The Merchant and the Sacred: Artifice and Realism in Decameron I.1

By investigating the first novella of the Decameron from the perspective of the sacred this article questions the notion of realism as privileged key to the interpretation of Boccaccio’s style, poetics, and even philosophy in his major work. Although with different nuances of definition, realism remains by and large the trait scholarship emblematically associate with the Decameron as testifying to the emergence of mercantile culture and bourgeois mentality. Realism as verisimilar representation of historical reality tends to be associated with the character of modernity of Boccaccio’s masterpiece. In this paper I propose a different approach and suggest an alternative notion of realism in terms of the effects on reality of the literary artifice. This notion encompasses the verisimile as well as the marvelous and identifies a mode of realism coherent to the moral instances of the Decameron