ABSTRACT
From what, precisely, do these Florentines flee? What are they trying so hard to forget? And, curiously, if determined not to remember, why, then, so many recitations? That is, against the socio-historical backdrop of silence and erasure, why such loquaciousness and repetition? But is this apparent fluency just that or, rather, just a series of false starts? I suggest that we read this early modern project of purposeful yet selective remembering and forgetting in and against the cultural discourses of trauma and commemorative practice, locating the site/sight of anxiety for Boccaccio’s protagonists in the functions – and failures – of the Florentine mourning ritual:
It had once been customary, as it is again nowadays, for the women relatives and neighbors of a dead man to assemble in his house in order to mourn in the company of the women who had been closest to him; moreover his kinsfolk would forgather in front of his house along with his neighbours and various other citizens, and there would be a contingent of priests, whose numbers varied according to the quality of the deceased; his body would be taken thence to the church in which he had wanted to be buried, being borne on the shoulders of his peers amidst the funeral pomp of candles and dirges. But as the ferocity of the plague began to mount, this practice all but disappeared entirely and was replaced by different customs. For not only did people die without having many people about them, but a great number departed this life without anyone at all to witness their going. Few indeed were those to whom the lamentations and bitter tears of relatives were accorded; on the contrary, more often than not bereavement was the signal for laughter and witticisms and general
jollification – the art of which the women, having for the most part suppressed their feminine concern for the salvation of the souls of the dead, had learned to perfection … in fact, no more respect was accorded to dead people than would nowadays be shown towards dead goats.3
