Decamerons Without Women: The Spiritualization of Italian Literature in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

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