Fiction with Fiction: Confessing to Dante in <i>Decameron</i> I.1

This essay addresses one specific element of Decameron I.1, the curious order in which the holy friar questions Ciappelletto in his confession, and relates it to the larger dialogue Boccaccio establishes with Dante’s Commedia. By avoiding the canonical models of confessing penitents, which traditionally unfolded according to the Decalogue, the seven deadly sins, or the sinner’s circumstances, the confession proceedings in the first novella evoke most distinctively and idiosyncratically the order of sins in Dante’s hell. Dante’s authoritative but not canonical text about the Christian afterlife, thus, colors our reading of the first novella of the new work, in which the protagonist, narrator, and author are all similarly involved in the making of a fiction.