Tales From the Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio

by Giovanni Boccaccio

  Despite its studied rhetorical structure and its possible literary antecedents, such as Dante’s contemptuous description of his native Florence in canto XV of Inferno, the passage could well reflect the author’s private thoughts and feelings in the years immediately following his return to Tuscany. Living in the house of his widowed father, in a city far more deeply engrossed in commerce and high finance than the pursuit of culture and scholarship, a city torn by internal disputes and at war with the neighbouring state of Lucca, he must indeed have looked back with nostalgia to the refined, tranquil and orderly aristocratic milieu in which he had spent the thirteen years of his adolescence and early manhood.

  His discontent with life in Florence may be glimpsed, also, in the closing paragraph of the first of Boccaccio’s ‘Florentine’ works, Comedía delle ninfe fiorentine, popularly known as the Ameto from the name of its main character. It probably dates from 1341–2, and in the last paragraph the author dedicates the book to a friend of long standing, Niccolò di Bartolo del Buono, asking him to accept ‘this rose, born amid the thorns of my adversity, which the beauty of Florence plucked by force from the unyielding brambles as I lay in the depths of despondency’.3 The Comedía delle ninfe fiorentine is a prose narrative interspersed with a number of poems, and in the last of these the author complains about ‘the dark, silent, melancholy house’ which harbours him against his will. What saddens him most of all, he continues, is ‘the coarse and horrible sight of a miserly old man, cold and churlish’ – perhaps a reference to his widowed father, but more probably a metaphor for the prospect of senility in a general sense. If a reference to his father was what he really intended, he was being unkind. Boccaccio senior could hardly have been as wizened and lifeless as he was painted if, some two years later, he was to pass to a second marriage with Bice de’ Bostichi, who was to present him with a son, Iacopo.

  Apart from the Comedía delie ninfe florentine and the Fiammetta (1343–4), already briefly referred to above, the years immediately following the author’s return to Florence also saw the completion of the Amorosa visione (1342), a complicated allegorical poem consisting of fifty cantos of terza rima in which the influence of the Commedia looms even larger than in any of his earlier compositions. There is also a lengthy pastoral poem, the Ninfale fiesolano, of which the dating (and indeed the authorship) have been subject to some dispute. Assuming that he was indeed the author, the maturity of its style and the directness of its narrative-line would lend support to Branca’s tentative placing of its composition in the years 1344–6. Although the poem is relatively free of the overt ‘autobiographical’ material of most of his earlier writings, the delicate presentation in one of its episodes of the affection of grandparents for their illegitimate grandson may well owe a part of its immediacy to his direct personal experience, during those years, of the sentiments it so charmingly depicts. Mario and Giulio, the first two of five children he fathered, all illegitimate, were already approaching adolescence, whilst the third, Violante, for whom he displays deep fatherly affection in one of his later Latin eclogues, was born either in Florence or Ravenna in the mid 1340s. More significantly, perhaps, the house where he lived with his elderly father and second stepmother was gladdened by the birth of their child, lacopo, in or around 1344. Positivist critics used to make a connection between the love-child of Mensola, the heroine of the Ninfale, with the circumstances of Boccaccio’s own illegitimate birth in 1313. It has even been suggested that the story is a literary re-working of a scandalous love-affair, imperfectly documented, between the author and a Benedictine nun from the convent of San Martino a Mensola, where a farm belonging to his father was located.

  Speculative tales of the sort doubtless arose in part from the dearth of reliable documentary evidence about Boccaccio in the years immediately preceding the advent of the Black Death in Florence in 1348. They were years of extreme political and economic uncertainty throughout the peninsula, especially in Florence and Naples, a city to which he had still not abandoned hope of returning under the patronage of his erstwhile friend Niccola Acciaiuoli. In Florence, the autocratic rule of the Duke of Athens (Walter of Brienne), nephew of King Robert of Naples, was brought to an end in 1343, to be replaced by the provisional government of the lesser guilds and merchants, the popolo minuto, whose reforms had severely diminished the influence and wealth of the prosperous merchant classes to which Boccaccio’s family belonged. The collapse of the Bardi and Peruzzi banking houses in 1345, largely brought about by Edward III of England’s repudiation of heavy debts he had contracted for his wars in France, aggravated the already serious decline in Florentine fortunes. In that same year, 1345, the Kingdom of Naples was thrown into confusion by the assassination of the husband of Queen Joanna, Andrew of Hungary, an event which two years later led to the punitive expedition into Italy of King Louis of Hungary. Joanna, along with her new husband, Luigi of Taranto, and their counsellor, Niccola Acciaiuoli, took refuge in Provence, and consequently Boccaccio’s already slender prospects of returning to the Neapolitan court were for the time being extinguished. The turbulent events in Florence had in any case already prompted him to seek patronage elsewhere, and by 1346 he was living in Ravenna, a city with strong Florentine connections. Dante had died there in exile in 1321, and his daughter, Suor Beatrice, still lived there in the convent of San Stefano dell’Uliva. A few years later, in the autumn of 1350, Boccaccio returned to Ravenna on an official mission on behalf of the Florentine commune, in the course of which he presented ten gold ducats to Suor Beatrice, a symbolic gift from the Compagnia di Or San Michele in tardy recognition of her father’s unique contribution to Florentine culture.

