Love and Sex in the Time of Plague: A Decameron Renaissance.

• Author: Ferguson, Dean T.

Ruggiero, Guido. Love and Sex in the Time of Plague: A Decameron Renaissance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. 306 pages. Hardcover, $49.95.

Guido Ruggiero, in his most recent entry into the cultural history of the Renaissance, offers a retelling of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, situating the one hundred tales in their historical setting and in a historiographical context in no small measure shaped by Ruggiero's own work on the intersection of power, sexuality, marriage, and love. In doing so, he "marries the interests of the literary critic" with those of the historian, re-reading the masterpiece and imagining how it was "heard in its day and how it might be heard anew today from a historical perspective" (p.3-4). Ruggiero once again approaches a familiar literary text, as he did in his Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self, and Love in the Italian Renaissance, employing the methods of microstoria, or microhistory, to center the history of love and sex in the urban culture of the Italian fourteenth century. Ruggiero again argues that, in the Decameron "we jump into a different world and culture" where "love, sexual desire, and their associated feelings were imagined in ways often strange to the modern eye"(p. 29). Yet, the fourteenth-century Italy he richly describes represents a critical and complex transitional moment in the history of the civilization of manners, and in the expression of feelings and passion.

In his approach to the Decameron, Ruggiero enriches traditional literary studies of the text, making this work an invaluable complement to literature scholars. Ruggiero asks readers to approach the Decameron as listeners to Boccaccio's tales must have done in the fourteenth century, encouraging readers to imagine themselves as Calendrino in the ninth day, fifth novella. In this tale, the Florentine artisan falls in love with Niccolosa, the wife of the son of a gentleman, leading to his public shaming. In asking readers to view the text through the eyes of fourteenth-century Florentines, Ruggiero encourages readers to see love, sex, laughter, sadness and violence as culturally constructed rather than as psychological or neurological responses common to all humans.

To guide readers through the Decameron, Ruggerio divides the tales into stories that evoked laughter and sorrow, others that illustrated the violence associated with sex and love, or that captured the transcendence made possible by sexual pleasure, and finally...