Communal Narrative: Boccaccio and the Historical Paraphrase Tradition

Abstract

“Communal Narrative: Boccaccio and the Historical Paraphrase Tradition” interprets Boccaccio’s composition practices in his three major Latin works by analyzing his manuscript revisions, cultural associations with humanism, and intellectual history that introduced him to Giovanni del Virgilio’s Ovidian exegesis (especially Giovanni’s paraphrase of the Metamorphoses, the Expositio). Noting how Boccaccio develops his paraphrases and moralizing commentaries separately—as does Giovanni—this chapter challenges modern criticism’s tendency to treat his Latin works as didactic collections, revealing his rhetorical and poetic sensitivity to the frame-narrative format. Boccaccio hereby proves to be more than a compiler and commentator on history and mythology; he emerges as a political visionary, collecting an array of voices to represent both political and scholastic communes.