The Most Pleasant And Delectable Questions of Love

by Giovanni Boccaccio

The Most Pleasant and Delectable Questions of Love is a translation of 13 chapters of one of Boccaccio's longer works. In these chapters, a group of young people have gone to the country for the day. One of the young women is chosen "The Queen of Love." Each young person tells a love story and poses a question about love. The group answers; there is no right or wrong. But the final arbiter, "The Queen of Love," holds the answers.

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1931

About the author

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313 - 1375) was an Italian author and poet, a friend and correspondent of Petrarch, and an important Renaissance humanist in his own right and author of a number of notable works including the Decameron, On Famous Women, and his poetry in the Italian vernacular. Boccaccio is particularly notable for his dialogue, of which it has been said that it surpasses in verisimilitude that of just about all of his contemporaries, since they were medieval writers and often followed formulaic models for character and plot.

Reviews

[Ostap Bender · Rating 2 out of 5]

‘Questions of Love’ is actually a segment of a larger work, ‘Il Filocolo’, which Boccaccio started writing when he was 23 and in love with the daughter of the King of Naples. He immortalized her in the character of ‘Fiammetta’ both here and later in the Decameron. As in the latter, the format for ‘Questions of Love’ has a group of young men and women sitting in a garden amusing themselves and whiling away the time with storytelling. They’ve elected Fiammetta “Queen”, to hear their stories and then to pose questions about love to her which have no right or wrong answer.

In one of the tales, a young man in love with a maiden takes an old beggar woman as a go-between to arrange a liaison. The pair get caught by the young lady’s brothers, who then force him to vow to spend a year with their sister but also a year with the old woman, with an equal amount of sexual relations between the two. The question before the queen is then who should he choose to spend the first year with? In another tale, a woman who has died is brought back to life by a knight who admires her; he makes her attend a banquet along with her widower husband, and only then decides to restore her to him. The question before the queen is then which is greater, the loyalty and virtue of the knight, or the joy and good fortune of the husband?

Posing these questions is an interesting device, but it cuts off the stories. I didn’t get anything out of the reasoning the queen used to justify her answers or the invariable counter-arguments from the questioners, so it quickly became banal for me. Many of the tales themselves weren’t very interesting either. The 1931 edition had the benefit of some interesting illustrations by Alexander King, but the English translation it used from 1566 with only spelling corrections was occasionally hard to understand. I would recommend a non-Elizabethan translation, if you should ever think to read this. Better yet, read the Decameron.