The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Perhaps Cepperello’s career was not unique among the saints. The next two stories, which happen to concern Jews, both show a liberated modern irreverence. The Jew Abraham is the object of his Christian friend Johannot’s charitable hopes that he will be converted. Against his Christian friend’s advice, the Jew travels to Rome to size up the religion at its headquarters. On his return he reports that in Rome he had found the Church dignitaries to be “gluttons, winebibbers, and drunkards without exception, and that next to their lust they would rather attend to their bellies than to anything else, as though they were a pack of animals.… He saw that they were such a collection of rapacious money-grubbers that they were as ready to buy and sell human, that is to say, Christian blood, as they were to trade for profit in any kind of divine object.” But the friend hears that the trip had firmly convinced the Jew to become a Christian. How could this be? Abraham explains. The highest dignitaries of the Church, he said, seemed to be using all their efforts to destroy the Christian religion at its headquarters. “But since it is evident to me that their attempts are unavailing, and that your religion continues to grow in popularity, and become more splendid and illustrious, I can only conclude that, being a more holy and genuine religion than any of the others, it deservedly has the Holy Ghost as its foundation and support.”

  There is not a saint or a scholar among the Decameron tales. While their commonest theme is love, they could also provide footnotes of sadism and masochism. Yet, whatever their tales, the visible conduct of the ten nubile young people is conspicuously proper.

  The tale of the love of Ghismunda and Guiscardo is a favorite of all the “stories about the sorrows of others.” Tancredi, prince of Salerno, dotes on his daughter and cannot bear to give her away in marriage. She falls in love with Guiscardo, one of her father’s valets of humble birth, sends him letters, and has secret rendezvous with him in a nearby cave. Tancredi determines to put an end to their affair and he kills Guiscardo. Then, to “console” his daughter, Tancredi sends her a handsome goblet of gold in which he has put Guiscardo’s heart. When she sees what is in the goblet, she determines to pour poison in the goblet and drink it so she and her beloved may be finally reunited. But before the fatal draft she addresses her obdurate father: “It is clear, Tancredi, that you are made of flesh and blood and that you have fathered a daughter made of flesh and blood, not one of stone or of iron.… I was deceived by you. Will you say … that I consorted with a man of low condition? Poverty does not diminish anyone’s ability, it only diminishes his wealth! Many kings and great rulers were once poor, and many of those who plow the land and watch the sheep were once very rich, and they still are.”

  One of the most popular stories on the day devoted to people attaining their desires was how the innocent maiden Alibech was taught by the monk Rustico to put the Devil back into Hell. To prepare her for the lesson, he stripped himself naked and instructed her to do the same, when she asked:

  “Rustico, what is that thing I see sticking out in front of you and which I do not have?”

  “Oh, my child,” replied Rustico, “that is the Devil, about which I told you. Now you can see him for yourself. He is inflicting such pain in me that I can hardly bear it.”

  “Praise be to God!” said the girl. “I am better off than you are, for I do not have such a Devil.”

  “That is very true,” Rustico replied, “but you do have something else which I do not have, and you have it in place of this.”

  “Oh?” answered Alibech. “What is it?”

  “You have a Hell,” said Rustico, “and I firmly believe that God has sent you here for the salvation of my soul. Since this Devil gives me such pain, you could be the one to take pity on me by allowing me to put him back into Hell. You would be giving me great comfort, and you will render a great service to God by making Him happy, which is what you say was your purpose in coming here.”

  “Oh, father,” replied the girl in good faith, “since I have Hell, let us do as you wish and as soon as possible.”

  “May God bless you, my child,” Rustico said. “Let us go then and put it back, so that he will at last leave me in peace.”

  And after saying this, he led the girl over to one of the beds and showed her what position to take in order to incarcerate that cursed Devil. The young girl, who had never before put a single Devil into Hell, felt a slight pain the first time, and because of this she said to Rustico:

  “This Devil must certainly be an evil thing and truly God’s enemy, father, for he not only hurts others, but he even hurts Hell when put back into it.”

  “My child,” Rustico said, “it will not always be like that.” And to prove that it would not be, they put him back in Hell seven times before getting out of bed; in fact, after the seventh time the Devil found it impossible to rear his arrogant head, and he was content to be at peace for a while.

  (Translated by Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella)

  Boccaccio was only forty when he completed the Decameron and provided the classic prototypes of the modern short story. Novella—a little new thing—was the name given to Boccaccio’s tales. They differed from anecdotes, which came from anybody’s lips in the marketplace, by being contrived into “the artful pattern of a plot.” Each of these hundred “new little things,” was a hint and an inspiration for others who one day would make a large new thing, not a “novella,” but a “novel.”

  After completing the Decameron, about 1353, Boccaccio lived on for more than twenty years. Then he retreated from the turbulent currents of everyday life to the conventional themes of his youth. The person responsible for this retreat was the lodestar of Renaissance humanism, the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374). Born nine years before Boccaccio, Petrarch was acclaimed as the greatest scholar of his age. Son of a lawyer in Arezzo, he was taken to Avignon by his father, who hoped for employment in the exiled papacy. Under pressure from his father he studied law at Montpellier but was luckily liberated to sate “an unquenchable thirst for literature.” After taking minor religious orders, Petrarch enjoyed halcyon years in the household of Cardinal Colonna in Avignon. There, at the age of twenty-three he met the legendary Laura, to whom he would write his Canzoniere, the series of poems in her praise that established his place in Italian literature.

