Above: A detail from John William Waterhouse’s “Decameron” (1916). In Boccaccio’s Decameron, young Florentines flee the Black Plague, taking refuge in the countryside and telling each other stories to pass the time. It’s one of the greatest works of Italian literature and it includes one of the earliest mentions of wine in Monferrato (image via Wikipedia Creative Commons).

As I whittled away at my post today for the Barbera consortium blogging project (“Fit for a King: The first mention of Barbera d’Asti?”), it occurred to me that the main character in Boccaccio’s novella “The Marchioness of Monferrato” is an ante litteram #MeToo icon, not to mention an extraordinary gourmet.

For two years now, I’ve been working on my own research on wine in Boccaccio and (what I believe is) its essential role in the Tuscan humanist’s Italian masterwork. And so it was only natural that I would take a philological paring knife to the description of a feast in the tale and try to uncover what Boccaccio meant when he wrote of the “excellent and precious” wines of Monferrato (where Barbera is famously grown today). You might be surprised by my close reading of the text.

Please check out my post here.

Rereading the text for the umpteenth time, I realized that it had never dawned on me: in using her wit to repel the unwelcome advances of the king of France, who uses his position of power to corner her while her husband is away, she is an early feminist and #MeToo icon. Especially when read in the context of courtly love and its code, she is a victim who rises above her times and cultural hegemony. She subverts that code by means of culinary and convivial artefice, making the tale even richer in meaning in my opinion.

The tale is a shorter one and it will take you just a few minutes to read it (in English here). The ending is even more powerful, I believe, when read in the light of gastronomic wokeness.

Thanks for reading. I just got back an exhausting but great trip to Italy. So many wines and adventures to share! Stay tuned and please come out and taste with me and Alicia tonight in Houston… Thanks for being here.