Conversion/Rétrospection. L’autorité ambiguë du ‹je› dans ‹Corbaccio› (1355?) de Giovanni Boccaccio et ‹Le Joli Buisson de Jonece› (1373) de Jean Froissart

Abstract

It is not uncommon for the authors of late medieval first-person narratives to depict in their later career stages religious conversions, in which they turn away from the love they had celebrated in their earlier texts. By telling of change and renunciation they seem to establish a new literary authority. But in fact, even in such revisions, the ego remains unstable and dynamic. This is shown by two well-known ‹love treatises› of late medieval Italian and French literature, written almost at the same time. Giovanni Boccaccio’s ‹Corbaccio› can be read as a parody of a conversion in which misogyny and body hostility are exposed as extreme effects of male loss of control. This interpretation only becomes possible if one considers the framing of the dream in which the frustrated ego is ‹enlightened› about the ›true› nature of women by the dead husband of the beloved: As is explicitly emphasized in the text, the vision is sent by Fortuna; accordingly, its messages are fickle, excessive, and questionable. In Jean Froissart’s ‹Le Joli Buisson de Jonece›, the conversion, which here occurs only upon awakening, is also ambivalently coded. However, in his Dit past and unfulfilled love is not condemned, but fixed in its aesthetic value and thus removed from time. Whereas in Boccaccio a conversion seems ultimately impossible for the subject, in Froissart the «old life» is preserved in poetic form like a precious self-portrait.