DECAMERONS WITHOUT WOMEN: the SPIRITUALIZATION of ITALIAN LITERATURE in the SIXTEENTH and SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES by Alyssa Falcon

DECAMERONS WITHOUT WOMEN: THE SPIRITUALIZATION OF ITALIAN LITERATURE IN THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES by Alyssa Falcone A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland April 3, 2017 Abstract This dissertation takes Francesco Dionigi da Fano’s 1594 Decamerone Spirituale as the prime example of the many ‘spiritualizations’ of classics of Italian literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The author, in an attempt to ‘repair’ the ‘sinful and deeply flawed’ Decameron, removes all female storytellers and characters and presents an exaggeratedly devout, misogynistic, anti-Boccaccian Decameron that offers no attribution to the original author among its 700-plus pages of ragionamenti spirituali. Despite Dionigi’s endeavor to displace Boccaccio’s famous work and showcase his own original, devotional writing, he essentially copies the structure and syntax of Boccaccio’s macrotext, sometimes verbatim, and sells himself as the new-and-improved Boccaccio. Apart from analyzing the text in terms of authorship, authorial identity, plagiarism, and gender and sexuality in the Counter-Reformation, I situate the Spiritual Decameron within the ‘tradition,’ or subgenre, of the spiritualizations of literature that proliferated during this period, especially in Italy, and analyze the objectives and motivations of the phenomenon. Primary advisor: Dr. Walter Stephens Secondary advisor: Dr. Christopher Celenza Readers: Drs. Eugenio Refini, April Oettinger, and Leonardo Lisi ii Acknowledgments There are quite a few people to whom I owe quite a lot of gratitude for their patience, presence, help and encouragement throughout the process of writing this dissertation. My advisors at Hopkins, Walter Stephens and Christopher Celenza, saw this project through from start to finish and continuously provided helpful feedback, gentle guidance, and manageable mountains of suggestions. Professors Pier Massimo Forni, James Coleman, Eugenio Refini, William Egginton, Laurie Shepard, Franco Mormando and Rena Lamparska shaped my ideas and taught invaluable courses from which I drew inspiration and material. Administrators from my department and from the Singleton Center helped me obtain funding to travel to Florence, Oxford, and Fano for research purposes. My family and friends have provided countless hours of support, intellectual stimulation, diversion, comfort, feedback and kindness over the past two years; I can not thank them enough for all they have done. To Dan Rosenberg, Irene and Michael Rosenberg, Layla Houshmand, Victoria Fanti, Janet Gomez, Troy Tower, Lauren Judy Reynolds, Brandon Pelcher, Abby and Chris RayAlexander, Autumn and Alex Siquig, David Jacobs, Jacob Chilton, Nicole Berlin, and all other colleagues and cohorts at Hopkins and beyond: thank you and bless you. To my family, especially my parents, Susan and Michael, my brother Mark and sister Julia, and my many close relatives: thank you and I love you. To my late grandparents Giovannina (Jennie) Falcone, Tim Falcone, and Lucy Falcone: thank you and I miss you. And to the two people who started me down the path of Italian Studies in the first place, my grandfather, Domenic Falcone, and my undergraduate advisor, Alan Perry: grazie infinite. iii A Note on Translations Where possible and necessary, I have provided translations of passages and citations into English from Italian, French, Spanish and Latin. With the exception of the canzoni in Francesco Dionigi’s Decamerone Spirituale, I have chosen not to translate some passages of poetry, mostly because I feature the poetry for means of comparison(s) of syntax and not for the content within. In Chapter 2 I include large passages from the proemio and Introduction of the Decamerone Spirituale, which I also compare syntactically to corresponding passages from Boccaccio’s Decameron to demonstrate excessive borrowing (and even ‘plagiarizing’) of the text; given that these passages are followed immediately by explications, I do not translate them. English translations of the entire text of the Decameron are available on Brown University’s website, the “DecameronWeb” (http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/texts). Finally, I have chosen not to translate the titles of works from their original language unless necessary for comprehension. