Aura before Petrarch

I propose reading for atmospheres in two medieval Italian texts: Dante’s Comedy and Boccaccio’s Decameron. The rationale here is that both texts strategically employ a term that is related to atmosphere, aura, in correlated narrative spaces, the Earthly Paradise in the Comedy and the Valley of the Ladies in the Decameron. But the atmospheres of these two spaces are utterly at odds with one another. Why? This talk will interrogate this question, suggesting that reading for atmospheres in medieval texts can be intensely revelatory. In this case, attention to atmospheres reveals differing attitudes to vulnerabilities, and specifically to gendered vulnerabilities, that lie at the heart of the divergence between these two texts.