Ebook: La influencia de Boccaccio en la literatura catalana medieval (1390-1495): Un estudio de la imitación literaria en Bernat Metge, Bernat Hug de Rocabertí y Joan Roís de Corella

This dissertation studies the impact of the works by Giovanni Boccaccio on Catalan medieval literature. The influence of Italian literature in medieval Iberian writing is traditionally understood as a key component of a wide-ranging cultural process of transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, the tre corone, played a crucial role in that process. Boccaccio, in particular, became a model for the writing of a variety of literary genres, from misogynistic poetry to chivalric romances. His works, both in Latin and Italian, featured in the most remarkable libraries of the period as well as circulated both in Spanish and Catalan translations. Early twentieth-century criticism offered us the first comprehensive approach to Boccaccio’s influx in the Iberian Peninsula, but this line of inquiry has ever since remained neglected.

In the fifteenth century Catalan writers were especially sensitive to the novelties brought forth by the tre corone. That is hardly any surprise, since Italian territories like Sicily and Naples were part of the Crown of Aragon. A cultural community across the Mediterranean framed Boccaccio’s wide readership and imitation. Not only did Boccaccio’s style become a model of prose, but also his literary persona, the ambiguity of his narrators, and his innovations in several literary genres. Catalan authors held the threshold condition of the Crown of Aragon for the Iberian Peninsula. This study begins by tackling a representative work of Catalan prose, Bernat Metge’s Lo somni, in which its author appropriates and reformulates essential discourses of Boccaccio’s Corbaccio. It then moves on to allegorical poetry and examines the Glòria d’amor by Bernat Hug de Rocabertí, a work traditionally considered a bizarre imitation of Dante’s Commedia, against the backdrop of Boccaccio’s Amorosa visione. Lastly, it turns to the presence of Boccaccio in the prose of Joan Roís de Corella. Corella, whose works represent the finest adaptation of sentimental rhetoric among Catalan authors. The cultural contextualization of Boccaccio’s influence in Catalan literature is essential not only to a richer appreciation of these three Catalan authors, but also to a full understanding of the paths leading to Martorell’s Tirant lo Blanc and the birth of the modern novel.