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The University of Chicago Playing an Epic Game: Games

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The University of Chicago Playing an Epic Game: Games THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PLAYING AN EPIC GAME: GAMES AND GENRE IN BOCCACCIO’S TESEIDA DELLE NOZZE D’EMILIA A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ROMANCE LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES BY MADISON DICKINSON HENDREN CHICAGO, ILLINOIS DECEMBER 2020 Copyright 2020 by Madison Dickinson Hendren. All Rights Reserved To Alice and Beatrice Table of Contents Acknowledgements v Abstract vii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Eyes on the Prize: Gifts, the Gaze, and Genre in the “giuoco a marte” 21 Chapter 2: Staying in Bounds: Play and Violence, War and Game 56 Chapter 3: La dubbiosa battaglia : Contingency, Chance, and Skill in the “giuoco a marte” 99 Chapter 4: Boccaccio’s Two Phoebuses: Funeral Games as Poetic Competition 131 Coda: Rules Made to be Broken? 165 Bibliography 173 iv Acknowledgements There are people without whom the completion of this dissertation would not have been possible. First and foremost, I must thank my advisor, Justin Steinberg, for his mentorship not just throughout the dissertation writing process, but from the beginning of my time at the University of Chicago. He provided me with sound advice that respected my interests and goals and helped me navigate the doctoral process. When I began writing, he provided me with suggestions, critique, and encouragement from start to finish. This project owes much to his expertise and support, for which I would like to express my sincerest gratitude. I am also indebted to the additional members of my committee, Daisy Delogu and Niall Atkinson. They each dedicated time to my project and gave thoughtful criticism and suggestions that guided my thought process. Their comments, grounded in solid expertise encouraged me to approach my arguments from interdisciplinary perspectives, which enriched my research immensely. I am very fortunate to have had committee members who not only provided substantive feedback on my work, but who also were models of decency and dignity in the academy. In addition to the individuals mentioned above, this study would not have been possible without the financial support of The University of Chicago Division of Humanities over the course of my doctoral studies at the University of Chicago. I would like to offer a special thanks to Bruce and Suzanne Lindsay, whose generosity established the Lindsay Graduate Fellowship Fund, which provided financial support for a year of my research at the University of Chicago and allowed me to devote focused time to my project. Furthermore, I am extremely grateful for the support of my colleagues in the Italian section, particularly Cosette Bruhns and Elizabeth Tavella. I cannot thank you enough for the v encouragement and support, both academic and otherwise, that you’ve offered me over the years. Whether helping me access items requesting items from the library, reading drafts, or just calling to say “hello,” I always knew I could count on you. To my husband, George, thank you for your patience with me and your support. You read every draft of every chapter, and were always willing to help me think through my ideas and articulate them. More important, however, was that you allowed me the time and space to pursue my studies and finish my degree. You offered encouragement when I needed it most, and reminded me that I could do it, even when I wanted to give up. Every time you read a draft, brought me a snack, or reheated my coffee for me in the middle of the night I was reminded of how lucky I am to have someone who supports me so wholeheartedly and cares about my success as if they were his own. To Gary and Cindy Hendren, I cannot thank you enough for the myriad of ways you’ve helped me over the years, especially this last year as I completed this dissertation. From cooking dinner, to watching the girls so I could devote time to my work, to encouraging me to take breaks when I was getting frustrated, your help has been invaluable. I don’t know what I would have done without you! I cannot express my gratitude enough, and am very fortunate to have such a loving, kind, and generous mother and father-in-law. