The Decameron Third Day in Perspective is the third volume of a lectura Boccaccii that directs fresh critical attention to each of the ten days of the Decameron. The interpretations of the individual novellas in this book are driven by a variety of approaches: narratological, thematic, metaliterary, allegorical, and psychoanalytical. Following a recently published article by Jonathan Usher, the introduction highlights the symbolic status of the framing narrative and its connective function. An Edenic symbolism, carved out through precise quotations from Dante, ideally connects the framework to the general theme of the novellas (how, thanks to industry, something desired may be obtained or something lost recovered), thereby characterizing the narrators’ situation as a lay paradise where social and civic values temporarily lost after the plague are now regained.

Attention to the relationship between the novellas and the framework and, in general, to the interconnection between microtexts and macrotext reappears in a number of essays in this volume, developing a line of research that over the last decades has opened up new perspectives on the Decameron. Steven Grossvogel and Massimo Ciavolella, for example, show how the day celebrating industry connects with the earlier giornate — on account of the thematic links among 1.1, 2.1, and 3.1 — but also, through its focus on love, with days 4 and 5, where this theme is further developed. Love also establishes a continuity between the tale of Alibech, the last of the ten, and the exemplum of the ducks (papere) that opens the following day. Elsa Filosa’s admirable essay on the crisis of courtly love reveals the bipartite and symmetrical structure of 3.2, but also its infratextual connections with 6.2, 10.7, and 10.10, where a new definition of the quaestio de nobilitate is sought.

One of the most innovative aspects of this book is the identification of a number of recurrent features (in addition to the theme chosen by the elected queen) that serve to unify the novellas: the prank narrative that appears in almost all the stories, the intertextual use of Dante (in the frame and in 3.4 and 3.8), and, finally, what may be called a dissimulation function that describes the silences, secrecy, or disguise in many of the novellas of day 3. As a theme or diegetic model, dissimulation is connected either to the motif of the fracture between appearance and reality, or to the prudence of the characters who wish to protect their honesty, viewed here exclusively as a social virtue.

Dantean reference and dissimulation lead to the very heart of this book — the assumption that the third day enacts the crisis, on the one hand, of courtly and confessional patterns of conduct, and, on the other, of medieval epistemology. This is expressed with great clarity in Susanna Barsella’s essay, which describes the relationship between appearance and reality, the human and the divine worlds in the Decameron as problematic and opaque. Narratively, the awareness of a divorce between appearance and reality surfaces in the metamorphosis of the characters, in the use of disguise and dissimulation. Thematically, it emerges through the recognition of a separateness between ethical and literary discourse, as well as in a search for a new moral philosophy.

This need finds a diegetic correspondence in the unfolding of the protagonist’s life in the tale of Tedaldo, who is constantly forced to change identity; in the failure of both the courtly and the penitential code to make sense of the characters’ lives; and in the series of misunderstandings that propels the fabula. In 3.8, the assertion of truth that drives Dante’s account of the afterlife is substituted with a narrative based on legends and beliefs regarding purgatory, thus alerting us to the impossibility of foreseeing our eternal destiny. Lastly, in Jelena Todorovic’s reading of Fra Puccio’s tale, the direct target of the antipenitential polemic are the sacraments of confession and penance: while the protagonist seeks the path of celestial beatitude, the two secret lovers who have played a trick on him experience the only form of beatitude accessible in the narrative universe of the Decameron: sensual bliss. The Dantesque underpinning of the third day in fact sustains a diegetic structure that upturns Dante’s ideal world and reflects the epistemological crisis of the autumn of the Middle Ages.