Kristina Olson, Assistant Professor of Italian, has recently published her first monograph, Courtesy Lost: Dante, Boccaccio and the Literature of History, with the University of Toronto Press. In Courtesy Lost, Olson analyses the literary impact of the social, political, and economic transformations of the fourteenth century through an exploration of two medieval Italian authors: Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), two of Italy's "tre corone" (three crowns) of literature.
The book uses the contradictory concept of courtesy as chivalry and as magnanimity as a heuristic for understanding Dante's political thought, and, in turn, how that influenced the historical vision of Boccaccio. Boccaccio wrote his vernacular masterpiece, the Decameron (ca.1350, after the Black Death), in Dante's shadow, as well as a series of public lectures on the Inferno. Courtesy Lost reveals how Boccaccio felt torn between a nostalgia for elite Florentine and Italian families in decline -- families noted for their propensity towards violence as part of a chivalric code -- and the need to promote magnanimity within the Florentine Republic in the name of an ethical, Ciceronian understanding of courtesy.
The book examines how these literary narratives compare with other historical accounts from those times, for instance, in the chronicles of Dino Compagni and Giovanni Villani, and the blurred line between history and fiction, and the sociological and the literary, when authors discuss a golden age marked by generosity, and a present day cursed by incivility and violence. Courtesy Lost attends to this development in the idea of civility by viewing these literary works both as products of their historical contexts and as a part of historiography itself.
A preview of her book may be found here:
https://www.academia.edu/8672957/Courtesy_Lost_Dante_Boccaccio_and_the_Literature_of_History
October 14, 2014
