Tales From the Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio

by Giovanni Boccaccio

  3. carole A medieval dance in a ring or chain, performed to the singing of the dancers.

  4. flowers of red and white Perhaps the flowers associated with wedding rites: roses and lilies.

  5. cornemuse A kind of bagpipe.

  SEVENTH DAY

  (Introduction)

  1. Lucifer The morning star, or the planet Venus as it appears in the sky before sunrise. The oblique reference to Venus may be a signifier of the venereal doings of the chief characters of the day’s stories.

  First Story

  1. werewolves The Italian term is fantasima, described by B.’s contemporary, Jacopo Passavanti, as ‘an animal resembling a satyr, or cat monkey, which goes around at night causing distress to people’.

  2. San Pancrazio A district named after the Franciscan convent on what is now the Via della Spada. Friar Puccio, the pious and simple-minded husband of III, 4, lived in the same quarter of the city.

  3. the song of Saint Alexis Possibly the Ritmo di Sant’Alessio, one of the earliest specimens of Italian verse, written in the early thirteenth century.

  4. the lament of Saint Bernard Perhaps a rhyming version of the so-called Sayings of St Bernard.

  5. the laud of Lady Matilda Matilde of Magdeburg, a mystic whose visions were given currency in Italy by the Dominicans, the monastic order that controlled the church of Santa Maria Novella.

  6. Mannuccio dalla Cuculia The Mannucci were a prominent Florentine family, who lived in the San Frediano quarter, one of whose districts was called Cuculia (‘cuckoo’) after a chapel containing a painting of the Madonna that included a cuckoo. But the name given by B. to Monna Tessa’s father comically prefigures the gulling of her pious husband.

  7. Camerata A village on the slopes leading up to Fiesole, a few miles north of Florence.

  8. the skull of an ass The placing of an ass’s skull on a stake to protect one’s crops was a propitiatory rite going back to the times of the ancient Etruscans. B. has given the custom a secondary purpose.

  9. Telucis The hymn attributed to Saint Ambrose in which God’s help is invoked against nocturnal spirits. It includes the words ‘Procul recedant somnia/Et noctium phantasmata’ (‘May dreams and phantoms of the night go far away’).

  10. Intemerata The popular antiphon O Virgo intemerata (’O Virgin undefiled’) was one of the prayers mockingly listed by the highway robber in the story of Rinaldo d’Asti (II, 2).

  11. have a good spit According to popular tradition, spitting was an essential part of the exorcizing ritual. In his book on popular Sicilian incantational formulas, Giuseppe Bonomo writes that ‘Spitting is a very powerful means of warding off the evil eye’ and that ‘If you spit three times it is even better.’ When Federigo responds to Gianni’s spitting by groaning about his teeth, he is giving the impression that the fangs of the werewolf have been well and truly drawn.

  12. this second account The alternative version is invoked, both to enhance the tale’s plausibility by giving it the air of an actual event, and to allow the insertion of a second incantation, almost as comical as the first.

  Second Story

  1. Peronella The tale of Peronella and the tub is derived directly, like that of the homosexual husband (V, 10), from The Golden Ass by Apuleius, one of B.’s favourite Latin authors.

  2. Giannello Scrignario As usual in B.’s narratives, the character’s name is that of an actual person. Giannello is a diminutive of Giovanni, and the Scrignari brothers, Giovanni and Niccolò, are recorded in 1324 as living in or near the Piazza Portanova, near the Avorio district, where the novella is set.

  3. the feast of Saint Galeone Not the most familiar of saints, Galeone (or Eucalione) had a chapel dedicated to him in that part of Naples where the action of the story takes place.

  4. a Parthian mare ‘One doesn’t have to go as far as Parthia to see stallions adopting an approach from behind to mares on heat’ (Almansi). That is so, but B. doubtless had in mind that Parthians were famous for turning their backs, as Peronella does to facilitate her lover’s access, and he is here employing a modified version of a simile derived from Apuleius and Ovid. Almansi correctly points out that the image forms part in the original text of some splendidly rhythmical and evocative prose.