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own and I take full responsibility for any and all errors within. iv Table of Contents I. Introduction 1 II. Chapter One: Spiritualizations of Italian Literature in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 12 III. Chapter Two: A Case Study: Francesco Dionigi’s Decamerone Spirituale (1594) 59 IV. Chapter Three: Spiritual Masculinities: Boccaccio’s brigata vs. Dionigi’s 104 V. Chapter Four: Female Gender and Sexuality in the Decamerone Spirituale: From “lusinghevoli femine” to “nobilissime Donzelle” 139 VI. Concluding Remarks 175 VII. Appendices 181 VIII. Bibliography 223 IX. Curriculum vitae et studiorum 250 v List of Figures Figure 1. Frontispiece of the DS, showing the city of Fano 79 vi Introduction In her 2015 book The Ethical Dimension of the Decameron, Marilyn Migiel confronts the question, “Is the Decameron immoral?” She responds: “Nobody asks that question anymore. Given that there is no religious or legal outcry about how the Decameron could threaten morality, scholars no longer need to defend the Decameron and its author” (7). Nearly seven hundred years after its initial publication, the Decameron exists in a very different world, yet a large portion of its content may still be considered too racy and too problematic to be enjoyed by certain audiences—for example, for students younger than middle-school age (12-14 years old), or as part of a religious education or seminary school. Notwithstanding the book’s raciness, libertinism, sexual themes or anticlericalism, Migiel is right to defend its overall moral message. She continues: “The moral message of the Decameron emerges in the narrators themselves (personifications of virtues and vices), in the attention Boccaccio pays to civic and political values, in the programmatic design of the Decameron, which highlights moral and family values, and in the war of virtue and vice throughout that culminates in a reflection on magnanimity” (7). Of course, this does not protect the work (or works similar to it) from being censored or banned from classroom usage. The Decameron is a fundamental part of the canon of Italian literature; however, books that are central to the American literary canon (e.g. To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) are frequently banned from school curricula even today due to the controversial language used within.1 1 See Moriah Balingit, “School district weighs ban of ‘Mockingbird,’ ‘Huckleberry Finn’ after complaint,” Washington Post, 3 December 2016. 1 Boccaccio’s Conclusion to the Decameron, in which he addresses his public in his own voice as an author, defends his text from his critics and detractors by highlighting the fact that the perceived moral value of the work depends solely on the morality of the reader. Millicent Marcus writes: “That words are morally neutral, and that their power to corrupt or enlighten is a function of the reader’s own inner disposition to sin or virtue, makes interpretation an act of projection, the externalizing of inner forces onto the screen of the literary text.”2 Boccaccio’s ten narrators (his lieta brigata) further promote this belief in the Introduction by insisting that the stories they will tell over the coming two weeks are neither prescriptive nor didactic, but rather, are meant only for entertainment purposes—to provide “ pleasantries, among young folk, but not so young as to be seducible by stories.”3 Entertainment, however, was seen in Boccaccio’s time as a dangerous consequence of reading, especially for young readers, who are typically the most impressionable faction of society regardless of the century. Just as many today fear the effects on youth of playing violent video games, listening to aggressive lyrics in music, or watching pornography, the censors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries feared the consequences that reading such a libertine text would have on young readers. According to Brian Richardson, “A bishop condemned the work in 1759 as more dangerous to youth than the works of Luther and Calvin” (“Transformations of a Text” 15). Gabriele Paleotti points to the fact that books, particularly popularly received ones written in the 2 Marcus, “Boccaccio and the Seventh Art” 271. She continues: “Boccaccio’s defense of his project is to insist on the autonomy of his literary space, its freedom from the didactic expectations of the philosophers and the clergy, for whom the written word must serve the ideal of exemplarity, and to declare instead an ‘imitation-free zone’ for his garden writings, a space where the healthy reader can enjoy the pleasures of storytelling in full awareness of the gap between the world of imaginative free play and that of lived experience” (272). 3 “sollazzo, tra persone giovani, benché mature e non pieghevoli per novelle” (Dec., Proemio 7). 2 vernacular, “were dangerous because their impact was almost comparable to that of an image ‘which after one single look people are able to understand.’”4 Popular vernacular works both threatened and undermined the Church’s authority by challenging its monopoly over the individualism and autonomy of its members; the Decameron

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