Furthermore it is made perfectly clear that these stories were told neither in a church, of whose affairs one must speak with a chaste mind and a pure tongue (albeit you will find that many of her chronicles are far more scandalous than any writings of mine), nor in the schools of philosophers, in which, no less than anywhere else, a sense of decorum is required, nor in any place where either churchmen or philosophers were present. They were told in gardens, in a place designed for pleasure, among people who, though young in years, were none the less fully mature and riot to be led astray by stories, at a time when even the most respectable people saw nothing unseemly in wearing their breeches over their heads if they thought their lives might thereby be preserved.
Like all other things in this world, stories, whatever their nature, may be harmful or useful, depending upon the listener. Who will deny that wine, as Tosspot and Bibber and a great many others affirm, is an excellent thing for those who are hale and hearty, but harmful to people suffering from a fever? Are we to conclude, because it does harm to the feverish, that therefore it is pernicious? Who will deny that fire is exceedingly useful, not to say vital, to men and women? Are we to conclude, because it burns down houses and villages and whole cities, that therefore it is pernicious? And in the same way, weapons defend the liberty of those who desire to live peaceably, and very often they kill people, not because they are evil in themselves, but because of the evil intentions of those who make use of them.
No word, however pure, was ever wholesomely construed by a mind that was corrupt. And just as seemly language leaves no mark upon a mind that is corrupt, language that is less than seemly cannot contaminate a mind that is well ordered, any more than mud will sully the rays of the sun, or earthly filth the beauties of the heavens.
What other books, what other words, what other letters, are more sacred, more reputable, more worthy of reverence, than those of the Holy Scriptures? And yet there have been many who, by perversely construing them, have led themselves and others to perdition. All things have their own special purpose, but when they are wrongly used a great deal of harm may result, and the same applies to my stories. If anyone should want to extract evil counsel from these tales, or fashion an evil design, there is nothing to prevent him, provided he twists and distorts them sufficiently to find the thing he is seeking. And if anyone should study them for the usefulness and profit they may bring him, he will not be disappointed. Nor will they ever be thought of or described as anything but useful and seemly, if they are read at the proper time by the people for whom they were written. The lady who is forever saying her prayers, or baking pies and cakes for her father confessor, may leave my stories alone: they will not run after anyone demanding to be read, albeit they are no more improper than some of the trifles that self-righteous ladies talk about, or even engage in, if the occasion arises.
There will likewise be those among you who will say that some of the stories included here would far better have been omitted. That is as may be: but I could only transcribe the stories as they were actually told, which means that if the ladies who told them had told them better, I should have written them better. But even if one could assume that I was the inventor as well as the scribe of these stories (which was not the case), I still insist that I would not feel ashamed if some fell short of perfection, for there is no craftsman other than God whose work is whole and faultless in every respect. Even Charlemagne, who first created the Paladins, was unable to produce them in numbers sufficient to form a whole army.
Whenever you have a multitude of things you are bound to find differences of quality. No field was ever so carefully tended that neither nettles nor brambles nor thistles were found in it, along with all the better grass. Besides, in addressing an audience of unaffected young ladies, such as most of you are, it would have been foolish of me to go to the trouble of searching high and low for exquisite tales to relate, and take excessive pains in weighing my words. And the fact remains that anyone perusing these tales is free to ignore the ones that give offence, and read only those that are pleasing. For in order that none of you may be misled, each of the stories bears on its brow the gist of that which it hides in its bosom.
I suppose it will also be said that some of the tales are too long, to which I can only reply that if you have better things to do, it would be foolish to read these tales, even if they were short. Although much time has elapsed from the day I started to write until this moment, in which I am nearing the end of my labours, it has not escaped my memory that I offered these exertions of mine to ladies with time on their hands, not to any others; and for those who read in order to pass the time, nothing can be too long if it serves the purpose for which it is intended.
Brevity is all very well for students, who endeavour to use their time profitably rather than while it away, but not for you, ladies, who have as much time to spare as you fail to consume in the pleasures of love. And besides, since none of you goes to study in Athens, or Bologna, or Paris,3 you have need of a lengthier form of address than those who have sharpened their wits with the aid of their studies.
Doubtless there are also those among you who will say that the matters I have related are overfilled with jests and quips, of a sort that no man of weight and gravity should have committed to paper. Inasmuch as these ladies, prompted by well-intentioned zeal, show a touching concern for my good name, it behoves me to thank them, and I do so.