  Third Story

  1. the child’s godfather In the Middle Ages, the bond between a child’s natural parent and its godparent was held to be so sacred that any sexual relationship between the two was considered incestuous.

  2. not the one from Milan The saint referred to in the story is not Saint Ambrose, patron saint of Milan, but a Dominican friar of Siena, the Blessed Ambrogio Sansedoni, who was posthumously honoured by the Commune of Siena in 1288 when a chapel was dedicated to his memory.

  Fourth Story

  1. Arezzo A flourishing commune in fourteenth-century Italy, Arezzo lies some forty-five miles south-east of Florence. Petrarch, B.’s friend and mentor, was born there in 1304. It was (and still is) notable for its many splendid churches and other elegant buildings. It is slightly surprising that this is the only story in the Decameron to be set in so distinctive a city. Typically Aretine are the names of the husband and wife, Tofano and Ghita, diminutives of Cristofano (Cristoforo) and Margherita respectively. The jealousy of husbands was a common theme in medieval popular literature. This particular story appears to be directly derived from one of the exempla in Peter Alphonsi’s Disciplina clericalis, a collection of anecdotes used by preachers as source material for moralizing sermons.

  Fifth Story

  1. she seated herself at his feet As noted earlier (III, 8, note 1), this was the penitent’s normal posture in the presence of the priest confessor. The confessional in its present form was introduced after the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century.

  2. A little before tierce Usually interpreted as just before 9 a.m. Strictly speaking, tierce is the third hour after sunrise, which at Christmas time, when the action of the story takes place, would be later in the morning.

  Sixth Story

  1. those who naïvely maintain that Love impairs the intellect The narrator is probably thinking of various Latin tags claiming that Love and Wisdom were incompatible. A more recent formulation is Samuel Johnson’s ‘Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.’

  Seventh Story

  1. Madonna Beatrice, the wife of Egano de’ Galluzzi The Galluzzi were a prominent Bologna family, but there is no record of any Egano Galluzzi. The name Beatrice inevitably recalls that of the lady fulsomely described by Dante in the Vita nuova, in whose honour he composed the Divine Comedy. The Provençal troubadour Jaufré Rudel had been a prominent singer of distant love (amor de lonh) in the twelfth century, and the first part of B.’s story is suffused with the motifs of the poetry of courtly love and of early French chivalresque romance. Other examples of amor de lonh may be found in the stories of the Marchioness of Montferrat and the King of France (I, 5) and of Gerbino’s fateful love for the daughter of the King of Tunis (IV, 4).

  2. to play chess The game of chess as the agency for revealing amorous passion was a common topos in the medieval romances. B. had used it in Book IV of his own early prose romance, the Filocolo.

  3. the blood of Bologna! Unlike the ladies of Pisa (II, 10), Venice (IV, 2) and Milan (VIII, 1), those of Bologna are always presented by B. in a favourable light. (See I, 10 and X, 4.)

  4. a sound thrashing The sadistic pleasure experienced by adulterous lovers in the thrashing of a husband is a common motif in the medieval French narrative poems known as fabliaux, from which the plot-outlines of many of B.’s narratives are derived. The second part of B.’s story can be traced to a number of these, among them De la dame qui fist batre son mari (‘On the Lady who has her Husband Beaten’).

  Eighth Story

  1. Berlinghieri The rise to prominence in Florentine commercial and civic affairs of the Berlinghieri family began around the middle of the fourteenth century, at the time when B. was composing his hundred tales. His account of the marri
age of Arriguccio Berlinghieri, of whom incidentally there is no historical record, may be read (like III, 3) as a cautionary tale in which a representative of the Florentine nouveaux riches gets his just deserts for aspiring to the ranks of the aristocracy. Certain elements of the story, such as the wife’s deceiving of her husband by substituting another woman for herself, are originally to be found in oriental narrative collections such as the Panchatantra. As in the previous story, there are clear links with certain of the French fabliaux, for instance De la dame qui fist entendant son mari qu’il sonjoit (‘On the Lady who Persuades her Husband that he is Dreaming’). The shearing of the unfaithful wife’s hair has a classical antecedent in Tacitus. But B. makes the story characteristically his own by such details as the length of string attached to the wife’s toe and his graphic portrayal of life in contemporary Florence.

