Family and Vocation in the Early Italian Renaissance: Boccaccio and Narratives of Filial Freedom

Abstract

With an eye to joining literary and family history, this article examines Boccaccio's role in consolidating a new genre regarding the struggles of young people to choose their own paths against the constraints of paternal authority. In works of fiction, humanist scholarship, and biography, Boccaccio portrayed the struggle for filial freedom, both in terms of his own vocational aspirations as a young poet and in the struggle of young women to assert their freedom in the choice of spouse or vocation.