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https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/86347350362

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Grace Delmolino will present on “Law as Methodology in Boccaccio Studies”:

Boccaccio attended medieval law school, where he was trained as a legal thinker. He never practiced as a lawyer, but his literary texts reference decretals and statutes, they depict legal processes, they make puns on legal language, and they contemplate social practices (like marriage, adultery, consent) that the law seeks to define and restrict. At the same time, medieval lawyers used stories and invented cases—that is, fiction—to establish doctrine on difficult legal concepts like rape and sexual violence. Looking at the intertwinement of legal methods and literary methods in medieval thought, this presentation asks how we might interpret the legal intertextuality of the Decameron as a methodology and a core component of Boccaccio’s literary project.

Grace Delmolino is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of California, Davis, Associate Editor of Digital Dante, and recently a 2025-26 Solmsen Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities (UW Madison). Her research explores the many intersections of canon law and medieval Italian literature. Recent essays—on topics like legal impossibility in the Filocolo and a new source for Decameron 1.1 in the Decretals of Gregory IX—have been published in Heliotropia, Speculum, MLN, and Lectura Boccaccii. Her first book tackles the question of Boccaccio’s youthful study of canon law, showing how canonistic texts resurface in Boccaccio’s literary treatment of violence, rights, and consent.

Lorenzo Caravaggi will present on “The adventure of Ser Andrea and other stories: Itinerant notaries and the making of ‘judicial novellas’ in fourteenth-century Italy”: 

In 1331, a civic official named Ser Andrea fell victim to an elaborate deception and robbery during a short visit in the central Italian city of Perugia. Both the subject matter of this story and, most importantly, the ways in which it is narrated bear striking similarities to the novella, a literary genre that developed in Tuscany in around 1300 and which reached its apogee in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (c.1349-1370). What is striking about this case, however, is that the adventure of Ser Andrea was not narrated in a conventional literary text, but in a criminal sentence produced by a Tuscan notary then working in Perugia. Its author, as we shall see, broke with many of the conventions of judicial record-keeping. However extraordinary, this case is not unique. It exists alongside dozens of similar criminal records with literary underpinnings – what I have defined as “judicial novellas” – written in the course of the fourteenth century. In this paper I explore this phenomenon of literary judicial record-keeping. I suggest that, like the novellas of Boccaccio and his contemporaries, these complex narratives may have been intended to prompt their audiences – citizens involved in public life – to reflect on the social and moral ambiguities of the rapidly-changing society of the 1300s. “Judicial novellas” show that in the ‘age of Boccaccio’, law and literature were engaged in a genuine two-way intellectual exchange.

Dr. Lorenzo Caravaggi (DPhil Oxon 2021) is lecturer in medieval history at Lancaster University (UK), where he teaches various aspects of the cultural, legal, and political history of late-medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. His first book, Keeping the Peace in Dante’s Italy, is under contract with Cambridge University Press (publication date 2027). The paper presented here is part of a new project on the interaction between criminal law and literature in the fourteenth century.