The Governance of Friendship: Law and Gender in the Decameron, Sherberg Michael

Through a series of close readings at all three levels of the text-the authors statements, the frame narrative, and the stories themselves-Sherberg shows how Boccaccio exposes and explores gender tensions rooted in a notion of the patriarchal household, which finds its own rationale in the natural-law postulate of the inferiority of women. Relying on the writings of the great twentieth-century legal theorist Hans Kelsen, Sherberg demonstrates how through the complex architecture of the Decameron Boccaccio dismantles the logic of natural law, exposing it instead as a rhetoric used by men to justify their control of women.