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Giovanni Boccaccio
apostle Peter’s proposal to build the tents for Moses and Elijah.
2 Peter, 1:18, puts forward the view of the Transfi guration as
the prophetic sign of the Parousia. Cf. also Origines, Homelies
sur l’Exode, trans. P. Fortier, intr. and notes H. De Lubac (Paris:
Editions du Cerf, 1947), sec. xii, pp. 244–255. Noteworthy are
the documented remarks by Danielou, Bible et liturgie, pp. 457–
461 especially.
18. Th e myth of the woman as the devil (“questo diavolo di questa
femina maladetta mi si parò dinanzi e ebbemi veduto, per ciò che,
come voi sapete, le femíne fanno perderla vertù a ogni cosa: . . .
Decameron, viii, 3, p. 690) echoes a solid patristic tradition about
the woman as Eve, on account of whom man, like Calandrino in
the novella, loses Paradise. Cf. Tertullian: “Tu es diaboli ianua, . . .
tu es quae suasisti . . . tu imaginem dei, hominem Adam, facile
elisisti” (Du cultu feminarum, I, 1, in Corpus Christianorum, Series
Latina, lxx, pp. 59–60). See also Jerome, Adversus Iovinianum,
PL 23, cols. 211–338. For a general sketch of the tradition, see
F. L. Utley, Th e Crooked Rib (Columbus: Ohio State University
Press, 1944). See also Katharine M. Rogers, Th e Troublesome
Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature (Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 1966).
19. Th is notion of the imagination can be found in Dante’s
Purgatorio xvii, 13ff . In this central canto of the Divine Comedy,
Dante suggests how the imaginative faculty, far from duplicating
the world of reality or originating from the perception of
outside events, steals us away from the experience of familiar
reality. Cf. the still important survey by M.W. Bundy, Th e Th eory
of the Imagination in Classical and Medieval Th ought, University
of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, no. 12, 2–3
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1927). A valuable reading
of this novella, even if in terms entirely diff erent from mine, has
been given by Luigi Russo, Letture critiche del Decameron (Bari:
Laterza, 1977), pp. 245–274; Mario Baratto, Realtà e stile nel
Decameron (Vicenza: Pozza, 1970), pp. 309–318. See also the
remarks by Marga Cottino-Jones, “Magic and Superstition in
Boccaccio’s Decameron,” Italian Quarterly, 18 (1975), pp. 5–32;
and by Millicent Joy Marcus, An Allegory of Form (Saratoga,
Calif.: Anma Libri, 1979) pp. 79–92.