Eroticism à la française: Text, image, and display in nineteenth-century English translations of Boccaccio’s Decameron

This article approaches the reception history of Boccaccio’s Decameron in English translation via a study of the translated book as object, focusing on the way in which textual and paratextual elements of French derivation are incorporated into English editions in order to license a degree of titillation for English readerships. Many nineteenth-century English editions of Boccaccio contain highly visible paratextual elements of French origin which serve a specific function closely associated with the specifically erotic content of the text: these include illustrations made by French artists such as Hubert-François Gravelot, Léopold Flameng, and Louis Chalon, and French-language translations, which are used within the text to both mask and reveal censored passages of obscenity. During the nineteenth century, notions of ‘Frenchness’ are therefore used editorially by Boccaccio’s English publishers to amplify the erotic content of the imported book.