  A celebrity for his pursuit of Latin classics, Petrarch searched monastic libraries, actually discovering a rich cache of Cicero’s letters at Verona. His models were not the medieval scholastics but Cicero, Virgil, and Saint Augustine. Like many another celebrity, Petrarch luxuriated in public adulation while professing to yearn for solitude, and he even wrote a treatise on the virtues of the solitary life. In 1340, perhaps at his instigation, both Paris and Rome invited him to be crowned as their poet laureate. Of course he chose Rome, was crowned on the Capitoline Hill on April 8, 1341, and then deposited his laurels at the tomb of Saint Peter. His Laura died of the Black Death on April 6, 1348, the twenty-first anniversary of their first meeting. Everywhere on his diplomatic travels and from his retreat in Vaucluse he celebrated the Latin classics and their relevance to the Christian tradition.

  Boccaccio’s meeting with Petrarch in Florence in 1350 marked a reverse in the direction of his work from the human comedy and the broad humanism of the ancients to the textual humanism of medieval scholars. Even before the Decameron his writing had been in Italian. Afterward he wrote mostly in Latin. He had prepared himself for discipleship by writing a Latin biography of Petrarch. But Petrarch was condescending to the Decameron, which he never claimed to have read fully. Finally, in 1373, charitably noting that he had enjoyed “a hasty perusal,” Petrarch explained that it was “a very big volume, written in prose and intended for the masses.” The “sometimes too free” tone of the book, he told Boccaccio, might be condoned because of “your age at the time and in view of the public to which the book is addressed.”

  Boccaccio, under Petrarch’s spell, acquired the enthusiasm of a born-again Christian humanist, a devotee of classical s
cholarship. Though neither he nor Petrarch could read Greek, they enjoyed reverently viewing Greek manuscripts of Homer and Plato. Boccaccio had a hand in creating at the University of Florence the first professorship of Greek in Western Europe, then brought its first incumbent, Leontius Pilatus, to live in his house. The appointment lasted only two years, for the Florentines had hoped the professor would instruct them in “commercial” Greek for their business. It was only through Pilatus’s crude Latin translations that Boccaccio and Petrarch came to know Homer.

  A frightening visit that Boccaccio received in 1362 confirmed his repentance for the Decameron. A holy man who came to his house brought word of the prophetic deathbed vision of a Carthusian monk, the Blessed Petroni. Jesus told Petroni that both Petrarch and Boccaccio would soon die and be eternally damned if they did not promptly turn away from profane studies like poetry and literature, and focus their thoughts instead on the world to come. The terrified Boccaccio wrote to Petrarch announcing his determination to heed the saintly warning. He would give up literature, burn his own writings, and sell his library to Petrarch. But the complacent Petrarch reminded Boccaccio that death, the common lot of man, was not to be dreaded. “Be reasonable,” he wrote, “I know of many who have attained the highest saintliness without literary culture; I don’t know of any who were excluded from sanctity by culture.… All good men have the same goal, but there are numberless ways thither, and much variety for the pilgrim … the way of knowledge is certainly more glorious, illumined and lofty. Give me an example of a saint who arose from the mass of the unlettered, and I will match him with a greater saint of the other sort.” Still, if Boccaccio was determined to give up scholarship, Petrarch would consider buying his library for a fair price from an itemized list. He invited Boccaccio to come live with him “for our few remaining days, as I have always hoped and as indeed you once promised,” so they could share their libraries. Boccaccio never took up this invitation.

  Under the influence of Petrarch, Boccaccio wrote ponderous Latin works. His encyclopedia of classical mythology, Genealogies of the Pagan Gods, which he continued to enlarge for the last twenty-five years of his life, remained the standard work for four centuries. And his early biographers extolled this book while ignoring the Decameron. Boccaccio’s last work of fiction, the curious misogynist Corbaccio (The Evil Crow) (1355) expressed in Italian prose his unhappy flight from the world of the Decameron.

  Never having found the patron he sought, Boccaccio’s last years in Florence were beset by poverty. His Tuscan friends gave him employment by sending him as ambassador to Avignon and Rome. He made a meager living as a copyist, transcribing his own works for others. Finally, in October 1373, the Commune of Florence engaged him for a hundred florins to read aloud and comment on Dante’s Divine Comedy in the Church of San Stefano de Badia. He gave sixty such lecture-readings before his pains of gout and scabies and his obesity—and learned objections to his efforts to “vulgarize” Dante—put a stop to the series. The death of his mentor Petrarch in July 1374 added to his miseries, which Petrarch himself had generously tried to assuage by willing Boccaccio a valuable fur coat for cold nights in his study. Boccaccio died on December 21, 1375. In his last words in the epitaph he wrote for himself he affirmed that “he cherished the nourishing Muses.”

