Abstract
This insight explores two stories from Boccaccio’s Decameron, both featuring the character of Calandrino, through the lens of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. It argues that the comedy of both tales relies upon a disjuncture between what Merleau-Ponty terms the ‘lived body’ and the ‘objective body’. This phenomenological conception of embodiment is then used to explore the ways in which Calandrino’s body challenges the binary of biological sex. The article further suggests that the conceit at the centre of the second story, in which Calandrino is tricked into believing he has become pregnant, may be read as an instance of phantom pregnancy.
Boccaccio’s Calandrino was the first and last man who felt himself with child.
James Joyce, Ulysses, 9. 836-37
In a digression on fatherhood, Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus invokes Calandrino, a Florentine painter whose supposed foolishness is exploited to comic effect in four novelle of the Decameron. Dedalus is referring specifically to the third story of Day Nine, in which Calandrino is tricked into believing he is pregnant by fellow painters Bruno and Buffalmacco, who use the promise of a ‘cure’ to cheat him out of his inheritance. Interestingly, Dedalus does not present Calandrino’s condition as a truth claim. Rather, he suggests via the verb ‘felt’ that it is affective—real in the sense that it belongs to Calandrino’s lived experience of his own body. The use of the idiomatic ‘with child’ as opposed to the more technical ‘pregnant’, moreover, distances Calandrino’s physical state from the realm of medical diagnosis and ties it to his subjectivity. In this way, Joyce’s character hints towards the paradox upon which Decameron ix. 3 hinges—namely, that although Calandrino’s companions know his pregnancy to be an impossibility, it is as real to the protagonist as any scientific truth.
In this insight, I will probe this tension, arguing that the practical joke, or beffa, at the centre of ix. 3 relies upon a phenomenological understanding of embodiment. I will suggest that the tale reveals a disjuncture between what Maurice Merleau-Ponty terms the lived body (corps vivant) and the objective body (corps objectif), referring to the body as it is experienced by its inhabitant and the body as it is perceived by others respectively. Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the phantom limb, I will argue that Calandrino experiences a phantom pregnancy, and that his body is a queer one in that it refutes the binary of biological sex. Moreover, I will read this novella alongside an earlier tale featuring Calandrino (viii. 3) in which he is tricked into believing he has become invisible. This tale, too, hinges upon the difference between Calandrino’s idiomatic experience of his body and its perception by external observers. An analysis of these two novelle will shed light on the ways in which Boccaccio anticipates modern and contemporary theories of embodiment, albeit employing different terminology.
Before turning to the novelle that are the main focus of this insight, it is worth dwelling on the reasons why phenomenology might be a particularly fruitful mode through which to examine the Decameron. The text is set amidst the Black Death epidemic of 1348 and follows ten noblemen and noblewomen, who flee the plague-ridden city of Florence to seek refuge in the nearby village of Fiesole. Over a period of ten days, the characters entertain themselves by telling stories based on a chosen theme each day. Whilst the plague is never invoked directly beyond the Introduction to Day One, embodiment is a recurring and complex theme throughout the novelle. In her philosophical study of illness experiences, Havi Carel argues that being ill demands phenomenological thinking:
In Merleau-Ponty’s view, our experience is first and foremost an embodied experience, an experience of fleshly sensual existence. So a deep and permanent change to the body, such as takes place in serious chronic illness, would lead to far-reaching changes to one’s embodied experience. Thus phenomenology seems doubly suited for describing the experience of illness, which often includes a radical shift in one’s embodiment. Full reference in Zotero Library
We might, therefore, reasonably assume that the plague makes Boccaccio’s narrators hyper-aware of their own bodies and the bodies of those around them, and that this awareness pervades the novelle. What is more, as Susan Sontag has argued in relation to the AIDS epidemic, illness ‘flushes out an identity that might have remained hidden’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Sontag suggests that the epidermal lesions caused by AIDS became visible markers of homosexuality, thus turning the body into a readable object. As we will see in the case of the Calandrino stories, the plague, too, arguably brings to the surface an otherwise latent queerness. The Black Death manifests itself visibly, in the form of ‘gavoccioli’ [bubons] (i. Intro, 010) which serve as a ‘certissimo indizio di futura morte’ [certain sign of future death] (012).1Text and divisions from Full reference in Zotero Library. All translations of Boccaccio into English are my own. What is more, the body’s legibility is mirrored by the text itself as a body, which ‘porta nella sua fronte […] la dolorosa ricordazione della mortalità trapassata’ [bears upon its forehead the painful recollection of the past mortality] (Proem, 003). James Kriesel even suggests that to medieval readers, ‘bodies covered by the sores of the plague would have repeatedly evoked the image of a manuscript, white or yellow parchment covered with black ink’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Disease exposes the body’s status as a script, whose decoding is reliant upon the subjectivity of external observers. Merleau-Ponty draws attention to the visual inaccessibility of the body to its own inhabitant:
I observe external objects with my body, I handle them, examine them, walk round them, but my body itself is a thing which I do not observe: in order to be able to do so, I should need the use of a second body which itself would be unobservable. Full reference in Zotero Library
The diagnosis of plague relies upon perception from the outside, revealing the ambivalence of embodiment as the combined product of objective and subjective experience. The Calandrino tales, as I will go on to show, exploit the tension between these two forms of reality, generating comedy from the ways in which they often contradict one another.
