professorships at Toronto and Jerusalem, as well as at Harvard's Villa I Tatti.