Maksymilian T. Del Mar (Queen Mary University of London, School of Law) has posted Exemplary Pleasures: Cicero, Boccaccio, and Moral Pedagogy (Forthcoming in A Amaya and C Michelon (eds), Public Exemplarity (Liverpool University Press, 2026)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This chapter argues that pleasure is an integral part of the concept of exemplarity. This is not only in the sense that pleasure is a carrier of exemplarity, i.e., that without pleasure (e.g., the aesthetic pleasure of an entertaining story) any moral teaching offered by exemplarity is ineffective. This is important, but pleasure is even more important than that: attention to pleasure, as part of the history of exemplarity, shows us that moral pedagogues have long understood the necessity for training the ability to take pleasure in the difficulty and complexity of reasoning about what one ought to do. Moral life is simply too subject to circumstantial change and the unpredictability of fortune for it to be possible to rely on straightforward exemplars, who offer admirable pictures of the virtuous life or a blueprint for how to live. Rather, for exemplarity to be valuable as a mode of moral pedagogy, it has to offer training in the exercise of ingenious reason: an inventive reason capable of discerning and adapting to changes in circumstance and timely opportunities for action. This chapter discusses two moral pedagogues who understood this well – Cicero and Boccaccio – and who deployed the resources of literature, poetry, and the arts of language for this purpose. The chapter presents Cicero as an important influence on Boccaccio, and discusses the Decameron as a text that, inspired by Cicero, trains readers to enjoy the difficulty and complexity of reasoning morally.