Whilst it serves to accentuate the differences between the sick and the healthy, the Black Death simultaneously obscures other forms of difference, in particular gender. This will be important as we examine the ways in which Calandrino’s ‘pregnant’ body challenges the constructed binary of biological sex. Plague leads to disorder in all areas of Florentine society: ‘in tanta afflizione e miseria della nostra città era la reverenda auttorità delle leggi, cosí divine come umane, quasi caduta e dissoluta’ [amidst the great affliction and misery that befell our city, the reverent authority of laws, divine and human alike, had basically collapsed and dissipated] (i. Intro, 023). In Boccaccio’s plague-stricken Florence, families abandon one another; mourning practices are forgotten; the houses of the dead become communal property; livestock roams freely. What is more, the disease mitigates physiological gender difference, symptoms appearing ‘a’ maschi e alle femine parimente’ [in men and women in the same way] (i. Intro, 010). Due to a scarcity of servants, noblewomen expose their plagued flesh to male attendants ‘senza alcuna vergogna’ [without any shame] (i. Intro, 029). This is ‘uno uso quasi davanti mai non udito’ [a custom almost unheard of before now], resorted to ‘solo che la necessità della sua infermità il richiedesse’ [merely because the necessity of her illness demanded it] (ibid). This suggests that the bodily markers of illness obscure both the physiological characteristics upon which gender is socially constructed and the cultural practices by which it is policed. The dysregulation brought about by the Black Death arguably leads to a temporary dissolution of what Jack Halberstam terms the ‘logic of reproductive temporality’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Florentines are no longer motivated by a desire to protect the ‘phantom figure of the child’ who for Lee Edelman represents ‘the telos of the social order’ and ‘the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust’, but by self-preservation in the present Full reference in Zotero Library. Calandrino’s unborn child resists the logic of reproductive futurity, embodying Edelman’s queer reformulation of Lacanian jouissance as a ‘passage beyond the bounds of identity, meaning, and law’ Full reference in Zotero Library.
Let us now turn to the earlier of the two tales under examination—the third novella of Day Eight. In this tale, Calandrino is led to a mountain by his companions Bruno and Buffalmacco in order to search for the Heliotrope, a stone he is tricked into believing will make him invisible. In the errant belief that he cannot be seen, he exposes himself to ridicule by his friends, and later his wife. The beffa at the centre of this tale prefigures the pregnancy of the later one, both in the lexicon of reproduction that marks the novella and in the discrepancy between the lived body and the objective body upon which the practical joke relies. Central to my reading of pregnancy is the term ‘ingegno’, meaning ingenuity, which is used to describe Elissa’s narration in viii. 3 and recurs throughout the Decameron. It derives from the Latin ‘ingenium’, a compound of the prefix ‘in’ and the verb ‘gigno’, meaning ‘to produce’, or ‘to give birth to’ Full reference in Zotero Library. By framing her tale as product of ‘ingegno’—‘io me ne ingegnerò’ [I will use my ingenuity] (003)—Elissa forges a connection between her own procreative role as storyteller and Calandrino’s non-normative parenthood. Indeed, given the reproductive nuances of ‘ingegno’, Calandrino’s occupation as an artist may fall under this category. In an earlier tale, Boccaccio ascribes ‘ingegno’ to the trecento painter Giotto, with reference to his realism:
L’altro, il cui nome fu Giotto, ebbe uno ingegno di tanta eccellenzia, che niuna cosa dà la natura, madre di tutte le cose e operatrice col continuo girar de’ cieli, che egli con lo stile e con la penna o col pennello non dipignesse sí simile a quella, che non simile, anzi piú tosto dessa paresse, in tanto che molte volte nelle cose da lui fatte si truova che il visivo senso degli uomini vi prese errore, quello credendo esser vero che era dipinto. (vi. 6, 005)
[The other, whose name was Giotto, possessed ingegno of such excellence, that there is nothing given to us through the continuous turn of the heavens by the natural world, mother and worker of all things, that he could not render merely as similar, but as almost identical, with pen, or pencil, or brush, to such an extent that many times his artworks caused the human eye to be tricked, in the belief that what he had painted was the real thing.]