  Meanwhile, in 1348, Italy had been ravaged by the most disastrous plague in European history, graphically described by Boccaccio in the Introduction to the First Day of the Decameron, where it serves both as a pretext for the assembly and the flight from Florence of the ten young people, the lieta brigata (‘happy band’), to whom the telling of the hundred stories will be fictively entrusted. It also acts as the sombre and frightening oprelude which medieval rhetoricians regarded as an essential component of the genre of comedy to which the Decameron, like Dante’s great poem, was intended to belong. Both works, in fact, despite their obvious differences in form and subject-matter, respect the definition of comedy formulated for instance by Uguccione da Pisa in his Derivationes: ‘a principio horribilis et fetidus, in fine prosperus desiderabilis et gratus’ (‘foul and horrible at the beginning, in the end felicitous, desirable and pleasing’). It is to this feature of the work that the author alludes in the opening paragraph of the First Day, where he forewarns his readers of its grave and troublesome beginning, and encourages them not to be deterred on this account from proceeding to the book’s remaining and more substantial portion, where they will encounter something more pleasing and entertaining. Boccaccio’s evident desire to place the book squarely within a specific rhetorical genre is further underlined by the progression from the tales of vice in the First Day to the tales of virtue in the Tenth, from the embodiment of villainy in the opening story to the embodiment of saintliness in the concluding tale. That sequence has led many critics to classify the Decameron as the ‘Human Comedy’, complementing the Divine Comedy of his illustrious predecessor. The two works, outwardly so dissimilar, have many other features in common, not least the fact that both are set ‘nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita’ (‘halfway along the path of our life’).4 For in 1348, the year of the great plague, Boccaccio had arrived, like Dante in 1300, at the halfway stage in the ideal biblical life span of three score years and ten.

  In all probability, Boccaccio gave definitive shape to the Decameron between the years 1349 and 1352. At least three of the hundred tales had already appeared in different forms in his earlier works, two in the Filocolo and one in the Comedía delle ninfe fiorentine, and it seems inconceivable that he had not drafted the outlines of a large number of others, at intervals, during the course of his by now fairly length
y literary career. The idea of assembling a collection of stories had probably rooted itself in his mind long before the year of the great plague, and there are various indications in the text of the Decameron that he had originally intended it to have a septenary structure, in other words that it should contain seventy rather than 100 stories. By refining and elaborating a scheme he had adopted in an episode from the Comedía delle ninfe fiorentine, where seven nymphs tell their life-stories, the seventy tales would be told by a company of seven young ladies. But once he had conceived the ingenious idea of setting his tales against the terrible events of 1348, it was inevitable, for reasons clearly set forth in the Introduction to the First Day, that the company of storytellers should be expanded by the inclusion of three young men, and that consequently an additional thirty stories should be inserted. This arrangement had the incidental advantage of giving the Decameron a structure comparable in some respects to that of the Commedia, which contains a hundred cantos and is divided into three sections. Some years earlier, when composing his martial epic, the Teseida, Boccaccio had been so sensitive to his main classical antecedent, the Aeneid, as to give it precisely the same number of lines as are contained in Virgil’s poem, and there can be little doubt that in setting about the composition of his own distinctive ‘comedy’ the example of Dante loomed large in his planning of the work’s structure. Significant in this connection are the two lengthy interludes in the flow of the Decameron’s narratives, strategically placed immediately after the numerically significant Third and Sixth Days, which have the effect of dividing the work into three cantiche, to use the term applied to the three sections of Dante’s poem.