  2. with a quill sticking out It was the custom for merchants and notaries to carry a quill and inkpot in a holder, either attached to their belt or carried in the back pocket of their trousers.

  Ninth Story

  1. Argos By setting the story in ancient Greece, B. is attempting to distance himself from his Latin model, where no location is specified. He enhances the Greek flavour of his own version by changing the husband’s name from Decius to Nicostratos. The names of the other characters remain unaltered.

  2. Lydia The name is that of the protagonist of the medieval Latin poem Comoedia Lydiae by Matthew of Vendôme, from which this story clearly derives, and of which there exists a version transcribed by B. himself in a manuscript known (because it is located in the Laurentian Library in Florence) as the Codice Laurenziano. There are numerous antecedents in medieval literature of stories involving the humiliation of a husband as proof of an adulterous wife’s devotion to her lover.

  3. Lusca In the original Latin poem, the author spares no effort to highlight the connotations of the maidservant’s name, equivalent to the French louche, meaning not only ‘squint-eyed’, but ‘shady’ or ‘disreputable’.

  4. a beautiful pear-tree Pear-trees producing hallucinatory effects of the kind that Lydia convinces her husband he has experienced are found in French fabliaux as well as in other medieval collections of narratives. English-speaking readers will possibly be reminded of the more improbable situation recounted by Chaucer in The Merchant’s Tale, where the husband’s blindness is cured when his wife and her lover engage in sexual congress above his head, precariously perched in the pear-tree’s branches.

  Tenth Story

  1. the extraordinary simplicity of the Sienese As in the earlier story (VII, 3) to which Dioneo refers both at the beginning and at the end of his tale of Tingoccio and Meuccio, the proverbial credulity of the Sienese once again becomes a target for B.’s satire. In both stories, their belief in the quasisacred bond of comparatico (the status accorded to godparents) is seriously undermined.

  (Conclusion)

  1. your namesake Lauretta is the diminutive of Laura, the name of the woman whose beauty was celebrated by Petrarch in the poems of his Canzoniere. The play on words between the name Laura and lauro (‘laurel’), the shrub associated with poetic fame, is a recurrent feature of Petrarch’s poetry.

  2. Palamon and Arcite The two aspirants for the love of Emilia in B.’s prolix narrative poem, the Teseida, which Chaucer reduced to more readable proportions in his Knight’s Tale. The story, just ended, of Tingoccio and Meuccio is read by some commentators as a brief self-parody of B.’s epic.

  3. when Neifile was our queen See the Conclusion to the Second Day, where Neifile spells out the reasons for desisting from storytelling on Fridays and Saturdays.

  EIGHTH DAY

  (Introduction)

  1. a nearby chapel The attendance of the brigata at Sunday Mass in a nearby chapel marks the first and only time that their total isolation from the outside world is breached.

  First Story

  1. Madonna Ambruogia The lady’s name is the feminine form of the name of Milan’s patron saint, Ambrose. Guasparruolo’s grasping wife may be taken as personifying the rapacity of the Milanese, a failing earlier alluded to by the phrase ‘in the Milanese fashion’ in the concluding lines of the Third Day. The story, based on a French fabliau, is retold by Chaucer in The Shipman’s Tale.

  Second Story

  1. Avignon Seat of the Papacy from 1309 to 1377 during its ‘Babylonian Captivity’.

  2. Varlungo A village in the valley of the Arno now forming part of Florence itself.

  3. Monna Belcolore Similar in plot to the previous tale, the story of Monna Belcolore (literally ‘Mistress Finecolour’) is set in B.’s home territory, the Florentine contado. Like Cipolla’s sermon (VI, 10), it is marked throughout by its richly animated effusions of verbal humour. No translation could do proper justice to its high-spirited account of rustic midsummer passion, reinforced in the telling by a constant stream of Florentinisms and double meanings.