The association of Giotto’s creativity with the maternal qualities of the natural world presents art itself as a form of procreation. Like Giotto, Calandrino aims to deceive the eye, believing that the heliotrope can make him invisible. Both Giotto’s mimesis and Calandrino’s attempt to become invisible speak to the contemporary concept of transgender ‘passing’, as summarised by Jack Halberstam: ‘realness—the appropriation of the attributes of the real, one could say—is precisely the transexual condition’ Full reference in Zotero Library. The beffa in which Calandrino is implicated centres upon the protagonist’s attempt to appropriate a particular set of attributes—its humour lies in his erroneous belief that he ‘passes’ as invisible. Unlike Giotto, Calandrino is unsuccessful in his ploy to deceive the human eye, and his false invisibility falls into the ‘seriousness that fails’ which for Susan Sontag characterises camp Full reference in Zotero Library.
Calandrino, moreover, is queerly coded through his characterisation as a man ‘di nuovi costumi’ [of strange habits] (viii.3, 004) and his appearance alongside his male friends Bruno and Buffalmacco, whom he ‘spezialissimamente amava’ [especially loved] (025). His hybridity with the heliotrope is a form of kinship that falls outside of the logics of reproductive futurism. Not only does he reject the binary of male/female desire, he also becomes what Rosi Braidotti terms a ‘geo-centred subject’, in that he integrates stone into his own corporeality Full reference in Zotero Library. The notion that a stone might render its bearer invisible belonged to a widespread belief in the Middle Ages that stones held magical powers—what medieval scholars termed their ‘virtus’. As Brigitte Buettner reminds us, ‘lapidaries [medieval texts listing the virtues of stones] promote stones that make us see what should be unseeable (such as demons and the dead) and, in an opposite movement, that conceal what should be seeable (such as bestowing invisibility)’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Whist he is made to seem ridiculous by his companions, therefore, Calandrino is simultaneously engaging in a practice that is embedded in medieval epistemology. Indeed, Buettner also comments that medieval stones are characterised by a ‘phenomenological responsiveness’, existing ‘only in interaction with viewers and surroundings’ Full reference in Zotero Library. This is certainly true for the stones in Boccaccio’s tale, which appear to change colour depending on the time of day: ‘tali paion testé bianche, delle pietre che vi sono, che la mattina, anzi che il sole l’abbia rasciutte, paion nere’ [the stones that are there appear to be white, which in the morning, before the sun had dried them out, appeared black] (034). Calandrino’s body shares with the rocks he gathers an appearance that is not fixed, but which is constituted as part of a network of multiple human and non-human agents.