  Like other classics of vernacular literature, the Decameron was widely read before academic critics dignified it by their attention. It was disseminated not through monastic scriptoria and university libraries but by Italian merchants who took copies with them across Europe. Not for the first or last time, authors were far ahead of scholars. Even after the book had delighted generations of readers, for centuries the translators insisted on remaining anonymous. It was a half-millennium before a translator of the Decameron into English dared sign his name to the work.

  Even these anonymous early English translators proceeded with extreme caution. “Whenever met with any thing that seemed immodest or loose,” one explained in his preface, he had studied “so to manage the Expression, and conceal the Matter, that the fair Sex may read it without blushing.” Despite all these precautions, two and a half centuries passed before any apparently complete translation, perhaps by John Florio, appeared—in 1620. Modern English translations still kept certain troublesome passages (like the story of the innocent Alibech) decently veiled in the original Italian. Those who tried to fumigate Boccaccio served modern readers with a short list of the most interesting stories.

  32

  Joys of Pilgrimage

  THE pilgrim metaphor permeated Christian literature. It was embodied in drama, ritual, and travel adventure. What the tourist is in our twentieth-century West, the pilgrim was in the European Middle Ages. But while the modern tourist wanders in search of the interesting, the unexpected, and the titillating, the medieval pilgrim journeyed toward a certain end. His travel bore the stamp of orthodoxy. Like Jesus Himself, every follower of Jesus was a “pilgrim” (derived from the Latin peregrinus for stranger or foreigner) in this life, awaiting the eternal life to come.

  By Chaucer’s time pilgrimage had become a flourishing institution. Across Europe Christians dramatized their faith by voyage to a sacred place. Jerusalem was, of course, the preferred destination, but Rome was a close second. The Jubilee Year, first so named by the bold and enterprising Pope Boniface VIII, in 1300 offered special indulgences to the pilgrims who came to Rome. The cult of saints and relics from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries multiplied pilgrim destinations, certified by miracles performed by the saints. On the Continent, after Rome the favored destination was Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain. In England it was Canterbury, where innkeepers prospered from the crowds who came to share the sanctity of the life and death of Saint Thomas Becket.

  And specially, from every shires ende

  Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,

  The holy blisful martir for to seke,

  That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke …

  Of sondry folk, by aventure y-falle

  In felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle …

  When such places and their relics worked miracles, Aquinas explained, they were vehicles of the power of God. Some pilgrims went for penance. A heinous crime, like that of the noble Frotmund who killed his father, was punished in 850 by perpetual pilgrimage. Such pilgrims traveling from shrine to shrine were condemned to a life in fetters that ended only when a saint miraculously broke their chains as a sign of forgiveness. Only after Frotmund had visited seven shrines were his chains finally broken in the little town of Redon in northwestern France. The powers of Saint Peter’s shrine in Rome were advertised by an impressive exhibit of broken fetters hanging from the altar. An unfulfilled vow to make a pilgrimage might bring divine punishment. When the English knight who had his broken arm healed by Saint James failed to make his promised visit to the saint’s shrine at Reading, the saint broke his other arm.

  Pope Urban II at the end of the eleventh century developed the “indulgence,” a formal remittance of punishment for sins by visiting certain shrines. Pilgrims, like widows and orphans, had the legal status of a miserabilis persona, which gave them special protection en route to fulfill their vows. The crowds of pilgrims benefited innkeepers and merchants, while they enriched the churches. When Henry VIII dissolved the Canterbury Cathedral priory, he hauled away twenty-six cartfuls of jewels and precious metals, the gifts of grateful pilgrims.

  Pilgrim shrines, too, like modern tourist centers, had their ups and downs. The appeal of the tomb of Saint Thomas at Canterbury, popular in the twelfth century, declined with rumors in the next century that the saint had lost his power to work miracles.

  Pilgrimage had its own ritual. A pilgrim was blessed by a priest at the outset, took a special oath, carried a staff, and wore a distinctive garment, with a bag for provisions hanging at his side. When he returned home his hat bore the badge of the shrine he had visited. Like modern tourists, pilgrims organized in groups and engaged exper
ienced guides to find the way and lead them to hospitable inns. Illustrated pilgrim Baedekers with maps noted sights along the way and warned of risks to health and purse.

  “Now let us ryde, and herkneth what I seye

  And with that word we ride forth our weye.”

  To make his journey count for penance the pilgrim was expected to suffer. In addition to suffering the usual trials of medieval travel, the more devout would walk barefoot, while fasting and constantly praying. But as the institution became popular it became more pleasant, less a penance than a travel holiday. Pilgrims who joined the tours from Venice to Muslim Jerusalem went to see the exotic, buy souvenirs, and then write their own journals. Sir John Mandeville (who, if there was such a person, must have been a contemporary of Chaucer) wrote the most popular travel book of the age, describing fountains of youth and monstrous animals, ostensibly to guide pilgrims to the Holy Land.

  Dubious miracles increased with the competition for pilgrims. The Rood of Boxley, a life-size figure of Christ on the Cross that actually shed tears, rolled its eyes, and foamed at the mouth, was finally discovered to contain “certain engines and old wires with old rotten sticks in the back.”