This essay presents a reading of the Mediterranean sea as a narrative space in the Decameron. Through a reading of text and images, the paper illustrates the categories of mobile/static and foreign/domestic at work in the Decameron. It also introduces a third epistemological category, hybridity, at the centre of this study, which aims to establish the role and function of the Mediterranean in the fabula—the plot development—as well as in the structure of the novella itself, and ultimately in Boccaccio’s poetics. Is the Mediterranean a “structural space” in (and of) the novella, hence in/of the Decameron? Does it make and forge “experiences” of women of different religions (and social origins) that differ from the experiences of men in the Medieval Mediterranean? The article proposes different cases of women travelling in the Decameron and discusses the paralysis and diaspora of women’s identity in the hybrid space of mobile Mediterranean, a foreign space of immobilization and dangers.

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• Morosini, R., (2025), "What a Difference a Sea Makes in the Decameron: The Mediterranean, a Structural Space of the Novella", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Quaderni d'italianistica

Original publication: Morosini, Roberta. "What a Difference a Sea Makes in the Decameron: The Mediterranean, a Structural Space of the Novella." Quaderni d'italianistica 38 (2): 2019. 65-111. DOI: 10.33137/q.i..v38i2.32232. 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/.