Introduction; 1. The Novella on trial; 2. The artist and the Police; 3. The widow and the sovereign; 4. Torture and the sense of an ending; 5. Another way of possessing; 6. The author on trial.
Steinberg's field-defining work shows how Boccaccio's Decameron reveals unexpected connections between the contemporary emergence of literary realism and legal inquisition in early modern Europe.
Justin Steinberg is Professor of Medieval Italian literature at the University of Chicago and Editor-in Chief of the journal Dante Studies. He is the author of Accounting for Dante: Urban Readers and Writers in Late Medieval Italy (2007), recipient of the MLA's Scaglione Publication Prize, and Dante and the Limits of the Law (2014), recipient of the MLA's Marraro Prize. He is co-editor with Roberto Rea of the handbook Dante (2020). He has previously held named visiting professorships at Toronto and Jerusalem, as well as at Harvard's Villa I Tatti.
'Written with vigor and wit, Justin Steinberg's book incisively
examines how Boccaccio's realism responds to medieval legal
procedure. His sophisticated historicist approach both appreciates
Boccaccio's work in its medieval world and highlights points of
contact with modern forms of literature and with contemporary
concerns. A major contribution to the study of literature,
Steinberg's book will open the Decameron to a new generation of
readers.' David G. Lummus, author of The City of Poetry: Imagining
the Civic Role of the Poet in Fourteenth-Century Italy
'In this ambitious, magnificently realized study of Boccaccian
'realism' and 'naturalism' through the lens of the evolving legal
culture of his time, Justin Steinberg has achieved something truly
rare among the ongoing attempts to synthesize close textual
analysis with historical-cultural contextualization: a genuine,
many-faceted dialogue between the two, in which neither cedes pride
of place to the other, but rather are mutually interpreting. For
Steinberg, mimetic representation (as defined by Auerbach and
others) is 1on trial' in the Decameron, in the sense that Boccaccio
continually probes the possibilities and limitations of
representing 'the real', even as his mimetic practice itself is a
trial, the residue of the author's inquisition into the vagaries of
human 'judgment' at both the individual and the institutional
level. Among its many specific accomplishments, Mimesis on Trial,
unveils the anachronistic emphases of much of contemporary
criticism, which has consistently wrenched key Boccaccian problems
(notably but by no means exclusively the status of 'the natural';
the defense of female desire as a triumph of subjectivity; the
encounters between individual subjects and legal institutions; and
so on) out of their original contexts, thus, paradoxically, losing
sight of what makes this text so extraordinarily 'novel,' such an
important marker of, and participant in, the long, uneven process
that moves us toward what we are so fond of calling modernity.'
Albert Ascoli, Professor Emeritus at University of California,
Berkeley
'In this highly original book, Justin Steinberg opens our eyes to
the pervasive nature of legal culture and its notions of truth as
they influenced Boccaccio in his composition of the Decameron. Not
only does Boccaccio parody courtroom dramas and legal
disputes, but he creates highly unlikely events across the hundred
tales that stage the 'human stakes of plausibility.' His characters
enact and respond to unrealistic contingencies, dwelling between
the world of chance and the fictional construction of the real. Law
and Mimesis challenges traditional theories of realism in the
Decameron and leaves us with a new understanding of Boccaccio as an
author who was trained in law but constantly reckoned with its
implications for art. The consequences of Steinberg's analysis
are formidable and far-reaching for studies of Boccaccio,
law and literature, and genre.' Kristina M. Olson, George Mason
University
'This brilliant, revisionary account of the history of Western
mimesis lays aside what we have 'long known' about verisimilitude,
realism, and law in Boccaccio (and Dante) in favor of original
research, and original thought. It impacts understanding not only
of 'the rise of the novel,' but also our current consumption of
procedural drama, suspended between 'the poetics of likelihood' (in
TV courtroom argumentations) and the hard fact of the smoking gun.
Written open-handedly, and a joy to read, this book grounded in
historical inquiry speaks to issues of prime importance in our own
troubled, story-driven times. Recommended.' David Wallace,
University of Pennsylvania
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