But I would answer their objection as follows: I confess that I do have weight, and in my time I have been weighed on numerous occasions; but I assure those ladies who have never weighed me that I have little gravity. On the contrary, I am so light that I float on the surface of water. And considering that the sermons preached by friars to chastise the faults of men are nowadays filled, for the most part, with jests and quips and raillery, I concluded that the same sort of thing would be not out of place in my stories, written to dispel the woes of ladies. But if it should cause them to laugh too much, they can easily find a remedy by turning to the Lament of Jeremiah, the Passion of Our Lord, and the Plaint of the Magdalen.4
There may also be those among you who will say that I have an evil and venomous tongue, because in certain places I write the truth about the friars. But who cares? I can readily forgive you for saying such things, for doubtless you are prompted by the purest of motives, friars being decent fellows, who forsake a life of discomfort for the love of God,5 who do their grinding when the millpond’s full,6 and say no more about it. Except for the fact that they all smell a little of the billy-goat,7 their company would offer the greatest of pleasure.
I will grant you, however, that the things of this world have no stability, but are subject to constant change, and this may well have happened to my tongue. But not long ago, distrusting my own opinion (which in matters concerning myself I trust as little as possible), I was told by a lady, a neighbour of mine, that I had the finest and sweetest tongue in the world;8 and this, to tell the truth, was at a time when few of these tales remained to be written. So because the aforementioned ladies are saying these things in order to spite me, I intend that what I have said shall suffice for my answer.
And now I shall leave each lady to say and believe whatever she may please, for the time has come for me to bring all words to an end, and offer my humble thanks to Him who assisted me in my protracted labour and conveyed me to the goal I desired. May His grace and peace, sweet ladies, remain with you always, and if perchance these stories should bring you any profit, remember me.
Here ends the Tenth and last Day of the book called Decameron, otherwise known as Prince Galahalt.
NOTES
PROLOGUE
1. the book called Decameron Following a practice adopted in several of his earlier works, B. uses a pseudo-Greek title, meaning ‘Ten Days’, and by a typical ironic twist, he points up the contrast between his own collection of narratives and Saint Ambrose’s series of erudite allegorical sermons on the six days of the Creation, the medieval devotional text know
n as the Hexaemeron (Six Days). B.’s subtitle (Prince Galeotto, or Galahalt) is no less equivocal, being derived from the character who before B.’s own transformation of the Greek Pandarus in his narrative poem, Filostrato, was the archetypal go-between of medieval romance.
2. To take pity In accordance with one of the rules of medieval rhetoric, ‘opus illustrant proverbia’ (‘proverbs illustrate the work’), B. opens his book with a proverbial saying.
3. a most noble and lofty love Until well into the present century, this was interpreted by B.’s biographers as a reference to Maria d’Aquino, natural daughter of the Angevin ruler of Naples, King Robert, with whom the author was supposed, because of a series of cryptic references in several of his earlier works, to have had an amorous liaison. There is no clear evidence that such a lady ever existed, and it is now generally accepted that in claiming to have loved a woman of royal birth, B. was simply following a well-established precept of medieval Love theorists, in particular Andreas Capellanus.
4. a hundred stories or fables or parables or histories The Italian reads ‘cento favole 0 parabole 0 istorie’, a phrase that happens to summarize the known sources of many of the Decameron’s stories: French fabliaux, Latin exempla and Italian historical chronicles. See Translator’s Introduction, p.lviii.
FIRST DAY
(Introduction)
1. the end of mirth is heaviness B. is quoting from Proverbs xiv, 13: ‘Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful; and the end of that mirth is heaviness.’ But the whole of this opening paragraph, with its references to ‘an irksome and ponderous opening’, ‘this grim beginning’, and the ‘steep and rugged hill, beyond which there lies a beautiful and delectable plain’, signals the author’s intention to write a work conforming to the rules of a particular literary genre. Dante’s visionary journey from the sorrows of Hell to the joys of Paradise had been chronicled in his great epic poem, the Commedia. Italian commentators often refer to B.’s work as the Human Comedy, the secular counterpart to Dante’s Divine Comedy. But the distinction is misleading, implying as it does that Dante’s concern with the secular world is less evident, which is patently absurd.
2. the deadly pestilence Nowadays known in Northern Europe as the Black Death, the plague of 1347 to 1351 is thought to have reduced the total population by one third, causing enormous damage to established social institutions. B.’s famous description of its ruinous effects in Florence in 1348, graphic and convincing though it may appear, is not to be read as the eyewitness account he claims it to be. It is in fact based upon earlier plague descriptions, in particular the one found in the eighth-century Historia Langobardorum by Paulus Diaconus (‘Paul the Deacon’). Confirmation that it should be read as a literary artefact is found in its concluding paragraph (‘Ah, how great a number of splendid palaces,’ etc., p. 13), where the writing is heavily loaded with rhetorical devices such as anaphora and a variant of the ubi sunt motif of classical literature.
3. Galen, Hippocrates and Aesculapius Galen (AD 129–199) was the founder of experimental physiology, whilst Hippocrates (c. 460-c. 377 BC) is traditionally regarded as the father of medicine. Aesculapius (or Asclepius), on the other hand, was a mythical figure, the Graeco-Roman god of medicine. It was common for the three names to be linked by medieval writers whenever medical authority required to be invoked.
