ABSTRACT
Boccaccio’s Decameron discloses storytelling as an essentially social practice, offering human-centred stories that were both realistic and at times bizarre or unexpected. As part of the Anglo-Italian Renaissance, novellas were a focus for English fears and desires towards an Italian other, but this was by no means their only role. Insofar as novella collections became courtly fictions, representing elite social worlds, they influenced and were influenced by Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, which revealed the performance of the courtier’s identity and social world. English translations and appropriations of the genre, such as Whetstone’s Heptameron of Civil Discourses, Edmund Tilney’s Flower of Friendship, and even The Cobler of Caunterburie, domesticated the Italianate form, while print culture created the illusion of a more broadly shared cultural space accessed through reading. Scholarship on novellas has dealt with developments of genres and with source study. Other works trace sources for plays or iterations of a single story. More recently a focus on the transmission, transformation, and negotiation of ideologies and social issues has been more critically central, questioning women’s reading and speaking, their agency and desire. Dramatists were among the important readers of novellas, and their work in turn contributed to the development of the English novel and to the negotiation of social and ideological issues through imaginative forms.
