The Decameron

by Giovanni Boccaccio

  As for the lover’s tears, the prime example of a story incorporating this and various other motifs of amour courtois is the famous account of Federigo and his prize falcon (V, 9), which the narrator claims to be offering to her lady hearers in order ‘to acquaint you with the power of your beauty over men of noble spirit’. The aristocratic life-style of a bygone age is nostalgically recalled in the initial description of Federigo, who ‘for his deeds of chivalry and courtly manners was more highly spoken of than any other squire in Tuscany’. The object of his love is a married lady, Monna Giovanna, whose attention he seeks to capture by riding at the ring, tilting, giving sumptuous banquets, and distributing largesse on so liberal a scale that he reduces himself to a state of poverty. In the best tradition of the courtly lover, he continues to serve his lady with unswerving fidelity. When, now widowed, she calls at his humble dwelling, he wrings the neck of his precious falcon without a second thought, so as to ensure that his unexpected guest is fed in as fitting a manner as his straitened circumstances will allow. The tears he sheds on learning the reason for her visit47 are at first misinterpreted by the lady. Though he attributes them to the hostility of Fortune, they serve to convince the lady of the strength of his devotion. When her brothers urge her to take a second husband, she insists that she will marry no other man except Federigo, explaining that she prefers a gentleman without riches to riches without a gentleman. What began as an adulterous passion ends with the formalization of the relationship in a Christian marriage. Courtly love (amour courtois) is transmuted into married love (amor conjugalis).

  The story of Federigo shares with all the other stories of the Fifth Day (except the last) a narrative line that ends in a happy marriage. One or two modern observers have taken this, along with evidence drawn from his other writings, to support the view that the author of the Decameron, far from encouraging adulterous liaisons, was a deeply committed moralist opposed to any departures from the norm of legitimate conjugal love.48 Significant in this connection is the ending of the tale of Nastagio degli Onesti (V, 8), where (as already noted) the lover, having succeeded in transforming a young woman’s enmity into love, insists first on marrying her to preserve her good name. The virtues of conjugal love are celebrated in many of the other stories, for instance in the tales of the Marchioness of Montferrat (I, 5), of Bernabò and Zinevra (II, 9), and of Messer Torello (X, 9). This last, one of the most touching narratives in the whole of the Decameron, presents amor conjugalis in a particularly attractive light, focusing as it does not only on the bond of affection between husband and wife, but also on their nuclear family as a whole. But, as in so many other respects, it is impossible to construct a coherent theory about the overall moral tone of the Decameron on the basis of the tales just cited. There are at least as many stories, including the tale of Tedaldo degli Elisei (III, 7), which point to a contrary conclusion. The ambivalence of the authorial stance accounts in large measure for the work’s endless fascination. Its morality is open-ended.

  The theme of Love in the Decameron is one that defies exhaustive analysis. Perhaps the best way to summarize this whole question is by quoting Filomena’s words in the preamble to her story of Madonna Francesca (IX, 1):

  In the course of our conversation, dear ladies, we have repeatedly seen how great and mighty are the forces of Love. Yet I do not think we have fully exhausted the subject, nor would we do so if we were to talk of nothing else for a whole year.49

  * * *

  The Decameron has been called ‘il poema dell’intelligenzd’,50 or the epic of human intelligence, and this designation of the work seems so appropriate that it comes as something of a surprise to discover that neither the noun (intelligenza) nor the adjective (intelligente) appears anywhere in Boccaccio’s text. The reasons for this are mainly etymological. Although both words were current in the author’s day, their present-day meanings were almost invariably conveyed by other linguistic forms. Boccaccio in fact employs a wide range of terms connoting various kinds and manifestations of human intelligence, and attempts have been made to show that he chose his alternatives with care, according to the particular type of intelligence with which he was dealing in specific contexts.51 Theories of this sort, whilst directing our attention to the subtle semantic nuances of particular words, are not entirely convincing, and more often than not Boccaccio’s choice between words of similar meaning is dictated by considerations of rhythm and euphony rather than by any doctrinaire obsession with semantic precision. In what follows, the temptation to differentiate between the various aspects of the theme of intelligence by close scrutiny of Boccaccio’s terminology will be eschewed, attention being directed instead to the overall theme as it presents itself, both in the framework and in certain individual tales or groups of tales.

