Petrarch’s Griselda and the Sense of an Ending

The essay compares the final novella of Boccaccio’s Decameron - the tale of Griselda - with Petrarch’s Latin translation of the tale at the close of his letter collection, the Seniles. In considering the status of the ‘ending’ and Griselda’s relationship to it, I focus on Petrarch’s enigmatic line to Boccaccio: ‘I don’t know if I have deformed your tale or beautified it; you be the judge.’ How might we speak about the beauty of the vernacular Griselda vis-a-vis that of the Latin Griselda? And how do both versions of the tale represent their authors’ self-conscious farewells to their feminized and perhaps insufficiently beautiful texts?