Novellas of Walter and Griselda: The Circle of Obedience and the Aesthetics of Uncertainty

Romania (founded 1872) is a foundational journal in the field of Romance Philology, recognized globally for its historical rigor. It is rated Class A by ANVUR (Area 10) and indexed in Web of Science (AHCI), Scopus, and Carhus Plus+. Significantly, this article was awarded a 4-star rating ("World Leading") in the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF2021). This study applies comparative historical lexicology to the transnational reception of Boccaccio’s Griselda (Decameron X, 10). By analyzing the earliest translations into Latin, French, and Catalan, the article reconstructs the semantic shifts in the political and institutional vocabulary of ‘obedience’. The paper treats translation not merely as linguistic transfer, but as an ideological recoding. The research shows how authors and translators manipulate Boccaccio’s source text to serve distinct local political agendas, moving beyond traditional allegorical interpretations.