  Whether, as the author claims at two different points in his Introduction, he was himself present in Florence during the plague of 1348, which is estimated by historians to have claimed the lives of two thirds to three quarters of the city’s 100,000 inhabitants, it is difficult to judge. His description of the plague is heavily dependent on literary antecedents, especially that of the eighth-century historian of the Lombards, Paul the Deacon, and there is no external evidence to support Boccaccio’s contention that he was an eye-witness to the terrible suffering to which the Florentines were subjected. If, as seems possible, he was not in Florence at that time, but still in Ravenna or (more probably) in Forlí, where he is known to have been at the end of 1347 and the beginning of 1348, at the court of Francesco Ordelaffi, many of the particulars of the plague’s ruinous effect on Florentine daily life could well have been communicated to him by his father. As the Florentine Minister of Supply (Ufficiale dell’Abbondanza), his father was in fact actively engaged in implementing the emergency measures decreed by the Florentine government to combat such pressing problems as shortage of food and inattention to customary standards of hygiene.

  Among its numerous victims, the plague accounted for many of Boccaccio’s closest friends and literary acquaintances, as well as his second stepmother, Bice, who died in 1348. Not long afterwards his father also died, leaving Boccaccio, as the eldest son, to assume responsibilities as head of the family in the most trying circumstances it is possible to imagine. Perhaps there is more than a grain of truth in Branca’s suggestion that, in this unaccustomed role, Boccaccio was forced into contact with a broader range of people and confronted with problems that in his sedentary life as a scholar had previously escaped his close attention. The varied experience he thereby acquired of the practical everyday world was bound to some extent to be reflected in the pages of the Decameron, the writing of which coincided with the years immediately following the death of his father.

  The story of Boccaccio’s life from about 1350 until his death in 1375 is the story of a steadily increasing involvement in humanistic culture combined with the growth of the reputation for diplomacy and eloquence he had already achieved among his Florentine fellow citizens. The first of numerous official missions was undertaken in the autumn of 1350, when he was sent to the Romagna for purposes difficult to determine. But it was after his return from the Romagna, in the early part of October 1350, that he was deputed to welcome the foremost man of letters in fourteenth-century Europe at the gates of the city, and offer him the traditional gift of a ring. Francesco Petrarca was on his way to Rome for the Jubilee, and during his stay in Florence he was a guest in Boccaccio’s house in the San Felicita quarter of the city. From that moment there began a friendship between Petrarch and Boccaccio which was to endure for the rest of their lives, and which was one of the most influential meetings of minds in the history of European culture. Their relationship was not one of equals, however, for Boccaccio, nine years younger and still comparatively unknown beyond the borders of Florence and Naples, consistently referred to Petrarch as his magister until the latter’s death in 1374, whilst Petrarch was well content to accept Boccaccio’s over-modest assessment of his own role as discipulus. In a letter written in 1372 to Niccolò Orsini, he refers to Petrarch as ‘my famous teacher… to whom I owe all that I am worth’ (‘inclitus preceptor meus… cui quantum valeo debeo’).

  In March 1351, five months after their initial meeting in Florence, the two men met again, this time in Padua. Boccaccio had been sent there as bearer of official letters setting aside a decree of 1302 which had exiled Petrarch’s father and confiscated his property. The letters invited Petrarch not only to return to his native Tuscany but to accept a professorial chair at the Studium, or university of Florence. Boccaccio’s mission was unsuccessful, much to the annoyance of the Signory, which revoked its decision. (Petrarch shortly afterwards accepted a similar offer from the Visconti lord of Milan, and took up a chair at the nearby University of Pavia.) One of Boccaccio’s Latin epistles describes with unusual warmth and affection the lengthy discussions that he and Petrarch engaged in during his visit. It was probably on that occasion that he formulated the views on poetry he later set down in the last two books of his Genealogia deorum gentilium (Genealogy of the Gentile Gods), a work he had already begun at some time before 1350.

