Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta

A new lexis for the description of affection

Unhappy and unrequited love, typical of the courtly style and the stilnovo, generates, in that which has been defined as the first psychological novel of Italian literature, a frustration that provokes stasis, the inability to act. In this impasse suffered by the protagonist we can recognise an inadequacy of the model of the French hero, by then anachronistic in a new mercantile society, all centred upon the exaltation of personal enterprise and the affirmation of the individual. Faced with the impossibility of concretely giving scope to her amorous desires Fiammetta resorts to sublimating her erotic experience in exemplary narrative. It is so that the verbalisation of passion is born, the long monologue to which Boccaccio’s heroine entrusts the memory of her private adventure so that it may serve as an example for the readers, so that they may not fall into the same, painful trap. Waving the rule of secrecy, to which, in accordance with courtly logic, any perfect lover had to submit to, the noble lady from Naples, through the medium that is the book, manages to break out of the isolation to which Eros had confined her and looks for, through written communication, a panacea for heart ache[1]. This last finds a solution not so much in the “outpouring” of her own unhappiness through narrative but rather in a search for understanding on the part of the public for her misadventures, that is an attempt to generate the “compassion” of her female readers, to whom the work is explicitly addressed. A new amorous phenomenology is thus generated, which reverberates through the creation of a lexis of affectivity constructed around the “key terms” of  “comprehension” and “compassion”.

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[1]E.L. Giusti, Dall’amore cortese alla comprensione. Il viaggio ideologico di Giovanni Boccaccio dalla Caccia di Diana al Decameron, Milan 1999.