Boccaccio Beyond Boccaccio: Reception, Adaptation, and Afterlives from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century

Panel Co-Sponsored by the Forum on 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-Century Italian Studies and the American Boccaccio Association

Proposal Abstract:
The works of Giovanni Boccaccio have exercised a persistent and transformative influence well beyond the Trecento, shaping literary, cultural, and artistic production across early modern and modern Europe. From the Counter-Reformation through Romanticism and the rise of philological scholarship, Boccaccio’s texts—most notably the Decameron—were translated, adapted, censored, moralized, illustrated, and reimagined in ways that reveal shifting attitudes toward narrative freedom, authorship, morality, and genre.

This panel invites papers that examine Boccaccio’s reception and reinterpretation from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, with particular attention to processes of continuity, transformation, and mediation. How were Boccaccio’s works read, reshaped, or contested in early modern and modern contexts? How did translators, editors, moral reformers, artists, and scholars negotiate the tension between Boccaccio’s narrative openness and evolving cultural, religious, and political norms? By focusing on Boccaccio’s afterlives rather than his Trecento context alone, this panel seeks to foster dialogue between Boccaccio studies and scholars of later Italian literary and cultural history.

We invite papers that explore, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Boccaccio’s continuity and reception in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries
• Adaptability of Boccaccio’s themes, narrative strategies, and representational freedom
• Translations, adaptations, abridgements, and rewritings of Boccaccio’s works
• Counter-Reformation censorship, moral expurgation, and editorial intervention
• Romantic, nationalist, and philological rediscoveries of Boccaccio
• Boccaccio from text to image: illustration, visual culture, and artistic reception
• Boccaccio in transnational contexts and comparative literary traditions

This panel welcomes interdisciplinary contributions from scholars working in literature, history, art history, translation studies, and cultural studies, and aims to bring together members of both sponsoring organizations in a shared conversation about Boccaccio’s enduring and evolving presence in Italian and European culture.

Submission Deadline: March 9, 2026

Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words together with a short bio to Bradford Masoni (bradford.a.masoni@gmail.com) or Viola Ardeni (mrsviolin2011@gmail.com).