Once he has gathered what he believes to be heliotropes, Calandrino stores them underneath his shirt, directly against his skin: ‘fatto del mantello grembo, quello di pietre empié’ [having formed an apron out of his tunic, he filled this with stones] (013). Whilst the primary meaning of the word ‘grembo’ here is a garment whose edge has been folded up to create a pocket, the noun can also denote the womb, as it does in modern Italian. This second sense of ‘grembo’ frames Calandrino’s action as a performance of femininity. What is more, the image of Calandrino’s bulging belly of stones evokes the pregnant body, a similarity which is heightened by Boccaccio’s repeated use of the adjective ‘carico’, meaning ‘loaded’ or ‘full’, to describe his appearance. This posture recurs in medieval depictions of men; we may consider Judas in Giotto’s fresco cycle in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, in which upon betraying Jesus he clasps a moneybag to his stomach, an image which is suggestively placed opposite the Annunciation. Interestingly, the beffa of the later tale (ix. 3) is a punishment for Calandrino’s avarice, which his friends enact ‘con ingegni’ [with ingenuity] (ix.3, 033). Their revenge is apt, given that usury and avarice in the Middle Ages were seen as unnatural forms of procreation, as they generated money out of money Full reference in Zotero Library. Bruno and Buffalmacco respond to Calandrino’s parsimony with their own procreative ingegno, forcing him to envision himself as a reproductive subject. Reading the story of Calandrino and the heliotrope with the later tale in mind, we might argue that he experiences a lithic pregnancy, which foreshadows the unnatural pregnancy narrated in Day Nine. Indeed, the end of viii. 3 sees Calandrino unloading the stones from beneath his tunic, a gesture reminiscent of giving birth (052). His house is left ‘piena di pietre’ [full of stones] (065), which serve as parodic echoes of the children he is unable to produce via biological means.
Turning to the later tale, Calandrino’s pregnancy is figured as an illness whose particularities transcend linguistic cognition. It manifests itself visually, and the ‘symptoms’ do not recall those of pregnancy: ‘tu mi pari tutto cambiato’ [you seem completely changed] (010) and ‘tu par mezzo morto’ [you seem half dead] (012). The use of the verb ‘parere’ emphasises the visual aspects of Calandrino’s condition, implying that his pregnancy is superficially readable. Yet, Calandrino himself seems to detect a change in his inner state, declaring ‘mi sento non so che dentro’ [I feel I don’t know what inside] (018). The verb ‘sento’ presents his pregnancy as affective, which suggests that—contrary to the assertions of his companions—it cannot be perceived from the outside. Boccaccio, moreover, narrates that ‘a Calandrino pareva già aver la febbre’ [it already appeared to Calandrino that he had a fever] (013). This suggests that his condition is psychosomatic, changes in his mental state occurring simultaneously with alterations to his physical state. Elizabeth Steinway remarks that pregnancy in the Early Modern period was ‘a status supposedly marked with outward signs, but which most often [relied] upon a woman’s interpretation of her own body’ Full reference in Zotero Library. In that the pregnant body ‘defies outward legibility’, pregnancy in the pre-modern world was particularly difficult to detect, diagnoses being formed predominantly on the basis of a woman’s own testimony Full reference in Zotero Library. To translate this into phenomenological terms, pregnancy was located predominantly in the lived body as opposed to the objective body, perhaps granting greater diagnostic validity to Calandrino’s inner sensations.
The protagonist’s companions, however, insist upon ‘diagnosing’ him on the basis of features of his body which they are able to observe from the outside. They even identify symptoms in his face—‘che viso è quello?’ [what face is that?] (013)—which makes it impossible for him to observe them objectively, as they are relegated to what Merleau-Ponty terms a ‘quasi-space to which [he has] no access’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Moreover, the doctor confirms the ‘pregnancy’ by checking Calandrino’s pulse (020), once again shifting the locus of his symptoms from the lived body to the objective body. Throughout the novella, the protagonist’s condition manifests itself more as an illness than as a pregnancy. Indeed, there are several parallels between this tale and Boccaccio’s depiction of the Black Death in the Introduction to the First Day, which are heightened by the fact that Calandrino and his companions are Florentines. For instance, Calandrino is offered a remedy ‘che in tre mattine risolverà ogni cosa’ [which will solve everything in three days] (028), which mirrors the three days which Boccaccio tells us usually passed between the onset of plague symptoms and death (i. Intro, 013). There is also a Christological dimension to this span of time, Jesus having risen from the dead on the third day according to the Gospels. Medieval narratives of Christ’s Passion, moreover, often depict Jesus with maternal imagery, such as lactating breasts and side-wounds that resemble the vagina.2For an exploration of maternal imagery in medieval depictions of Christ, see Full reference in Zotero Library. Calandrino can thus be read as a parodic inversion of the medieval trope of Christ as a pregnant man who gives birth to humanity through his crucifixion and resurrection.