  4. Bentivegna del Mazzo The name (literally ‘may you have joy of the rod’), is of course equivocal. It is also distinctively Florentine, like those of a colourful gallery of other characters whom B. has inserted into the story to enhance its comic effect: Ser Bonaccorri da Ginestreto, Lapuccio, Naldino, Biliuzza, Lotto, Buglietto, Binguccio dal Poggio and Nuto Buglietti. None of these has any real function in the narrative. They are personalities who flash momentarily into being and then subside, like sparks from a Catherine wheel.

  5. leather thongs The priest’s curious request hints at an interest in bondage.

  6. Douai An expensive fabric taking its name from Douai, in Flanders.

  Third Story

  1. Calandrino Nickname of the Florentine thirteenth/fourteenth-century painter Nozzo di Perino, famous for his simple-mindedness. This is the first of four stories in the Decameron in which he appears as the protagonist, the others being VIII, 6, IX, 3 and IX, 5. Of his two companions, Bruno and Buffalmacco, the latter was a painter of some stature, whose frescoes can still be admired in the church of the Badia in Florence and in the cathedral of Arezzo, as well as in the Camposanto of Pisa.

  2. Maso del Saggio Fleetingly referred to earlier in Fra Cipolla’s sermon (VI, 10), Maso del Saggio was a well-known Florentine prankster, one of whose escapades is recounted later in the tale of the Marchesan judge (VIII, 5). His nonsensical replies to Calandrino’s questions are reminiscent of the gibberish used by Cipolla to hoodwink his audience outside the church in Certaldo.

  3. More than a milling, that spends the whole night trilling The translation attempts to preserve the rhyming form of the original (‘piú di millanta, che tutta notte canta’), together with a word suggesting a large number (‘milling’, for millanta, which is based on mille, ‘thousand’).

  4. Monte Morello As explained in VI, 10, note 19, Monte Morello is a hill north of Florence whose name carried distinct homosexual overtones.

  5. heliotrope Old name for bloodstone, a dark-green variety of quartz spotted with red jasper, used as a semi-precious gem. Dante refers to its magical quality of rendering its bearer invisible in Inferno (XXIV, 93), where he writes that the souls of the thieves had no hope of any crevice or heliotrope (‘Senza sperar pertugio o elitropia’) to conceal them from the hideous snakes tormenting them.

  6. Mugnone A tributary of the Arno entering the main river near Florence.

  7. in the Hainaut style i.e. short and narrow-waisted.

  8. all things lose their virtue in the presence of a woman An ancient proverb, popular in medieval times. It was probably based on the story of Adam and Eve.

  Fourth Story

  1. a provost The head of a cathedral or principal church.

  2. a city of great antiquity Fiesole lies on a hill overlooking the Arno and Mugnone valleys a few miles north-east of Florence. It was an important garrison town and commercial centre in Roman times long before Florence itself was established, but declined rapidly after being conquered by barbarians in AD 405.

  3. Senigallia A town on the Adriatic coast, now a seas
ide resort, but notorious in B.’s day for malaria.

  4. Ciutazza The name ‘Ciuta’ in itself has a repulsive ring about it, which is intensified by the pejorative suffix -azza. B.’s portrayal of the maidservant here is reminiscent of his earlier description of the kitchen-wench, Nuta, in the tale of Friar Cipolla (VI, 10). The probable source for B.’s story about the substitution of a maidservant for her mistress is the French fabliau entitled Du prestre et d’Alison.

  Fifth Story

  1. the Marches A province of eastern Italy bordering on the Adriatic from which the chief magistrate (podestà) of Florence was frequently recruited during the fourteenth century.

  Sixth Story

  1. the bread and cheese test A rudimentary form of lie detector, popular in the Middle Ages, in which people suspected of uttering an untruth were invited to consume a bread and cheese confection whilst a magic formula was being recited. Their inability to swallow it was taken as a sign that they were lying.

  2. dog ginger Dog ginger is water pepper, a marsh weed having an acrid juice. B. wrote ‘quelle del cane’ (‘those of the dog’), which until recently was misinterpreted by most of his English translators as ‘dog stools’ or ‘dog turds’.