Chapter 5 examines Boccaccio’s authorial defenses in the Decameron in the light of medieval medical and literary prescriptions for lovesickness, such as those in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris, and Andreas Capellanus’ De amore (which Boccaccio has been credited with translating). Like these didactic works, the Decameron can also be seen as teaching both how to recover from an unhappy love affair and how to procure a new liaison, thus aggravating the very ills that it is said to cure. Indeed, the book is presented metaphorically as fighting fire with fire, redressing unrequited desire by offering female readers the solace of a personal relationship with its author. But Boccaccio also recognizes that it useless to try to prevent sexual desire, and the cure may do more harm than good. The chapter’s second half examines stories that seem to draw on the dialogues between lovers of different social statuses in De amore. The attempted seductions are all unsuccessful in Andreas’ hypothetical encounters, but the corresponding novelle tend to end happily and to model healthier, more productive human relationships.

This essay formulates a critical response to scholars’ Freudian-Lacanian understanding of Ovidian desire in terms of frustration, futility, absence and lack. It focuses on the Remedia Amoris, a poem it takes as paradigmatic and culminatory in Ovid’s elegiac project, and attempts to give an account of what is meaningful and productive about the rhythmic process of Ovidian amor in and of itself, through the lens of Jean-Luc Nancy’s recent book on jouissance (Coming, 2017). The Remedia, it argues, performs absence not as tragic loss but as an undoing-remaking that continually regenerates desire and teaches investment in the pleasure of process. The second half of the essay explores how the poem’s temporal instabilities and dislocated subject positions produce a series of imagined inter-relations and ‘elsewheres’ that move readers away from Lacanian desire as continually projected into an ungraspable future, and into the experience of jouissance in the elegiac present.

In his diatribe against love in the De Rerum Natura, Lucretius unleashes a powerful grotesque imagination, endowing it with the gravitas of his philosophy, against the type of love that was to furnish the elegists with their basic theme. Writing the Remedia a generation later, Ovid assumes a perspective on elegiac love reminiscent of Lucretius, but whereas Lucretius was writing outside the boundaries of elegy, by chronology as well as choice of genre, Ovid is an elegist and writes from within its conventions. For Ovid, the aesthetic significance of the grotesque is that the elegiac code includes images that simulate foreignness of origin, in that they appear to intrude into the elegiac domain from somewhere beyond its boundary, while expressing ideas that are in fact generated entirely by the same code. Starting with this aesthetic premise and a narrative scenario in which unfulfilled desire figures as an apparently incurable malady, in the Remedia Ovid assumes a therapeutic stance with respect to both the afflicted lover and the elegist, teaching the one how to ‘unlearn’ his behaviour as a lover and the other how to attempt the ultimate permutation of the elegiac scenario, turning its narrative premise upon itself.