The Decameron Eighth Day in Perspective. Ed. William Robbins

A set of masterfully edited essays by William Robbins, The Decameron: Eighth Day in Perspective provides sophisticated and learned insights into the philosophical and artistic complexity and subtlety of the Decameron's Eighth Day.The day's theme is beffe or practical jokes played with equal opportunity by men on women and vice versa, or men on men, and so forth.This would seem like a jovial and light theme, but this collection of essays demonstrates superlatively that these novellas are anything but slight.The original research by leading scholars of medieval Italian literature both breaks from and expands on Vittore Branca's conclusion "that the novella of Day Eight were derived more or less directly from local, oral, 'municipal anecdotes'" (17).Thus, it provides some stunning new readings of the tales that will spur further thought about Boccaccio's mastery of the beffa genre, which, as the collection shows, he has used here to probe issues of justice, retribution, law, gender, social status, "Florentine polity" (17), and Aristotelian ethics, among other themes.The beffa in Boccaccio's hands, Robins writes, tends to celebrate "the triumph of cleverness and wit over gullibility and folly" (3), often to expose the stupidity, greed, or meanness, particularly of those outside ruling power structures.But, this collection also demonstrates Edoardo Sanguineti's point in Lettura del Decameron that Day Eight's beffe possess a meta-literary purpose as they examine the genre itself.Robins' concise but insightful introduction covers three central features of the day: the nature of beffe, the role of repetition and amplification in the development of the tales (whether internal to the novella or across novellas), and the geographical coordinates of the novellas, "a neat 'cartographic' arrangement of tales … unique to Day Eight" (11).At the same time, and as occurs in many of the essays, Robins shows how Day Eight develops central themes of the entire collection and how it fits into the "realistic" turn away from the idealized countryside to return to urban life and a focus on Florence itself.Implicit in the day's stories also is the role of Florence as a protagonist.This point is particularly evident in the two Calandrino stories (VIII.3 and VIII.6).Taking up the first of the Calandrino novellas, in "The Artist and the Police" (VIII.3),Justin Steinberg develops an enticing, profoundly historical, and intellectually rigorous new reading to argue that "Boccaccio uses Calandrino's fantasy of invisibility in Decameron VIII.3 to explore why we should act lawfully when there is no one around to see" (59).Avoiding the convention of either

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