ABSTRACT
The one hundred cantos of Dante’s sublime Divine Comedy, which celebrates the transcendental nature and power of love, are matched, at least in number, by the one hundred tales in Giovanni Boccaccio’s “human comedy,” the Decameron. This chapter aims to provide some sense of the number and variety of erotic/sexual elements in medieval Italian lyric poetry and prose. It explains a number of examples of what could be termed erotic and sexual activity in order to suggest that the topics were very much a part of the literary tradition. The elaborate structure of the contrasto, together with its highly nuanced language and vibrant sexual images, make it one of the most developed and sustained poems of seduction and sexuality in early Italian poetry. Poems in coarse and crude text category reflect a much lower stylistic register, use popular language, and contain unadorned descriptions of sexual activity.
