Abstract

[«Sotto ristretta legge ragionato abbiamo». Èthos and nòmos in Decameron]. Law, rule and infringement are some of the key points in the analysis of Decameron. Boccaccio’s tales are set in a period in which there were not laws. The pestilence perturbs the city of Florence; the judges and the public administrators were killed by pestilence, so human and divine laws disappeared. This article makes an enquiry about the meaning of law in the most famous Boccaccio’s work. In Decameron we can distinguish four types of laws: human, divine, natural, and a literary law, which regulate the tales (modus novellandi).