  The first allusion to intelligence (in this case senno or ‘wisdom’) occurs in the Prologue, where it is accompanied, interestingly enough, by a reference to another of the Decameron’s major themes, that of Fortune. The author is elaborating upon his reasons for composing the work, claiming that it stems in large measure from the sense of gratitude he feels in having been released from the bonds of love. In order not to appear ungrateful for his deliverance, he has resolved to employ his talents in making restitution for what he has received. He will offer solace to those who stand in need of it, or in other words to people who remain enmeshed in the toils of love. Those friends and acquaintances who rendered him assistance in his own timely escape may derive little benefit from all this, for their good sense (senno) or good fortune (buona fortuna) will possibly render such a gift superfluous.

  Thus, right from the outset of the Decameron, the author juxtaposes the work’s three central themes (Love, Intelligence and Fortune), and suggests that the trials and tribulations attending the first can be assuaged or avoided by the application of the second or the intervention of the third. This, in essence, is what the Decameron is about. As its sub-title (Prencipe Galeotto) implies, it is a work that shares with medieval romance, more specifically of the Arthurian variety, an abiding concern with the operation of profane love, Galeotto being the medieval archetype of the Pandar figure. The Dantesque associations of the sub-title should not be overlooked, for it will be remembered that Dante’s allusion to Galeotto occurs in that episode of the Commedia, illustrating the sin of lust, where Francesca da Rimini claims that the mainspring of her adulterous liaison with Paolo Malatesta was their reading together of an Arthurian romance with that very title: ‘The book was Galahalt, and he the one who wrote it.’52 By deliberately choosing this name as the alternative title of his own collection of tales, the author is rejecting Dante’s implicit condemnation of the literature of profane love, the genre of which Boccaccio had made himself a leading exponent long before he addressed himself to the writing of his master work. Whereas Dante had suggested that literature concerned with profane love was inherently harmful, Boccaccio polemically stresses its didactic value, at the same time pointing out that for those people blessed with intelligence or good fortune its usefulness is strictly limited. They, presumably, will read it, if they read it at all, for the pleasure they derive from whatever aesthetic values it may possess.53

  That Boccaccio is adopting a polemical stance in relation to the literature of profane love – a position, moreover, that is diametrically opposed to that of Dante, whose poetry he greatly admired – cannot seriously be doubted. His passionate, eloquent, and occasionally mischievous defence of the Decameron in the Introduction to the Fourth Day, as well as the remarks he appends in the work’s concluding pages, are indicative of the need he experienced to defend the genre within which he was working. And it is characteristic of Boccaccio’s realistic view of the human condition that he should have seized upon the possibilities afforded by the great natural calamity of the Black Death to furnish his stories (many of which were doubtless already written before 1348) with a plausible raison d’être. The framework of the Decameron, and the circumstances in which the hundred tales ar
e alleged to have been told, have already been discussed in some detail. What needs to be emphasized at this juncture is that the description of the plague, and of the moral and social upheaval to which it gave rise, is first and foremost a powerful instrument for ensuring that a hitherto neglected or despised literary genre will attract due recognition. Boccaccio’s defensive posture is at once apparent in the opening paragraph of the Introduction to the First Day, where, referring to his description of the plague, he apologizes to his readers in advance for the work’s irksome and ponderous opening (grave e noioso principio), and assures them that they will be affected no differently by this grim beginning than hikers confronted by a steep and rugged hill beyond which there lies a fair and delectable plain. The delectable plain is of course the main body of the work, the hundred stories themselves, but so aware is Boccaccio of the possible opprobrium that may accrue to him from his narration of the tales that he constructs an elaborate justificatory framework within which the stories are told, in a particular set of historical circumstances, by a group of ten fictitious narrators. By using this ingenious device, which, as already noted above, is not original to Boccaccio, but is rather a sophisticated form of a technique used by compilers of earlier collections of tales, not only does he distance himself from his material, but he also provides it with a valid aesthetic and historical raison d’être.

