“Boccaccio, the Disguised Revolutionary” by Martin Eisner (Duke University)

Thursday, April 11, 2024 5:00 pm EST

Medieval and renaissance, feminist and misogynist, radical and conservative, class-warrior and aspiring aristocrat, Boccaccio has been interpreted in a variety of contradictory ways since the fourteenth century. Professor Martin Eisner’s lecture proposes a new way of reading Boccaccio’s work that puts the Decameron at the center to show how the revolutionary ideas about fleshly desire, language, gender, cultural diversity, and power that Boccaccio identifies in the Author’s Conclusion to the Decameron radiate throughout his works. Join us on Thursday, April 11, 2024, from 5:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. ET.

Speakers:
Martin Eisner is Chair of Romance Studies and Professor of Italian at Duke University. He is the author of Dante’s New Life of the Book: A Philology of World Literature (Oxford UP, 2021), which won the Howard R. Marraro Prize from the Modern Language Association. His first book Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature: Dante, Petrarch, Cavalcanti, and the Authority of the Vernacular (Cambridge UP, 2013) has recently been published in Italian as Boccaccio e l’invenzione della letteratura italiana (Salerno, 2022). He is currently working on a biography of Boccaccio forReaktion Books’s Renaissance Lives series. He continues to develop the online research project Dante’s Library. His articles on Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Machiavelli have appeared in PMLA, Renaissance Quarterly, Dante Studies, Mediaevalia, California Italian Studies, Quaderni d’Italianistica, Annali d’Italianistica, and Le Tre Corone. His research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the American Academy in Rome, the American Philosophical Association, and the Fulbright Foundation.