As Gur Zak notes in the opening paragraph, while the world suffers, adapts, and tentatively seeks to rediscover joy in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, a study on Boccaccio and consolation seems to be “unexpectedly, even uncannily, timely” (ix). The most obvious point of reference for coping with wide-scale trauma in Boccaccio's oeuvre is, naturally, the Decameron, which the author presents as a collection of stories told for pleasurable distraction from the plague. Zak observes that studies on Boccaccio and consolation have been heretofore almost exclusively focused on this most famous of his works. Moreover, Boccaccio's associations of consolation with pleasure and distraction have generally served as the basis for excluding it from “the serious ‘business’ of life” (5). Boccaccio and the Consolation of Literature, however, demonstrates that the literary representation of consolation extends far beyond his capolavoro and that the ethical-literary questions to which it is central are decidedly serious.
By considering how Boccaccio's writings come into contact with philosophical and literary consolatory paradigms, Zak offers a fresh and enlightening critical lens that results in innovative readings even of works that have received extensive scholarly attention. For example, in his analysis of the Elegia di madonna Fiammetta in chapter 2, he diverges from the widely adopted interpretation of Fiammetta as a “negative example” (79) and the nurse as “the voice of reason” (84) in matters of love. Instead, Zak demonstrates how the latter serves as a parody of Stoic-Boethian wisdom. Through unsympathetic and self-contradictory counsel, the nurse ultimately fails to console the protagonist, suggesting “the inability of rational arguments to eradicate the passions of love and grief” (53). Rather, the Elegia implies the efficacy of “companionship in sorrow”—that is, empathy—while simultaneously remaining “open ended” (87).
The open-ended, flexible nature of Boccaccio's vision of consolation is in fact the crux of the “striking continuity” (186) that Zak identifies throughout the author's literary production. In each of the five chapters—beginning with a close reading of the Filocolo (1336–38) and concluding with the Epistola consolatoria a Pino de’ Rossi (1361–62)—Zak illustrates how Boccaccio rejects the notion of “one overarching and universal solution to hardships” (54). Rather than subscribing to the “largely authoritarian and monolithic consolatory mode” (185) encapsulated in Boethius's Consolatio philosophiae and perpetuated by Dante and Petrarch, Boccaccio favors a “context-specific consolation” (55) inspired by Aristotle's concept of practical wisdom in the Nicomachean Ethics. Especially illuminating in this regard is Zak's analysis of the Corbaccio in chapter 4, where his attention to Boccaccio's literary interlocutors leads once again to a creative departure from conventional interpretations. Zak presents the Corbaccio as a sophisticated and strategic revision of the Dantean concept of salvific love that, however, is not “a universal repudiation of love and women” (148), as many scholars have maintained. Instead, Zak argues, Boccaccio “tasks his audience with the responsibility of being sensitive to context” (136) and ultimately leaves it to the reader to decide if the author-narrator is an appropriate model for them. In essence, Zak argues, Boccaccio recognizes that the most effective approach to suffering is the one chosen with discernment by the sufferer themself, in response to their specific circumstances.
This kind of interpretive wisdom is emphasized in the Decameron, analyzed in chapter 3. For example, in his unique analysis of an often-overlooked character, Zak illustrates how, in contrast with Beritola (the protagonist of day 2, story 6 who literally turns feral in her grief), her nurse embodies a modified model of Boethian patientia. By remaining hopeful about the future and trusting in the changeability of fortune, the nurse exemplifies “the cultivation of calculated patience, as well as interpretive and emotional flexibility” (190) necessary for surviving life's inevitable heartaches. The cultivation of this discernment in the reader is also central to the Decameron. Boccaccio's masterwork is not a mere compendium of possible coping mechanisms. Rather, in presenting readers with a “polyphony of consolation”—as Zak poetically describes it throughout the book—Boccaccio guides them in an extended exercise in “develop[ing] the reader's emotional intelligence and capacity to make discerning choices” (189).
Zak concludes with a definition of Boccaccio's consolation of literature as “one which is empathetic rather than judgmental, polyphonic rather than one dimensional, open ended rather than authoritarian” (187). Thus, while Boccaccio and the Consolation of Literature clearly demonstrates that Boccaccio's strategy for confronting life's hardships is in close dialogue with his philosophical and literary antecedents as well as late medieval contemporaries, this insightful study reveals that it is also remarkably modern.
