Naturalizing Humanity: Genealogy and the Politics of Storytelling in Boccaccio'sDecameron

Abstract

AbstractIn his literary masterwork, theDecameron, Boccaccio undertakes a thorough examination of human values along the lines he had drawn in his history of the origins of the gods, theGenealogie deorum gentilium libri, on the assumption that values, in a world emptied of the gods, retain a similarly normative and aggregating function. To Boccaccio both gods and values are transient items in a moral ontology that acknowledges only one set of perennial items: natural impulses and dispositions. Boccaccio adopts a particular stance towards the emergence of values: genealogy is, for him, a distinctive way to examine the processes whereby beliefs, attitudes, and values come about.