This book investigates representations of Other and spaces of Otherness in Boccaccio’s works. Its first part is dedicated to Christian-Muslim relationships in the Decameron, then shifts to female characters crossing the sea in other people’s clothes or denying their faith and culture. Rarely a place where conflicts are resolved, the Mediterranean is ultimately the "third space" in Bhabha’s terms: its uniqueness is to be a place of hybridity rather than of homogeneity. It is a space of dissent where Boccaccio can narrate the darkest pages of the medieval trade in women and...