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Marilyn Migiel. The Ethical Dimension of the Decameron. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2015.
Marilyn Migiel's The Ethical Dimension of the Decameron is a new investigation of the varied relationships between the Decameron and its readers, between the Author and his characters, and between translators and the intentionality of the text. Adding to the work of numerous Boccaccio scholars and translators of the past century, Migiel carefully reconsiders key passages of some of the Decameron's most famous stories (and other, lesser-studied ones) in order to present inherent problems in modern readers' methods of interpretation. Although she examines how every individual reading of the text is colored by personal biases and assumptions, Migiel denies taking a prescriptive approach to the ethics of Decameron; "Rather," she writes, "I examine how Boccaccio's narrators, translators, and readers establish the ethical questions about how we ought to live, and I ask readers to consider the implications of such choices" (5).
Over the course of eight chapters, Migiel demonstrates-mostly through close comparisons of translations by John Florio, W. K. Kelly, J. M. Rigg, and Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella, among others-how the misperception of even one word can set off a chain reaction of misinterpretations, leading readers to believe, in more than one case, that the wrong character is culpable of a crime when another could be found guilty instead. Distancing herself a bit from the tale of Griselda, which is usually the "linchpin" of ethical studies of the...