This book explores the tangled relationship between literary production and epistemological
foundation as exemplified in one of the masterpieces of Italian literature. Filippo Andrei
argues that Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron has a significant though concealed engagement with
philosophy and that the philosophical implications of its narratives can be understood through
an epistemological approach to the text. He analyzes the influence of Dante Petrarch Thomas
Aquinas Aristotle and other classical and medieval thinkers on Boccaccio's attitudes towards
ethics and knowledge-seeking. Beyond providing an epistemological reading of the Decameron
this book also evaluates how a theoretical reflection on the nature of rhetoric and poetic
imagination can ultimately elicit a theory of knowledge.