The disjuncture between Calandrino’s pregnancy and his corporeality is highlighted comically by his concerns about the physical process of birthing: ‘come farò io? come partorirò io questo figliuolo? onde uscirà egli?’ [What will I do? How will I give birth to this child? Where will he come out?] (023). There is cognitive dissonance in his simultaneous belief in his pregnancy and conviction that he cannot give birth. Calandrino’s body defies legibility, allowing us to entertain conflicting versions of reality, namely that he is both pregnant and not pregnant simultaneously. As James Robinson posits, ‘whilst the reader of the Decameron is perfectly aware that Calandrino’s pregnancy is a fiction and never took place, to Calandrino it was a substantive process whose issue was simply prevented from appearing by Simone’s “medicine”’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Going beyond this reading, we might argue that Calandrino’s condition has much in common with phantom pregnancy, or pseudocyesis, by which the body simulates the physical signs associated with pregnancy despite the absence of a foetus. Whilst pseudocyesis remains under-researched, the consensus amongst scientists is that it results from ‘the interaction between psychological factors and reproductive dysregulation that are caused by neuroendocrine/endocrine disorders’ Full reference in Zotero Library . Although the majority of cases are observed in women, there are documented examples of men experiencing phantom pregnancy.
Reading the tale from a queer perspective, Calandrino’s pseudocyesis may be viewed as a consequence of gender dysphoria, defined by Gayle Salamon as a ‘disjunction between the “felt sense” of the body and the body’s corporeal contours’ Full reference in Zotero Library. This definition, which is itself phenomenological, perfectly describes Calandrino’s experience in both tales under examination. He can be read as a transgender subject in that there is a mismatch between his own ‘felt sense’ of his body and the ways in which it appears to others. What is more, Calandrino believes he has become pregnant because he has occupied a submissive sexual role: ‘Ohimè! Tessa, questo m’hai fatto tu, che non vuogli stare altro che di sopra: io il ti diceva bene’ [O my! Tessa, what have you done to me, always wanting to be on top: I told you so] (021). Robert Mills argues that sodomy in the Middle Ages was understood as gender inversion or alternatis, reflecting the performance of gender roles as opposed to the physiological characteristics associated with biological sex Full reference in Zotero Library. Sex between men and women could also be sodomitical, and thus Calandrino’s relations with his wife might have been labelled as such. Sodomy, moreover, was sinful not only because it violated the sanctity of marriage between husband and wife, but because it did not lead to biological reproduction. Dante allegorises this view of sodomy in in Inferno XV, in which sinners are propelled aimlessly by the flames licking at their coattails, just as in life they engaged in sexual intercourse with no telos. Calandrino’s phantom child, therefore, seems to exist in order to remind him of his failure to secure his own genealogical posterity. Indeed, scientists have attested that ‘cultural pressure for pregnancy in the reproductive age group’ plays a role in causing pseudocyesis Full reference in Zotero Library. Studies have shown that ‘individuals with pseudocyesis sometimes have a strong desire to have a child or are under pressure of having a child’ Full reference in Zotero Library. This is a particularly convincing reading of Calandrino’s condition if we regard the novella in the context of the aftermath of the Black Death, which had reduced Florence’s population from 90,000 to 45,000 Full reference in Zotero Library. The epidemic arguably made conceiving children into an ethical and existential imperative, framing Calandrino’s childlessness as a failure to fulfil his civic duty.
