A Rhetoric of the Decameron

Marilyn Migiel. A Rhetoric of the Decameron. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 219.

Marilyn Migiel's voice in her recent book on Boccaccio's masterwork, A Rhetoric of the Decameron, is strong and authoritative throughout, both while outlining her argument and while substantiating her views with incisive readings of the novellas. Hers is neither an apologist's reading of the Decameron nor a strictly feminist one. As to taking a side one way or another on the issue of Boccaccio's misogyny, she remains tactfully (and wisely) agnostic. In sum, the confidently polemic voice behind A Rhetoric of the Decameron is a welcome contribution to Boccaccio studies.

Migiel's book takes up again this elusive text and faces the challenge that awaits any reader who tries to understand Boccaccio's position vis-à-vis the representation of women in the Decameron. As Migiel rightfully claims in her introduction, any reading of the Decameron that attempts to understand its discourse, and ultimately how meaning is created in the text, will have to look first in a responsible and critical way at its discourse on women. This means avoiding facile interpretations about Boccaccio's alleged misogyny or protofeminism, and, rather, taking up the challenge of engaging with the work to produce meaning. By this, Migiel means at attempt at a "rhetorical" reading of the work that recognizes and analyzes its "syntactic" strategies, along with its "grammatical" and "semantic" structures, as previous critics have done. This approach may not only subvert the author's narrative strategies, which, Migiel argues, continually seek to displace the reader's subject position, but it also squarely puts the onus on the reader in terms of responsibility for deciding, quite literally, what to make of the Decameron.

This critical stance already represents a substantial shift from classical interpretations that...