ABSTRACT
'Buona' Gualdrada, the representative of civic republican values, did not turn down just any man; she turned down the emperor. Giovanni Boccaccio's version is the story of a confrontation between Florentine civic values and feudal values; Gualdrada's act is represented as a symbol of republican virtue. The legend of Gualdrada even has one element that makes it superior to the stories of St Anne, David and Judith: those are monumental figures of antiquity and scripture available to any city that wished to find parallels between its current events and their heroism. Whereas Gualdrada was a historical Florentine and allegories based on her politics and her playing of the woman's part naturally produced Florentine narratives. In a Florentine context, Gualdrada's reaction makes sense: in Boccaccio's time, an unmarried woman who kissed a man lost her value on the marriage market, and in Florence the marriage market was everything for Florentine magnate and noble families, the likely readers of Boccaccio's book.