4. seven young ladies The occult significance of numbers, a regular feature of medieval literature, is much in evidence in the Decameron. The seven ladies are clearly symbolic, if only because none is married yet all are older than the normal marriageable age of between fourteen and seventeen. The range of their ages (‘none was older than twenty-seven or younger than eighteen’) is itself significant, both limits being multiples of nine, the so-called golden number. Their unswerving propriety, to which B. refers at regular intervals, makes it probable that he intended the female members of his group of storytellers to represent the four cardinal virtues (Prudence, Justice, Temperance, Fortitude) and the three theological virtues (Faith, Hope, Love).
5. Santa Maria Novella The scene for the beginning of the frame story (in preference, say, to a more centrally located church such as the Florentine cathedral, or Duomo) was probably selected because of the association of its name with the telling of a story, or novella.
6. man is the head of woman See Ephesians (v, 23): ‘For the husband is the head of the wife.’ It has become fashionable in recent years to think of B. as a feminist writer ante litteram. At times, however, passages like these suggest that he was no more feminist than Saint Paul.
7. three young men No less symbolic numerically than the seven young ladies, whom they complement to make up the perfect number of ten, the three young men possibly represent the tripartite division of the soul into Reason (Panfilo), Anger (Filostrato) and Lust (Dioneo).
8. the spot in question On the basis of the details supplied by the writer, scholars have attempted to identify the exact location of the first of the storytellers’ country retreats. But the place is imaginary. The seemingly realistic description conceals B.’s expert handling of the literary topos known as the locus amœnus. Other, more elaborate examples are seen in the Introduction to the Third Day and the Conclusion of the Sixth Day.
9. Dioneo’s manservant, Parmeno By giving the seven servants names that are associated with the lower social orders in classical literature, more especially in the Hellenistic comedies of Terence and Plautus, B. further heightens the sense of distance separating the world of the frame from that of the narratives.
10. on the stroke of tierce Medieval writers generally use one of the canonical hours, such as Matins, Tierce (or Terce), Sext, Nones, Vespers and Compline, to indicate the time of day. Tierce is recited at the third hour after sunrise. At the equinox it corresponds roughly to 9.00 a.m.
11. shortly after nones Nones is the canonical office recited at the ninth hour of the day, about 3.00 p.m.
First Story
1. Musciatto Franzesi Like many of the other characters in the Decameron, those appearing in this first story are based on actual people. Fourteenth-century chroniclers relate that Musciatto, a Florentine financier, made a huge fortune in France, chiefly through advising the French king, Philip the Fair, to counterfeit coinage and fleece Italian merchants. Cepperello Dietaiuti of Prato was one of his business associates. The military expedition into Italy, encouraged by Pope Boniface VIII, of King Philip’s brother, Charles of Valois (‘Carlo Senzaterra’, or Charles Lackland) took place in 1301. One of its most famous consequences was the banishment and exile from Florence of Dante Alighieri.
2. Ciappelletto In order to follow this long-winded explanation of the character’s name, the English reader should bear in mind that -etto, like -ello, is a diminutive suffix, and that B. possibly thought the name Cepperello was derived from ceppo (‘log’ or ‘tree-stump’), whereas it was almost certainly a diminutive form of Ciapo, or Jacopo. On the other hand it is possible that a sexual allusion was intended (Cepperello = ‘little log’ or ‘little prick’). Either way, Cepperello was a far more appropriate name for this incorrigible scoundrel than Ciappelletto (‘chaplet’ or ‘garland’).
3. flung into the moat like a dog According to the Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani (c. 1275–1348), it was common practice for the bodies of suicides, heretics, and excommunicates to be thrown into the moat surrounding the walls of the city.
4. these Lombard dogs In France, as in England, a Lombard was anyone who came from the northern part of Italy, including Tuscany. Lombard Street in London and the Rue des Lombards in Paris bear witness to the connection between such Italian expatriates and the world of banking and commerce.
5. Soon after vespers Vespers, the sixth of the canonical hours, is recited or sung towards evening.
Second Story
1. in Paris… difficulties? Paris in the Middle Ages was considered to be the focal point of all knowledge, especially in the fields of philosophy and theology.
2. could prevent me from b
ecoming a Christian The reasons Abraham gives for becoming a Christian are similar to those found in various earlier accounts of Jews or Saracens unexpectedly converted to the Christian faith.
3. Nôtre Dame de Paris The most famous Gothic cathedral of the Middle Ages, a fitting location for Abraham’s conversion and baptism.
Third Story
1. Melchizedek B.’s Melchizedek (literally ‘king of justice’) became the model for similar figures in later literature, notably the main character in Gotthold Lessing’s Nathan der Weise (1779). The parable of the wise Jew was a popular subject in medieval literature, as was the story of the three rings, which had appeared in the earlier collection of tales known as Il novellino. A notable feature of B.’s version is that, like other stories in the Decameron (e.g. I, 7 and V, 9) it is emboxed within a narrative already itself emboxed.
Tales From the Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio Page 109