  The first draft of the Genealogia, which was to become a standard work of reference on classical mythology for the next 500 years, was completed around 1360, and it was revised and enlarged at frequent intervals up to the year of the author’s death, as indeed were most of his other encyclopaedic Latin works and some of his earlier, vernacular writings. The Genealogia is in essence a compendium of the knowledge concerning the myths of the ancient classical world accumulated by Boccaccio during a lifetime of intensive study. Critical attention tends nowadays to be focused, however, upon the two concluding books (there were fifteen in all), where the author’s poetic creed, newly formulated in the wake of his discussions with Petrarch, is expounded with polemical vigour and intense inner conviction. In Book XIV, Boccaccio defends the art of poetry against its many detractors, asserting that it was a rare and precious accomplishment of an élite whose work was distinguished by Truth composed under a veil of Beauty. In a similar vein, he also describes the true poet’s distinctive quality as ‘a certain fervour for exquisitely discovering and saying, or writing, what you have discovered’ (‘fervor quidem exquisite inveniendi atque dicendi, seu scribendi, quod inveneris’). As for the art of storytelling, he stresses its didactic function by saying that narratives should ‘at one and the same reading instruct and entertain’ (‘fabulae… una et eadem lectione proficiunt et delectant’). In the concluding book (XV) Boccaccio proceeds to defend himself against those who have charged him with frivolity. There are echoes here of the Decameron, especially of his replies to his critics in the Introduction to the Fourth Day and in the Author’s Epilogue, but in the Genealogia strong emphasis is placed upon the poet’s moral and didactic function. The work ends with the significant claim, addressed to God, that poetry brings glory, not to its earthly creator, but to the name of the Lord: ‘Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo dat gloriam.’

  Boccaccio’s conversations with Petrarch in Padua, in the spring of 1351, coincide more or less exactly with a change of direction as
well as of emphasis in his literary interests. At that time, he was almost certainly working on the latter part of the Decameron. It would be hazardous to suggest that the edifying tales of the Tenth Day, culminating in the story of Griselda’s extraordinary forbearance (a story which Petrarch admired so greatly that he eventually translated it into Latin), were in any sense motivated by the older poet’s moralizing counsels. It is certainly true, however, that after completing the Decameron Boccaccio wrote no other substantial piece of imaginative literature, and that the major part of his subsequent output was composed, not in Italian, but in Latin. The main exceptions to this second general rule (though not to the first) were the Corbaccio, one or two letters including the Consolatoria a Pino de’ Rossi, a treatise in praise of Dante (Trattatello in laude di Dante), and his commentaries on the first seventeen cantos of Dante’s Inferno (Esposizioni sopra la Comedía di Dante). All of these are markedly diverse in character, but they share one element in common, in that they all, in their separate ways, look back to the past instead of pointing resolutely forward (as most of the earlier vernacular works had done) to the future. The treatise on Dante is without question the most appealing of all these works, consisting as it does of an affectionate, anecdotal biography of Boccaccio’s favourite poet, who is presented as the embodiment of the principles he sets forth in his Defence of Poetry in the last two books of the Genealogia deorum gentilium. The Trattatello, begun around 1357, underwent at least two revisions, and eventually acquired an imposing Latin title: De origine vita studiis et moribus viri clarissimi Dantis Aligerii ftorentini poetae illustris et de operibus compositis ab eodem.5

  The Corbaccio, written, according to Giorgio Padoan, in or around 1365, but attributed more convincingly by Natalino Sapegno and others to a much earlier date (1355), is at once the most enigmatic and least attractive of Boccaccio’s works. The very title is mysterious, being almost an anagram of the author’s name and signifying a bird traditionally associated with omens of misfortune. The ‘ugly crow’ of the title can hardly refer to Boccaccio himself, and it is possible that all he intended it to suggest was the unceasing mockery (il corbacchiare) characterizing the work as a whole, which is a bitter invective against women. It therefore forms part of a tradition of misogynistic writing stretching back to Juvenal and to St Jerome. But although he had made one or two earlier excursions into this equivocal poetic terrain, for instance in an episode in the Filocolo and more especially in the story of the scholar and the widow (Decameron, VIII, 7), the sheer intensity and ferocity of the Corbaccio’s anti-feminism will astonish those who are accustomed to accept Boccaccio’s own self-portrait in the Decameron as the champion of the gentle sex (see the Prologue and the Introduction to the Fourth Day). The Corbaccio is in fact the work which documents in most convincing fashion Boccaccio’s conversion to the kind of literary asceticism to which he became increasingly committed after his encounter with Petrarch. As Sapegno has shrewdly observed, whereas the Muses in the Decameron had been compared to women (IV, Intro.), in the Corbaccio the ‘Ninfe Castalidi’ (‘Castalian nymphs’, a circumlocution for the Muses) are contrasted with wicked women (‘malvagie femmine’).