  The chief impression conveyed by Boccaccio’s horrendous account of the plague and its disastrous effects is one of chaos and disorder brought about by the decay of hallowed traditions and the sudden breakdown of long-established social institutions. Initially, it is asserted that against so massive and capricious a natural calamity all the wisdom and ingenuity of man are powerless. As Boccaccio reports, ‘large quantities of refuse were cleared out of the city by officials specially appointed for the purpose, all sick persons were forbidden entry, and numerous instructions were issued for safe-guarding the people’s health, but all to no avail.’ But it is interesting to observe that wisdom and ingenuity are precisely the qualities that ultimately accomplish the return to order and harmony, as represented by the paradisal world that the members of the lieta brigata construct for themselves. In introducing the seven young ladies to his readers, the author gives pride of place to the quality of their intellect (savia, or ‘wise’, is the adjective he applies to them), before going on to enumerate their other distinguishing features, which are their gentle breeding, their physical beauty, their graciousness, and their charming sense of decorum (leggiadra onestà). Pampinea’s lengthy address to her companions, in which she carefully analyses their common predicament and advances cogent arguments in support of her proposal that they should retire to one of their country estates, offers an apt illustration of the first of the qualities to which the author had referred. The brief discussion that ensues, concerning the desirability on practical grounds of enlisting male support for their enterprise, carries strong traces of anti-feminism, for it is asserted that women, when left to themselves, are not the most rational of creatures, that they are by nature fickle, quarrelsome, suspicious, cowardly and easily frightened, and that, without a man to guide them, it rarely happens that any enterprise of theirs is brought to a worthy conclusion. But emphasis is once more laid upon the young ladies’ powers of judgement, one of their number, Filomena, being described as discretissima, by way of indicating her exceptional prudence.

  As with the seven young ladies, a key attribute of the three young men whose company they enlist is their intelligence, as seen in Pampinea’s remarks on first catching sight of the trio: ‘See how Fortune favours us right from the beginning, in setting before us three young men of courage and intelligence [discreti giovani e valorosi], who will readily act as our guides and servants if we are not too proud to accept them.’ The reference to Fortune is significant, coming immediately after the initial description of the three young men, in which the author lays special emphasis on the strength of their affection for three of the ladies present. Implicit within this description is the concept, central to the poetry of the dolce stil novo, of the ennobling effects of love, for the trio are characterized as young men in whom neither the horrors of the times nor the loss of friends or relatives nor concern for their own safety has dampened the flames of love, much less extinguished them completely. Thus, as in the Prologue, we once again find the deliberate juxtaposition of the Decameron’s three central themes: Love, Fortune, Intelligence.

  In the course of his harrowing description of the plague and its disastrous effects on the traditions and institutions of Florentine society,54 Boccaccio repeatedly directs attention to the chaos and disorder brought by the Black Death to the city he nostalgically recalls as the most noble of any in Italy (‘oltre ad ogni altra italica nobilissima’), and he deplores the breakdown of those moral and legal restraints which had contributed to the city’s cultural and social pre-eminence. He stresses that in the face of the misery and affliction occasioned by the plague all respect for the laws of God and of man had broken down and been extinguished, and that consequently everyone was free to behave as he pleased. The departure from generally accepted rules and standards of behaviour is graphically illustrated in two passages referring to women. In the first, Boccaccio writes that whenever a woman was taken ill, she raised no objection, no matter how gracious or beautiful or gently bred she might be, to being attended by a male servant, and that she had no scruples about showing him every part of her body as freely as she would have displayed it to a woman. This practice, he goes on to suggest in a slightly flippant aside, was responsible for a subsequent decline in the sexual morals of those women who were fortunate enough to recover. But if chastity waned, so too did the compassion ordinarily associated with the feminine ideal. In a passage describing Florentine burial customs, and the role that had traditionally been played in them by the womenfolk of the dead, it is pointed out that these customs had been abandoned, and that not only did people die without having many women about them, but they also died with few people if any to mourn them, or even to witness their passing. Indeed, with the overturning of normal values that accompanied the plague, bereavement became the signal for black humour – laughter, witticisms, and general jollification – the practice of which, as the author ruefully adds, women had learned to perfection.

