Eros and Evanescence in the <i>Decameron</i>: The Weave of Love, Time, and Memory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay studies the interplay between the emotion of love and the sense of its transience, as the interplay is featured in the three authorial interventions of the Proem, the Introduction to Day 4, and the Conclusion. The author returns time and again to this interplay, emphasizing the role of memory throughout these interventions. While Boccaccio identifies eros as a guiding impulse for his story-telling and showcases sexual desire as a main theme of both the comic and tragic novelle, this study looks at the way the passages present love as highlighting the temporal nature of human existence, which, in its mortal finitude, relies on remembrance, especially the recollection of love’s transient sway, in order to foster a sensibility for life’s wholeness. The study’s approach is phenomenological. It examines the manner in which Boccaccio displays appearances—of character, mood, or circumstance—within a temporal frame. Phenomena surface and vanish in time, while being retained in memory. Above all in these three interventions Boccaccio reminds his readers to keep in view the timing of love, its absence and presence, as they become aware of their own ageing and mortality while traveling with the author through his narrative.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".