Guest Lecture

PD Dr. Dagmar Stöferle (LMU Munich):
Consensus and Copulatio. Matrimonial law on the 10th storytelling day of the  Decameron

Tuesday 6 July 2021, 10.15 a.m. - Room KGA-206 (Ostenstr. 26)

The novella and law are closely linked. The literary genre developed parallel to the rediscovery of Roman law and the institutionalisation of jurisprudence in Northern Italy. At the same time, the novella is, interestingly enough, a genre for which the gender issue is constitutive from the beginning: here, men and women tell each other stories whose conflicts mostly concern the problematic coexistence of women and men. After the retreat of the brigata from the world threatened by pestilence and lawlessness, the question arises, especially for the 'sublime' stories of the 10th and last storytelling day of the Decameron, to what extent law and order are restored here. The lecture aims to show that marriage law, which was by no means uniformly codified around 1350, plays a central role in this. The economic and political relations of exchange and power in the novellas are crystallised in the marriage law concepts of Copulatio and Consensus.