שיעור ספרות ברנסנס האיטלקי: קריאה, חמלה וקהילה

How was the ethical and educational role of reading and interpreting literature conceived in the Italian Renaissance? What kind of model might literary works from that period offer for the teaching of literature today? This article seeks to address these questions through an examination of two works by prominent early humanists—Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron and Leonardo Bruni’s Novella of Seleucus. Both works depict a group of young men and women engaged in storytelling and reflecting upon the stories they tell, in a manner that might resemble a literature classroom and repeatedly raises the question of the ethical function of communal reading and interpretation. Focusing on the way in which both texts offer a reworking of an ancient narrative—the story of Seleucus, Antiochus, and Stratonice, as told by Valerius Maximus in the first century CE—I aim to show how they conceive of literature as an ethical and political instrument directed toward cultivating compassion and expanding the readers’ circle of empathy, goals that remain highly relevant to the teaching of literature today. Accompanying the article is a Hebrew translation of Bruni’s Novella of Seleucus.