In this article, I explore the subject of gender in Boccaccio through an analysis of his gendered history of the vernacular as the language of women. I posit that by means of an interpretation of Boccaccio’s gendered history of the vernacular one can achieve a different reading of the canoni-cal negotiations of the Proem, the Introduction to Day Four, and the Conclusion of the Author in the Decameron. Ultimately, I argue that Boccaccio can be related to misogynist and non-misogynist ideologies by means of his own rhetoric of philogyny when seen as the result of linguistic debates within textual communities that can be discerned inside and outside of the Decameron.
May 08, 2012
