3 - Fiction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 July 2009
Summary
In an earlier publication, I committed the historian's typical sin against literature by considering fiction in the last chapter of a book on history, thus privileging documents over fiction, and adopting a hierarchical attitude to the discipline and its sources. So, in amends, I am here placing literature close to the beginning of the inquiry, and not at the end. Literature's relation to the law is complex, and some of the methodology of proponents of ‘Law and Literature’ will be used to explore that relation in a period usually passed over by ‘law and literature’ specialists. The emphasis will thus be not on how accurately fiction depicts the legal system, but on how it criticises the law (in Boccaccio, for example, the law-court is transformed into a place of laughter, where judges are mocked for their pomposity and scorned for their corrupt behaviour).
At first glance, the body of late medieval Italian prose fiction would seem to present none of the problems of other sources. Tales have known authors, whose lives we know in some detail. Individual tales or whole collections can be precisely placed and dated. The ‘realistic’ character of many tales, their renowned closeness to chronicle narrative, and their assertions of recounting true events might lead historians to treat them like other narrative sources. Moreover, the two genres, of history and story, were to some extent confused: some writers were both chroniclers and novellieri; novellieri used material from chronicles to achieve the effect of realism; and some chroniclers inserted tales into their ‘histories’.
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- Crime and Justice in Late Medieval Italy , pp. 72 - 83Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007