Presents
Book Presentation & Winter Quarter Lunchtime Lecture
with
Professor Roberta Morosini
UCLA European Languages & Transcultural Studies
March 6, 2026
10:00am-11:00am, HG 1341 (Persian Studies Lounge)
Show & Tell: The Oxford Decameron Manuscript Facsimile
Open to the UCI Community
12:00pm-1:30pm, HG 1002 Lunchtime Talk
“A tutte le nazioni comune” Crete, Boccaccio, Dante, and the Future(s) of Migrant Europa
RSVP for light lunch at noon!
Marking the occasion of the donation of the Oxford Decameron facsimile to UCI Library’s Special Collections, this lecture reflects on the responsibility of literature and on why Italian authors such as Dante and Boccaccio continue to matter today. From a geocritical perspective, it examines the idea of Europe through the Mediterranean, focusing on Crete and on the figure of Europa as sites where myth, power, and violence intersect. Beginning with Dante’s exile—which compels a journey both on foot and by sea—the Mediterranean appears not as a border but as a space of passage and ethical tension. The myth of Europa, forced across porous shores toward Crete, frames Europe’s origins as marked by displacement, erasure, and hybridity. Turning to Boccaccio, the lecture will highlight his critical reworking of the Europa myth in his encyclopedic Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, where poetic fiction is stripped of its innocence and exposed as a narrative of domination. Crete emerges as both mythic origin and historical crossroads, imagined as a tutte le nazioni commune (shared by all nations), yet founded on acts of exclusion and forgetting. In this context, literature appears not merely as an archive of the past, but as an ethical practice—one that makes visible what founding narratives conceal and invites us to rethink Europe’s origins and futures. The lecture will be a journey through texts and images, showing how Dante and Boccaccio construct the Mediterranean as a space of modernity and how medieval literature, by illuminating the past, offers critical tools for reading the present and for imagining Europe’s unfinished futures.
Event Co-sponsored by
UCI Humanities Center, UCI Libraries Special Collections, Departments of Art History, Classics, and European Languages & Studies