This essay reconsiders the conventional division of Boccaccio’s career into two parts that is usually associated with his first meeting with Petrarch. Beginning with two fourteenth-century portraits of Boccaccio, it challenges this traditional account by calling attention to the continuities between the defences of poetry in the Decameron and the Genealogie. It argues that the persistence of Boccaccio’s claims for the freedom and authority of literature constitutes a singular feature of Boccaccio’s thought that unites his works.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Eisner, M., (2025), "A Singular Boccaccio: Defending Poetry in the Decameron and the Genealogie", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Quaderni d'italianistica

Original publication: Eisner, Martin. "A Singular Boccaccio: Defending Poetry in the Decameron and the Genealogie." Quaderni d'italianistica 38 (2): 2019. 179-199. DOI: 10.33137/q.i..v38i2.32236. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Quaderni d'italianistica. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Quaderni d'italianistica under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.