Male piety and sexuality in Boccaccio's Decameron.(Giovanni Boccaccio)

From: Philological Quarterly | Date: June 22, 2003| Author: Calabrese, Michael | Copyright information

This essay examines the tension between male piety and male sexual performance in selected novelle in Giovanni Boccaccio's fourteenth-century collection of prose narratives, the Decameron. Recent studies in medieval masculinities have sensitized the modern reader to the problems of practicing and performing male identities in medieval amatory literature. (1) Scholars are learning that being male can no longer simply--and erroneously--be understood as the enjoyment of social, econom...

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