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Robert and Mercedes. You are exemplars of hard work, intelligence, and determination. More than that, however, your unconditional love and support was a spring of inspiration that I drew from on many occasions when I thought I couldn’t make it to the finish line. If this dissertation proves nothing else, it’s that you were right, Mom, all the times you said, “when there’s a will, there’s a way.” Thanks for always helping me find my way! vi Abstract This dissertation examines the Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia through the lens of its representation of games. The Teseida is a relatively understudied work in the field of Italian studies, although it has received more attention from English scholars, as it served as a model for Chaucer. Likewise, the relationship between sports, games, and literature has received scarce attention in the study of medieval literature. This dissertation asserts that the Teseida’s games are privileged spaces within the work for the negotiation and formation of individual and collective identities and poetic authority as well as for the exploration philosophical concepts, such as the roles of agency, chance, and Fate. This dissertation therefore contributes to literary scholarship on the Teseida as well as to scholarship on medieval sports and games by exploring how games are employed to produce meaning within the literary text. Because the issues that game play brings to the fore are also those which inform the Teseida’s position within the generic traditions of epic and romance, the analysis of games undertaken in this dissertation sheds light on the generic alignment of the text and how Boccaccio combines the epic and romance traditions in the Teseida . The first chapter analyses the concept of the prize in the Teseida , and argues that, rather than a romance prize, Emilia functions as a gift whose exchange forms the basis of the male collective. The second chapter approaches the question of ludic violence by analyzing the treatment of inter and intra textual references to martial combat, both in classical epic and in the first two books of the Teseida , in the representation of the “giuoco a marte”. The third chapter confronts the contingency of the “giuoco a marte” and the extent to which it allows for human agency to be determinate. I argue that the prayers to Mars and Venus reflect epic determinacy and romance indeterminacy and that the divine interventions dramatize the intersection of contingency and necessity in agonistic sports. The final chapter approaches the funeral games as vii the locus of poetic negotiation, in which Boccaccio establishes the superior position of poetry and poetic representation relative to visual representation through his use of ekphrasis, asserts the primacy of epic in the Teseida through the prize awarded to Theseus, and assimilates poetic and natural creativity in the figure of Pan. While scholars have treated isolated aspects of the Teseida’s games, there is no study devoted completely to the games in the work that accounts for the historical and philosophical complexity of the representation of games and sports. By focusing on how games mediate sociological, philosophical, and literary questions, this study demonstrates not only the importance of games to the text, but also demonstrates the complexity of games and the seriousness with which they should be approached in literary studies. viii Introduction Literature and games share many qualities that make the study of one complementary for the study of the other. As Alexis Tadié explains, “the interactions between these two distinct activities involve mutually recognizable principles: rules, conventions, public, community of readers or spectators, figures, industry, journalism, etc.” 1 The relationship between sports and literature, however, extends beyond formal similarities. Literature also, Tadié explains, mediates the relationship between sport and society, “the relationship between sport and literature...extends beyond the important but simple level of representation. If our perception of sport can be mediated by the literary text, in most cases, literature enables the reader to reflect on sport in different, and perhaps, literary ways.” 2 Although Tadié’s observations on the nexus between sport and literature are based primarily on modern sports and modern literature, scholars have begun to notice a similar relationship between medieval games and medieval literature. In the introduction to her edited volume, Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature , Serina Patterson demonstrates “not only how medieval games are useful as a lens for examining social, ethical, and political issues, but also how ludic texts mediate cultural identity and interpersonal interaction in different cultural institutions.” 3 Her volume is a crucial contribution to the study of both games and medieval literature, as its essays “reflect the widespread prevalence of medieval games as a vehicle for cultural signification” and “their multifaceted relation to literary discourses as systems of meaning, interactive experiences, and modes of representation.” 4 1 Alexis Tadié, prologue to The International Journal of the History of Sport 29, no.12 (2012): 1656. 2 Ibid., 1655. 3 Serina Patterson, “Introduction: Setting Up the Board,” in Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature , ed. Serina Patterson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 4. 4 Ibid., 15. 1 Patterson’s volume begins to fill in a lacuna in medieval literary studies, which, with few exceptions, has largely been ignored: the nexus of games and literature. 5 Absent from Patterson's volume, however, is analysis of any work in the Italian vernacular.
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