French Literature Reviews - 2026
Boccaccio, The Raven of Misfortune
Medieval and Renaissance Studies
Bibliographic reference: Boccaccio, Corbeau de malheur, Les Belles Lettres, coll. "Bibliothèque italienne", 2010. EAN13: 9782251344980.
Bilingual text (French-Italian). Published on August 27, 2010.
In this early forerunner of autofiction, Boccaccio (1313-1375) portrays himself as a poet turned rejected lover, eager to escape the yoke of love. In a dream, the protagonist journeys through an allegorical landscape, accompanied by a guide who is none other than the penitent soul of the beloved woman's husband. Through discourses that serve primarily as a biting invective against women, acting as a remedy for love, this guide succeeds in freeing the poet from the "labyrinth of Love." The raw edge of this satire led early publishers and translators, followed by early 20th-century critics, to view The Raven of Misfortune as an indignant confession prompted by the author's hypothetical romantic setbacks. For several decades now, criticism has revised this view by redefining its autobiographical dimension—limiting it to the realm of intellectual autobiography—and by highlighting the broader scope of the invective, which reflects a new conception of culture. At the heart of the work, the satire echoes the defense of poetry championed by Boccaccio and Petrarch (1304-1374) in the second half of the 14th century, framing the assertion of the poet's moral mission within a narrative structure. Following the model of the Comedy, The Raven of Misfortune indeed fulfills the moral function that Boccaccio assigns to fiction in his mature works (most notably his biography of Dante (1265-1331) and his Genealogy of the Pagan Gods), since this genre-blending work claims the significance of an edifying treatise right from its opening pages.
Giovanni Boccaccio occupies a foundational place in fourteenth-century Italian literature, standing alongside Petrarch as a central figure of early humanism. While modern readers associate him primarily with the Decameron, his broader output encompasses varied works that bridge medieval allegorical traditions and critical thought, illuminating the intellectual climate of the Trecento and the changing status of the poet.
In this early forerunner of autofiction, Boccaccio portrays himself as a poet turned rejected lover, eager to escape the yoke of love through an allegorical landscape accompanied by the penitent soul of the beloved woman's husband. Readers interested in medieval Italian literature and the early development of autofictional modes may find this bilingual volume a useful addition to their study of Boccaccio's wider prose works.