Chapter 2 investigates how the three opening stories of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron reformulate examples of ascetic and altruistic behavior used in vernacular sermons, concentrating on Italian sources close to Boccaccio: the homilies of Giordano da Pisa and the devotional treatises of Domenico Cavalca and Iacopo Passavanti. It explores the Dominican friars’ vicious representations of Jews, and the Decameron’s surprisingly sympathetic attitude toward them and other excluded or subordinate social groups in medieval society. The apparent filogyny and filo-Judaism in Boccaccio’s reworkings of antifeminist and anti-Semitic exempla do not seem to respond to contemporary women’s or Jews’ historical circumstances, however, so much as to the reductive didacticism of his sources. The chapter’s final sections examine how Decameron novelle 5.8 and 5.9 parody sermon exempla by showing how abstract moral injunctions can be put to different ends, thereby undermining the assumption that any lesson can be universally applied.

Chapter 3 explores medieval hagiographic collections, including Iacopo da Varazze’s Legenda aurea and Domenico Cavalca’s Vite dei santi padri. By adopting conventional narratives – of young men who squander their wealth, cross-dressing female saints, and ascetics tempted by demons – but charging them with new messages, Boccaccio interrogates the nature of exemplarity and the possibility of generalizing from experience. This chapter briefly discusses Decameron 1.1, then turns to individual tales (such as 3.10) that combine details from different narratives, as well as to pairs of tales (such as 2.3 and 2.9) that manipulate elements from one saint’s life in different ways. The chapter concludes by examining Boccaccio’s reprisal of apologues embedded in the Legend of Saints Barlaam and Josaphat – a Christianized version of the life of the Buddha – especially in the partial novella recounted at the opening of Day 4 and in the final novella.