Law and Mimesis in Boccaccio's Decameron

Justin Steinberg is Professor of Medieval Italian literature at the University of Chicago and Editor-in Chief of the journal Dante Studies. He is the author of Accounting for Dante: Urban Readers and Writers in Late Medieval Italy (2007), recipient of the MLA's Scaglione Publication Prize, and Dante and the Limits of the Law (2014), recipient of the MLA's Marraro Prize. He is co-editor with Roberto Rea of the handbook Dante (2020). He has previously held named visiting professorships at Toronto and Jerusalem, as well as at Harvard's Villa I Tatti.

'Written with vigor and wit, Justin Steinberg's book incisively examines how Boccaccio's realism responds to medieval legal procedure. His sophisticated historicist approach both appreciates Boccaccio's work in its medieval world and highlights points of contact with modern forms of literature and with contemporary concerns. A major contribution to the study of literature, Steinberg's book will open the Decameron to a new generation of readers.' David G. Lummus, author of The City of Poetry: Imagining the Civic Role of the Poet in Fourteenth-Century Italy

• Introduction; 1. The Novella on trial; 2. The artist and the Police; 3. The widow and the sovereign; 4. Torture and the sense of an ending; 5. Another way of possessing; 6. The author on trial.