Boccaccio and Cervantes: possible Italian sources of La cueva de Salamanca

Abstract

From the Decameron as a narrative archetype, I suggest delimiting a "corpus" of stories about the use of magic in matrimonial mockery to focus on motifs, type-characters, compositional techniques and expressive resources that, from Boccaccio's book, the narrative and Renaissance theatre spread to our literature. The aim is to rethink the theme of the Italian sources of the entremés La cueva de Salamanca in order to better assess, also from possible Italian models, the profound innovation of the Cervantes text and the ideological background that animates it.