This article revisits a subject that has been treated plenty: misogynist discourses in Boccaccio's Decameron. Nevertheless, I submit that such medieval normative discourses are both spread and contained by the brigata ladies themselves as they seek shelter and safety away from a plagued Florence. In their determination to preserve their lives, however, the ladies are reluctant to risk their honor, which is intertwined with Dante’s definition of nobility (i.e., "una vera salute") and of women's shame as recorded in the Convivio . With shame and nobility shaping both womanhood and women's governance in the Decameron, I examine the dynamics of female shame-honor in the text and its silencing and reining effects in gender politics. My study focuses on the speeches of two queens—Filomena and Emilia—and how these are challenged by the stories they tell themselves. Day 9, under Emilia's rule, provides us with analogies between human and non-human animals (e.g., horses and mules) which in turn threaten Filomena's preventative measures in keeping women’s safety and honor as observed in the frame tale and Day 2. It is these contradictions and many other stories (2.9, 7.2, 8.1, 9.9 and 9.10 analyzed to a greater extent herein) that expose women's situated vulnerability as much as their complicity. Last but not least, my article ends with a coda that evinces yet another layer of shame with a very different function and effect, namely the authorial shame-modesty staged in the vernacular masterpieces of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. With each poet exhibiting a distinct source of their vergogna, this article points to the tre corone shame variants as symptomatic of their vulnerable poetic status as they dare to produce and innovate Italian vernacular literature.

The Italian novella has had a widespread impact across centuries and genres. After its inception, marked by the anonymous Libro di novelle et di bel parlar gentile (late thirteenth century), popularly known as the Novellino, it saw its crowning moment with Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1352), the first framed novella collection that would popularize this new genre, thus influencing emerging genres throughout Europe at different moments in literary and cultural history, including the chivalric romance, the modern novel, Shakespearean theater, and, with the advent of television, telenovelas, to mention some examples. However, despite having its own literary tradition and carrying forward vernacular and Latin traditions alike, the novella has been reduced to a subgenre in the theorization of the modern novel and neglected by scholarship on Medieval/Renaissance authorship, which have privileged other genres, such as lyric and chivalric romance.

Rethinking the Novella: Immodest Modesties and Shameless Authorships elevates the novella tradition from its marginalized position in genre and authorship studies by challenging the very theoretical lenses that have neglected it—those of Ernst Curtius (1953), Thomas Greene (1982), David Quint (1986), and Guido Mazzoni (2011). I begin by examining Boccaccio’s Decameron against the authorial vulnerabilities of Dante and Petrarch as expressed in the Inferno and Rime sparse, respectively. I evince that Boccaccio introduces a different model of poetics through his manipulation of the dynamics of shame(lessness), both as a thematic concern and as a topic around writing. Hence, contrary to the theories that have been championed, Boccaccio escapes classical discussions of imitation and originality, thus making the novella a unique, yet paradoxical instance of modern literature.

My investigation encompasses three literatures—Italian, neo-Latin, and Spanish—and, besides the Decameron, focuses on Ser Giovanni Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone (1378-85), Poggio Bracciolini’s Liber facetiarum (ca. 1440-50), Juan de Timoneda’s El Patrañuelo (1567) and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote (1605 and 1615). Through a comparative analysis of these texts, I trace the imitation and reception of the Italian novella, thus illustrating its thematic continuities (such as authorial shamelessness) as well as its subversion. Furthermore, because the conversations on imitation, translation, and originality are connected to important cultural movements, such as the rise of humanism and the language debates characteristic of the Quattrocento and Cinquecento, this dissertation sheds light on how these authors in their respective contexts—Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Valencia in the sixteenth century, and Castile in early seventeenth century—face the dilemma of what classical and contemporary models to imitate and/or what language to use for their compositions.

The Languages of Berkeley: An Online Exhibition celebrates the magnificent diversity of languages that advance research, teaching, and learning at the University of California, Berkeley. It is the point of embarkation for an exciting sequential exhibit that built on one post per week, showcasing an array of digitized works in the original language chosen by those who work with these languages on a daily basis. Many of these early-published works are now in the public domain and are open to the world to read and share without restriction. 

Preparations for the online exhibition began in early 2018 with the final installment published online in October 2020. Using the Library’s instance of WordPress, the library exhibit comprises short essays of nearly all of the 59 modern and ancient languages that are currently taught across 14 departments on campus plus a dozen more languages that contributors wished to include. From September 2019 to August 2020, exhibit designer Aisha Hamilton and curator Claude Potts also installed a physical companion exhibition in Moffitt Library’s Free Speech Movement Café (FSM) centering on endangered languages which was cut short by the campus closure due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Photos from that installation are archived in this catalog with the open book publishing platform Pressbooks, along with the complete entries from the online exhibition. 

Aside from core support from the Library and the Berkeley Language Center, this multi-year project would not have been possible without the contributions and hard work of more than 45 librarians, professors, lecturers, staff, and students.