‘Questions of Love’ is actually a segment of a larger work, ‘Il Filocolo’, which Boccaccio started writing when he was 23 and in love with the daughter of the King of Naples. He immortalized her in the character of ‘Fiammetta’ both here and later in the Decameron. As in the latter, the format for ‘Questions of Love’ has a group of young men and women sitting in a garden amusing themselves and whiling away the time with storytelling. They’ve elected Fiammetta “Queen”, to hear their stories and then to pose questions about love to her which have no right or wrong answer.

In one of the tales, a young man in love with a maiden takes an old beggar woman as a go-between to arrange a liaison. The pair get caught by the young lady’s brothers, who then force him to vow to spend a year with their sister but also a year with the old woman, with an equal amount of sexual relations between the two. The question before the queen is then who should he choose to spend the first year with? In another tale, a woman who has died is brought back to life by a knight who admires her; he makes her attend a banquet along with her widower husband, and only then decides to restore her to him. The question before the queen is then which is greater, the loyalty and virtue of the knight, or the joy and good fortune of the husband?

Posing these questions is an interesting device, but it cuts off the stories. I didn’t get anything out of the reasoning the queen used to justify her answers or the invariable counter-arguments from the questioners, so it quickly became banal for me. Many of the tales themselves weren’t very interesting either. The 1931 edition had the benefit of some interesting illustrations by Alexander King, but the English translation it used from 1566 with only spelling corrections was occasionally hard to understand. I would recommend a non-Elizabethan translation, if you should ever think to read this. Better yet, read the Decameron. ( )