Renewal through the Classics: Irony, Parody, Intertextuality in the Decameron

The aim of this paper is to analyse some of the numerous textual references to classical literature which characterise Boccaccio’s opus maius. Through a process of allusion, ‘sympathy’, irony and parody Boccaccio manages to renew – i.e. reconstruct – a new world, which has been defined as the ‘Fall of the Middle Ages’; but whilst the medieval models (apart from obvious quotations from Dante and Petrarch, Boccaccio’s masters) are often ironized or parodied, the classical ones are contemporised and used as tools for the (re)composition of a new literature and a new society.