Grace Delmolino
Position title: Solmsen Fellow (2025–2026)
Address:
Assistant Professor of Italian, Department of French and Italian, UC Davis
Medieval Consent: Law, Gender, and Power in Gratian’s Decretum and Boccaccio’s Decameron
“Medieval consent” is not an anachronism. Medieval canon law—the legal system of the western Christian church—advanced a notion of consent supporting personal autonomy over paternalistic authority. My project illuminates the origins of consent theory in Gratian’s Decretum and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. The Decretum is a 12th-century Latin textbook of canon law that retained legal force until 1917; the Decameron is a 14th-century collection of vernacular Italian short stories, long noted for their attention to women, gender, marriage, and—I argue—consent. In his literary works, Boccaccio imagines new horizons of consent that go beyond the already nuanced treatments he found in medieval law.
Grace Delmolino (Assistant Professor of Italian, UC Davis) is a scholar of medieval Italian literature and legal history with research areas in Dante, Boccaccio, canon law, gender studies, and the history of consent. She holds a PhD from Columbia University in Italian and Comparative Literature and Society, and is currently Associate Editor of Digital Dante. Her work is published or forthcoming in Speculum, MLN, Heliotropia, and Reconsidering Consent and Coercion. Recent projects include an analysis of the legal sources of fraudulent counsel in Dante’s Inferno (winner of the 2025 Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize), an article on Boccaccio’s poetics of impossibility in the Filocolo (Heliotropia, forthcoming), and a book chapter on Dante’s textual translation of St Lucy from the canon law of rape into the Divine Comedy.