Reading the two stories alongside each other, it is clear that the comedy of each derives from an acute dissonance between the objective body and the lived body. In both tales, Calandrino can be tricked because his experience of his own body is radically different from that of his friends who perceive it externally. Phenomenologically, Calandrino is both pregnant (lived body) and not-pregnant (objective body) at the same time. His body offers us a pre-Cartesian model that bears similarity to Merleau-Ponty’s post-Cartesian thesis:
The union of soul and body is not an amalgamation between two mutually external terms, subject and object, brought about by arbitrary decree. It is enacted at every instant in the movement of existence. Full reference in Zotero Library
In that Calandrino’s pregnancy is psychological, it is also physiological, as mind and body are fundamentally connected. We might draw a helpful comparison between Merleau-Ponty’s example of the phantom limb and Calandrino’s phantom pregnancy, in the sense that ‘the phantom arm is not a representation of the arm, but the ambivalent presence of an arm’ Full reference in Zotero Library. The ‘ambivalent presence’ of Calandrino’s pregnancy defies categorisation as either psychological or physiological, leaving us ‘imprisoned in the categories of the objective world, in which there is no middle term between presence and absence’ Full reference in Zotero Library. The ambivalence of his physical condition is heightened by the mystery surrounding pregnancy detection in the pre-modern world. Whilst Calandrino’s belief in his own pregnancy is framed as ridiculous, we are in fact presented with two versions of reality which both bear diagnostic validity. Reading the tale phenomenologically allows us to entertain both possibilities simultaneously, rather than viewing them as mutually exclusive. Carel’s distinction between the ill body and the diseased body is particularly useful here:
The ill person is the only one who experiences the illness from within, although others may have an experience of someone else’s illness. […] Disease, on the other hand, is a process in the objective body that may be observed by any other person and may yield information that is not available through first-person reports. Full reference in Zotero Library
In both tales, Calandrino experiences ‘symptoms’, but his friends do not believe him to be physically altered. From a phenomenological perspective, whilst he may not be ‘diseased’, Calandrino is indeed ‘ill’ (read pregnant or invisible), because his lived experience of embodiment is one of illness.
Moreover, the miraculous nature of the pregnancy forges a rift between what Merleau-Ponty terms ‘the habit-body’ and ‘the body at this moment’ Full reference in Zotero Library. The former refers to the body to which an individual is accustomed, and the latter to the body as it is experienced in a particular place and at a particular time. The Black Death, for instance, marks the body with buboes, rendering the ‘body at this moment’ different in appearance from the ‘habit-body’. Calandrino’s ‘symptoms’ too render the ‘habit-body’ distinct from ‘the body at this moment’, a change which he is able to detect regardless of the reality of his condition. Yet, unlike Merleau-Ponty’s phantom limb, which recalls a somatic presence in the complete ‘habit-body’, Calandrino’s phantom pregnancy draws on the potential of ‘the body at this moment’ to fill the void of somatic absence in the inadequate ‘habit-body’. In this sense, the temporalities governed by the phantom limb and those governed by the phantom pregnancy are fundamentally different. Whilst Calandrino is haunted from the future by his spectral child, the patient with the phantom limb is haunted by a past to which he cannot return:
It can now be said that, a fortiori, the specific past, which our body is, can be recaptured and taken up by an individual life only because that life has never transcended it, but secretly nourishes it, devoting thereto part of its strength, because its present is still that past. Full reference in Zotero Library
The phantom limb is a result of the patient’s denial of the rift between the ‘body at this moment’ and the ‘habit-body’. Calandrino’s phantom pregnancy, however, represents an essential absence rather than a lost presence, a re-envisioning of Merleau-Ponty’s model that can help us to think about transgender experiences of embodiment.
The purpose of this insight has not been to diagnose Boccaccio’s Calandrino with a medical condition on the basis of contemporary science. Rather, it has been to draw attention to new layers of meaning that arise when we read the Decameron through the lens of modern theories of embodiment. Far from being anachronistic, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology perfectly reflects the multiple realities at play in Boccaccio’s stories. By shifting our understanding of Calandrino’s corporeality from a fixed reality to the combined product of the objective body and the lived body, we can entertain apparently contradictory versions of the truth simultaneously. Moreover, using phenomenology to analyse the Calandrino stories draws out the queer subtext that underpins both. These modes of reading have much in common with medieval modes of perceiving the world, in that they require an abandonment of the Cartesian binaries of true and false, mind and body. If, as Stephen Milner argues, the Decameron’s language is characterised by a ‘betrayal of the faithful relation of sign to signified’ and the ‘unmooring of fixed referentiality’, Calandrino’s ambivalent physiology can even be read as a mirror for the rhetoric of the work as a whole Full reference in Zotero Library. Whilst Boccaccio’s character may initially appear one-dimensional, existing merely as the butt of a series of practical jokes, he in fact encapsulates the author’s complex theorisation of embodiment. Furthermore, the Black Death arguably forges a liminal space in which this non-normative corporeality becomes visible. From a phenomenological perspective, illness fundamentally changes the ways in which bodies are experienced by their inhabitants and perceived by external observers. This allows Boccaccio’s bodies to breach their own physical and social contours, calling us to question whether the conceit of the pregnant man—or indeed the invisible one—is as impossible as we might think.