  In all of this there is of course a remnant of the anti-feminism which is observable in much of the literature of the Middle Ages, and which surfaces at several points in the Decameron, despite Boccaccio’s dedication of the work to the ladies and his frequent avowals of devotion to their well-being. But the overriding impression conveyed by his account of the plague is of a previously well-ordered and civilized society that has been precipitated into chaos and anarchy by the reversal of those values and standards of behaviour on which it depended for its survival, and to which the exercise of the traditional womanly virtues of modesty and compassion had made a decisive contribution. It is thus significant that in his fictive account of the return to a decorous and civilized mode of existence, as represented by the sealed-off world of the lieta brigata, Boccaccio not only attributes its generative impulse to a group of young ladies, but he stresses over and over again their strict adherence to rules of womanly conduct which in the outside world had fallen into disuse. Their sustained sense of decorum stands in marked contrast to the moral anarchy which has overtaken their contemporaries in the plague-ridden city. Pointed reference is made to the correctness of their behaviour, not only in the Introduction but in the interludes between one bout of story telling and the next. And in the concluding pages of the Tenth Day, Panfilo claims that neither in word nor in deed nor in any other respect have he and his companions been deserving of censure.

  The return to order, harmony, and self-discipline is effected by the application of wisdom, the quality to which the author gives pride of place in his description of the seven young ladies, and which is embodied to its fullest extent in Pampinea. It is she who not only supplies a graphic account of the
indignation that she and her companions experience in their daily lives because of the collapse of traditional civilized values but also indicates how their dilemma may be resolved. Her eloquent address to her companions is faintly reminiscent of the harangue delivered to his crew by another, much more famous representative of human intelligence, Dante’s Ulysses, who in a well-known passage from the twenty-sixth canto of Inferno impresses upon his shipmates that they were not born to live like animals, but to pursue virtue and knowledge.55 So, too, Pampinea implants in her companions the desire to escape from a brute-like existence and pursue the virtue and knowledge which will inevitably flow from their active participation in the well-ordered, civilized mode of living she prescribes for their own brief odyssey. Like the quest of Dante’s Ulysses, it has as its objective the attainment of a mythical state of well-being, associated in the medieval consciousness with the notion of the earthly paradise. The fate of Dante’s Ulysses is a warning to those who pursue the spirit of inquiry beyond reasonable bounds, symbolically represented by the pillars of Hercules that stand at the extremity of the known terrestrial world. For Dante, the earthly paradise is located at the summit of the mountain of Purgatory, at the antipodes of the world as he and his contemporaries knew it. But no sooner do Ulysses and his companions, spurred on by their desire for knowledge, chance upon the mountain in their mortal state than they are caught up in a whirlwind and destroyed. In contrast, what Boccaccio seems to be suggesting is that, through human initiative allied to wisdom, mortals may indeed attain to a condition of terrestrial bliss.

  To achieve that condition, the main prerequisites are a meticulous regard for order and a constant sense of propriety, and these are the attributes which figure most prominently in Pampinea’s elaborate proposals for the withdrawal of the company to their pastoral refuge. In broaching her design to her companions, she stresses the ‘fatti non foste a viuer come bruti,