Boccaccio's View On Women

Although not situated within Italy, Marguerite de Navarre was a French royal during the later half of the Renaissance. She is perhaps the only well-known woman to take on creating a work that was heavily inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron, by creating her Heptaméron. Within it, she creates a piece that has a voice for women, by women. Boccaccio, of course, dedicated the Decameron to the ‘graziosissime donne’, those poor ladies who have no outlet like men do to distract them from their feminine longings. He tells the reader countless times that he is on the side of women, yet, as Suzuki (1993, p. 237) states “In the Introduction to Book IV…he repeatedly complains of being mutilated…because of his allegiance to the ladies.” – oh how terrible it is, what a martyr he is, to be such a man to be on the side of women; Marguerite sees right through this façade (whether Boccaccio was truly for the women

When reading through her stories, it slowly comes to the surface that she wants to give a voice to women who find themselves stuck within the injustices of the patriarchal order, whereas Boccaccio would only try to present a story using feminine vernacular, but fall back into stories being driven by masculine judgments – Boccaccio is only on the side of women when it suits him; when he goes on to tell a friend of his to make sure that “…the Decameron should not fall into the hands of the women of his household…” (Olson 2011, p. 56). Boccaccio’s claims of writing for women are all over the place and, respectively, can be seen to be unfounded – he is merely writing like this to impress the elites of the literature world, or in other, simpler words, the men of the