Anti-Petrarchism in the <i>Decameron</i>’s <i>Proem</i> and <i>Introduction</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Similarities of purpose between the Proem of the Decameron and the opening sonnet of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta have been noticed by several scholars. Students of Boccaccio and Petrarch are also becoming increasingly aware that the former was willing to criticize his friend, as he did when Petrarch chose to accept Visconti patronage in Milan, the great enemy of Florence.The Proem of the Decameron, however, has not hitherto elicited comment as a text where such friendly criticism, at least of Petrarch’s poetic persona in the RVF, might be found. The present essay suggests that Boccaccio’s famous address in the Proem to fearful, lovesick and housebound women pertains as much to that Petrarcan persona as it does to those vaghe donne. Although it refers to and engages with the important debate on Boccaccio’s attitudes towards real women, the essay explores the possibility that the Decameron’s Proem slyly hints (in a way that is reinforced by the story collection’s Introduction) that the Canzoniere reveals a male poet who is himself “unmanned” by his excessive lovesickness and pursuit of solitude.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".