Carissime donne: Boccaccio’s fabliaux for a new audience

In the composition and structure of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron we can identify a double articulation and a double setting, as well as a double audience. This article explores whether this choice is part of what Boccaccio was learning from his experience of reading the French fabliaux that constitute some of his sources. It offers a reader-oriented interpretation of the relation between the Decameron and the fabliau material, before focussing on the sixth novella of the ninth day – the story of Niccolosa and Pinuccio – and its antecedents, the anonymous fabliaux generally known as Le meunier et les deus clers, together with Jean Bodel’s Gombert. It also proposes a comparison with a text possibly deriving from these, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale.