SOURCE: Bergin, Thomas G. “An Introduction to Boccaccio.” In Giovanni Boccaccio:“The Decameron,” A New Translation, 21 Novelle, Contemporary Reactions, Modern Criticism, translated and edited by Mark Musa and Peter E. Bondanella, pp. 151-71. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977.

[In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture in 1975, Bergin reviews Boccaccio's career and reflects on the historical and environmental foundations of the Decameron, characterizing it as a work that conveys the solace that can be provided by art in the face of intolerable reality.]

Italian literature is built firmly and enduringly on the great triangular base of Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio. These are figures of such authority and magnetism as not only to have affected the course of Italian letters but to have left as well visible traces of their inspiration and example on the thought and creative fancy of the Western world. Thinking of any one of them, it may sharpen our appreciation of his special talents if we at the same time bear in mind the gifts of the other two. All of the three are of Tuscan stock, all nourished in the same cultural climate; indeed for a few brief years all were sharing this world of the living. Dante, the oldest, died in 1321; Boccaccio, the youngest, was eight years old at the time. There are personal links between the members of the great triumvirate: Petrarca met Dante when the former was still a child and Boccaccio, who ardently admired both of his elders, became a close friend of Petrarca. As not infrequently happens in families where the youngest brother is overshadowed by his talented siblings, Boccaccio is commonly thought of as ranking third, so far as distinction is decent among giants. Yet if he lacks the grandeur of Dante and the grace of Petrarca, it may fairly be claimed for the youngest brother that he is the most versatile and inventive of all of them.

It may even be, in the opinion of today's critics at least, that he invented a good deal of himself, that is to say, much of his own biography. On the authority of a letter from Petrarca … we can be reasonably sure that Boccaccio was born in 1313, and in his Amorosa visione (XIV, 42 ff.) he refers to his legitimization by his father, one Boccaccino di Chelino, a merchant, originally from Certaldo but long associated with the Bardi banking family and domiciled in Florence. As to Giovanni's mother we know nothing at all, unless we are prepared to believe—as nowadays most scholars are not—what her son tells us about her in poetic and veiled fashion in a number of his early romances. He will have us think she was a Frenchwoman and—in one of his accounts—a lady of high degree. It is certainly true that Boccaccino made frequent visits to Paris, some of which coincide very closely in time with what must have been the season of Giovanni's conception. Boccaccio's word was good enough for the French scholar Hauvette, moved no doubt by a pardonable chauvinism, to dedicate his study of Boccaccio to the unknown Frenchwoman, but most scholars today, as noted, see her as a creature of pure fiction and opt for a girl either from Florence or Certaldo; she remains, however, when all is said and done, a woman of whom we know nothing. Shortly after legitimizing his love child Boccaccino married, thus forging another casual but interesting link between the members of the great triumvirate: Dante and Petrarca had stepmothers too.

It is also alleged nowadays, such is the uncharitable positivism of twentieth-century scholarship, that Boccaccio invented his adored Fiammetta, to whom he dedicated a number of his works and whose name, with some lingering touch of her magic, survives into The Decameron, where she is one of the ten young storytellers. In his own version of the affair, set forth very circumstantially in the Filocolo, Boccaccio tells us that he met his charmer on Easter Saturday in the Franciscan church of San Lorenzo in Naples; unlike Petrarca, who chronicles an encounter of such similar circumstance as to arouse in critics the suspicion of plagiarism, literary if not existential, on Boccaccio's part, he does not mention the year. Boccaccio's Fiammetta, according to his account, was a princess of sorts, the illegitimate daughter of Robert, king of Naples and patron of Petrarca. Skeptical historians have been for some time pointing out that there is not a shred of evidence for the existence of any such princess and the unanimous verdict of recent scholars would place the fair Fiammetta beside our hero's French mother, empedestalled in the gallery of fantasy. No doubt they are right, but if they will not let us believe in a princess, yet in view of the outpourings of passion that her name evokes in many works of her admirer, it is hard to believe that there was no Fiammetta at all. Even Vittore Branca, who has done more than most men to demolish Boccaccio's dreamworld, freely concedes that “a generic and total skepticism with regard to the data provided in the romances would be an error as inexcusable as noncritical acceptance of them.”¹ And to be sure, even as the doubters must stop short of affirming that young Giovanni had no mother at all, so too the normal pattern of a young man's life, in the Middle Ages as even now, would justify the postulate of some flesh-and-blood inspiration under the seductive Neapolitan sky.

But the allure of Fiammetta has led us to pass over earlier important events in this brief chronicle of the poet's life. He had been brought to Naples by his father, it would appear, in 1327. Boccaccino, in spite of his son's occasional complaints of mistreatment, seems in fact to have dealt very fairly with his love child. He not only legitimized him but gave him a good schooling under the tutelage of Giovanni da Strada, father of the scholar later to receive the laurel wreath and destined to be a lifelong friend of Boccaccio. Boccaccino also saw to it that his boy had instruction in “arismetica,” which gave him the elements of accounting. So when the father came to Naples to set up a counting house in association with the Bardi, the boy was prepared to take his place behind the counter, though it is not clear whether he was employed by the Bardi or another house. (It may have been that of the Acciaiuoli, whose scion, Niccola, was to become a prominent figure in the political affairs of the kingdom; he may have opened the doors of many aristocratic palaces to his slightly younger compatriot.) Boccaccio was not happy in the business world, although undoubtedly his experiences as bank clerk, money changer, and occasionally errand boy in the busy port must have been exciting enough. His father indulgently permitted him to leave the counting house and sent him instead to study canon law at the University (1331). This new career was scarcely more appealing than banking to the youth (he tells us in an autobiographical passage in the Genealogy of the Gods that he never wanted to be anything but a poet), but it provided him with intellectual stimulation and, one may say, set his path on the road of scholarship. Cino da Pistoia, one of his professors, provided him a living link with the school of the “dolce stil nuovo” and he speaks years later with respect of Paolo da Perugia, the royal librarian who opened for him that rich storehouse of learning and literature. Between banking and schooling Boccaccio spent thirteen years in Naples; they were the truly formative years of his life and the happiest as well. He tells us … that he lived in some elegance and the young bloods of the city were not unwilling to visit his quarters; Naples in fact gave him the triple experience of court life, the business world, and the kingdom of letters. It is not surprising that he left the city reluctantly nor that all his life he longed to return. If like his fellow Tuscans, Dante and Petrarca, Boccaccio too had the experience of exile, he was certainly the happiest of the three expatriates. Dante's exile was not voluntary and the restless Petrarca never lived in any one place for as long a span of time as Boccaccio spent contentedly in the sunny Angevin capital.

Returning to Florence, the young poet found adjustment difficult. The 1340s were not kind to bankers; both the Bardi and the Peruzzi failed, and Boccaccio was obliged to cast around for some means of employment, seeking to establish himself as a kind of secretary, adviser, or ornament to whatever magnate might find him useful. In some such capacity he seems to have served the Polenta of Ravenna (1345-46) and subsequently (1347-48) the Ordelaffi of Forlì. Later he tried—and more than once—to install himself in Naples under the wing of his old friend Acciaiuoli, who became in the course of years the power behind the somewhat unstable throne of Queen Joan. But such appointments as he held were short-lived and unsatisfactory; as the years passed, however, he found recurrent opportunities to serve the Commune of Florence, although on an irregular basis. He was sent as ambassador or emissary on sundry political missions; to various Lords of Romagna, to Louis of Bavaria in the Tyrol, to the powerful Visconti, and on three occasions to the papal court (to Avignon in 1354 and 1365 and to Rome in 1367). In the intervals he was appointed to boards or agencies dealing with such matters as military administration, or remained unemployed, retiring to Certaldo, eking out, according to his own reports, a precarious existence on his onion patch. For our purposes here—and to Boccaccio himself—the most important experience of his later years was his friendship with Petrarca. He first met the singer of Vaucluse in 1350, when he was privileged to entertain the great man in his own house and make him acquainted with an admiring circle. The friendship ripened with the years: visits were exchanged and correspondence flourished. Petrarca had a great influence on his young admirer, sharpening his critical faculties, strengthening his devotion to the cause of poetry, improving his Latin and perhaps his habits. One may perhaps question his master's effect on Boccaccio's purely creative genius; the record seems to show a waning of creative power—or interest—after that memorable encounter of 1350.

The foregoing brief biographical summary is intended merely to indicate the raw experiential material that went into the writings of this versatile author. We may remark on the existential side that the pattern of his life brought him into intimate contact with two very different social cultures. In Naples he lived in a society that was still feudal; the nobility was all-important and the pastimes of the élite, tournaments, pageantry, and love-making, exercised an irresistible attraction on a generous-hearted youth. In Florence the nobility had been barred from office-holding a generation before Boccaccio came on the scene; the recurrent political dissensions were not of dynastic origin as they were in Naples but reflected the class struggle for wealth and power between various levels of the middle class, a state of affairs that the twentieth century can readily understand. Shrewd calculation and opportunism were virtues to be admired in such a culture; business success brought prestige and there was no courtier class to glorify either jousting or flirtation. Equally formative of Boccaccio's achievements was the reading that came his way. Even in his early schooling as a boy he had read Ovid, he tells us; in Naples, among the works available to him in the Royal Library were Provençal and Old French romances, with Italian adaptations thereof, as well as scholarly compilations dealing with mythology, astrology, and history. In Naples, too, he must have encountered the works of Dante Alighieri, whom he was to admire all his life, occasionally imitate and, in his last years, explicate.

Of such experiences, personal or vicarious, are woven the creative works of the omnivorous author, even as his productions of an encyclopedic nature have their genesis in his early researches. Boccaccio is a many-faceted writer, to a greater degree, I think, than either Dante or Petrarca. To categorize his writings, either chronologically or formally, is not especially difficult but a twentieth-century critic attempting to assay them, if he is concerned with being useful to readers approaching Boccaccio for the first time, has a certain problem to face and perhaps a double function to fulfill. As with all writers of the past—at least those of major importance—Boccaccio must be approached with a double standard. There are in his canon works of great interest in the history of Western letters and even Western culture which are properly deserving of the attention of scholars in the field of literary history. They are not always, it is fair to say, works that a reader today seeking aesthetic or emotional satisfaction, and indifferent to their role in history, would find appealing. Among them however, are a few that have retained their freshness over the years and still delight the reader looking simply for enjoyment or catharsis. We shall keep this distinction in mind as we catalogue the artifacts.

Our first category would include four works: the prose Filocolo (or Labor of Love), the Caccia di Diana (Diana's Hunt) in terza rima, the verse romances Il filostrato (Love's Victim) and the Teseida (or Emilia's Nuptials), both in ottava rima. All of these were written or at least begun during the author's youthful years in Naples; the order of their composition is not entirely certain. The authoritative critic Vittore Branca assigns the following sequence: Diana's Hunt 1334, the Filostrato 1335, the Filocolo 1336, and would put the composition of the Teseida, if not its conception, sometime after the poet's return to Florence in 1340. Branca's arguments are subtle and sophisticated; a critic judging only by proficiency of technique might be inclined to put the Filostrato much later in the sequence. It is the most compact and effectively designed of all the works of this period, and it is difficult to believe that it could have preceded such a loosely organized and discursive narrative as the Filocolo; it seems indeed to reveal a surer hand than the one that penned the Teseida. In any case, all of these works follow the romantic medieval cult of the exaltation of love. Venus triumphs over Diana in the Hunt; love motivates the arduous quest of Filocolo for his sweetheart; love bears all before it, including feudal loyalties and the claims of friendship, in the Teseida; and love makes a hopeless victim of the young warrior Troilus in the Filostrato. Two of these works clearly look back to medieval models: the Filocolo is Boccaccio's version of an old love story, perhaps oriental in origin, versified in twelfth-century Old French as Floire et Blanceflor; the Hunt is an animated version of the catalogues of fair women of which Provençal literature and the lost sirventese of Dante provide examples. The remaining two (although also based on earlier models) throw, as it were, their adumbration into the future: Chaucer made use of both of them, and the ottava rima in which they are cast as well as the knightly aura that clings to them will characterize in varying degree the chivalrous romances of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso. The student of literary history would find in all of them matters for study; probably, however, only the Filostrato could be recommended to a reader of today, accustomed to look for sharp characterization and psychological subtlety in his reading. The obsessed and doomed Troilus, the calculating Cressida, and the mature and tolerant Pandarus have a vitality that transcends their times.

Chronologically the next category would be composed of the works written after the poet's return to Florence and before his masterpiece, The Decameron. These include the Ameto, sometimes called The Comedy of the Nymphs of Florence (1341-42), L'amorosa visione (The Amorous Vision, 1342), the Elegy of Lady Fiammetta (1343-44?), and the Ninfale Fiesolano or Story of the Nymph of Fiesole, which may be as late as 1346. In this group the differences between the titles are marked, with regard to both form and manner. Like their predecessors, they all exalt the power of love, but the vehicle of the message—save for one exception—depends more on allegory than simple narrative. In the Ameto a train of symbolic nymphs teaches virtue and gentility to a crude shepherd, employing a mixture of prose and terza rima; to be sure, narrative is not lacking. The lover in the Amorosa visione is a kind of immature Dante guided through various circles by a celestial lady; appropriately, terza rima is used to describe his progress. The ottava returns in the Ninfale, in this case not to sing of knights and ladies but, instead, of the nymphs and shepherds of mythology. In the Elegy, the abandoned Fiammetta tells the long and sad story of her infatuation and its consequences. Though full of lengthy passages of plaintive repining and saturated with Ovidian echoes, the Elegy, by virtue of its realistic detail and psychological authenticity, remains, like the Filostrato, a story that can still move a sympathetic reader today.

Another easily classifiable group would be that of the learned compendia: De claris mulieribus; De casibus virorum illustrium; De montibus, silvis, fontibus; and De genealogia deorum gentilium. It is difficult to assign a precise date to any of these works, since they were all repeatedly elaborated and revised by their author. In general one may say that all were begun in the 1350s (the Genealogia in 1350, the others somewhat later) and all indicate the new direction—towards Latin and scholarship and away from the vernacular and the creative—pointed out by Petrarca. They proved to be invaluable works of reference for men of letters down through the sixteenth century; they are interesting today, apart from the occasional intrusion of the raconteur into the labors of the compiler, largely for their incidental autobiographical allusions and, in the case of the Genealogia, for the definition and defense of poetry passionately put forth by the author. It is interesting to note that in his catalogue of the tribulations of famous men and his parade of noteworthy women Boccaccio cites examples from his own time as well as the familiar cases sanctified by the ancients. These works are monuments of humanism—Boccaccio proudly made use of his recently and painfully acquired acquaintance with Greek—and on them their author labored steadily until the end of his life. They gave him a prestige among his contemporaries that none of his creative works ever won for him. His early biographer, Filippo Villani, cites them with admiration, merely mentioning the compositions in the vernacular. Perhaps, since his Buccolicum Carmen (Rustic Song) is written in Latin, we might, as Villani does, attach it to this category but it is of different substance, being essentially allegorical autobiography rather than a work of research.

Some works escape easy classification. In the Trattatello in lode di Dante (Treatise in Praise of Dante) biography, gossip and critical commentary are fused; such a definition might also apply to some extent to the commentary on the early cantos of the Inferno. The lyric poems, written at intervals over the course of their author's life, are in the tradition of Dante and Petrarca but have their own character, fresh and spontaneous. The miscellaneous letters have an interest for what they tell us of the writer's opinions and vicissitudes. Also autobiographical in origin, it would seem, is the misogynistic Corbaccio, an unsympathetic survey of the physical and moral frailties of womankind, in language and vivacity of style perhaps the closest of all Boccaccio's works to his Decameron. In truth, save for its length, it might have provided one of the storytellers of that work with his daily ration, although in spirit it runs counter to the prevailing current of the masterpiece.

All these lesser works are worthy of the attention of the scholar and the historian. There is not one of the creative works without some touch of originality in form or treatment of substance; many of them, as we have indicated, are seminal. If Boccaccio had never written The Decameron his name would still loom large in the chronicles of European literature. Yet it must be said that The Decameron is an accomplishment of such scope and vigor as to make the minor creative works seem anemic by comparison and to overshadow the pedantic virtues of the compendia.

Surveying the sequence of youthful compositions enumerated above, a critic might well be at a loss in seeking to explain the genesis of The Decameron. From the Caccia di Diana to the Ninfale fiesolano the substance of Boccaccio's writing had been essentially in the high style; his romances portrayed princes and ladies of high degree; at the very least, as in the case of Fiammetta, people of wealth and prominence. His allegories were, of course, even further removed from the vulgar herd, dealing with lofty quasi-religious concepts and clearly intended for an erudite and polished audience. With The Decameron, the author takes his readers into a new world—or perhaps for the first time leads them from the cloudland of refined erotic fancy to the land of things as they are, wherein the citizenry is as varied as it is purposeful, where calculation displaces illusion, where the seamy side of things is not concealed and where laughter is not out of place. (There is not so much as a chuckle in any of the chivalrous or allegorical confections.) To some extent it may be surmised that the historical circumstances of the genesis of the masterpiece go far to explain the nature of its substance. The fourteenth century was not the happiest era in the history of Europe and Boccaccio's lifetime spans a period of many miseries. Aside from the dynastic wars of the kingdom of Naples that followed on the death of Robert in 1343, and the recurrent factional brawling in Florence, the early years of the century were marked by famines and financial reverses, and worst of all was the scourge for which the century is best remembered, the Black Death, which came to Florence in the spring of 1348 and moved on to devastate all Europe. The Decameron may have been begun in that year and was probably finished in 1351 (its “lascivious” pages would never have been written had he met Petrarca a little sooner). The exuberant vitality of the work may well be seen as a reaction against the horrors of the dreadful scourge; Boccaccio indeed suggests as much in the Introduction to his work, which begins with a description of the stricken city. It is strange that he should have borrowed some of the details from Paulus Diaconus, the chronicler of an earlier pestilence, for it is highly probable that he was an eyewitness himself of the plague's ravages; in any case his portrayal is forceful and no doubt accurate:

Many ended their lives in the public streets, during the day or at night, while many others who died in their homes were discovered dead by their neighbors only by the smell of their decomposing bodies. The city was full of corpses. The dead were usually given the same treatment by their neighbors, who were moved more by the fear that the decomposing corpses would contaminate them rather than by any charity they might have felt towards the deceased: either by themselves or with the assistance of porters (when they were available), they would drag the corpse out of the home and place it in front of the doorstep where, usually in the morning, quantities of dead bodies could be seen by any passerby; then they were laid out on biers, or for lack of biers, on a plank. Nor did a bier carry only one corpse; sometimes it was used for two or three at a time. More than once, a single bier would serve for a wife and husband, two or three brothers, a father or son, or other relatives, all at the same time … when all the graves were full, huge trenches were dug in all of the cemeteries of the churches and into them the new arrivals were dumped by the hundreds; and they were packed in there with dirt one on top of another, like a ship's cargo, until the trench was filled.

Petrarca, too, employing the more stately measures of Latin hexameters, remarks on the same scene:

Funerals meet my terrified eyes, wherever I turn them;
Horror piles upon horror; the churchyards, crowded
                    with coffins,
Echo to loud lamentations, while countless bodies unburied,
Noble and peasant alike, lie in the open, unhonored.

The impersonal impartiality of death, ignoring all social distinctions, may to some extent explain the liberal democracy of The Decameron, wherein representatives of all classes are set before us, even as the relaxation of traditional proprieties, also mentioned by the author as characteristic of the time of the plague, may explain its moral permissiveness.

In any event it is on this historical foundation that the structure of The Decameron is built. For it was amidst such scenes of horror, Boccaccio tells us, that ten young people met in the church of Santa Maria Novella: seven young women and three young men. The youth of the group is worth stressing—nor should it be forgotten that the author was himself only thirty-four at the time—and in other respects, too, it is a homogeneous company. All are of good family, all are well known to each other, and all are well educated and sophisticated. Several centuries of scholarship have striven in vain to identify them with any actual historical figures or even, in truth, to clarify the teasingly suggestive symbolism of the names they bear—at least as in any way functional in the narrative. At the suggestion of the most mature of the women they decide to leave the city and betake themselves to a country villa and there enjoy themselves as best they may until the plague has run its course—but always, as their leader puts it, “in pure fraternal friendship.” To beguile the time they hit upon the notion of story-telling; each member of the house party is to be king or queen for a day and suggest the general topics for the tales to be told. So in the course of their sojourn there are ten days of narration, each with ten stories, totalling a hundred tales and thus equaling, perhaps not by accident, the number of cantos in the Divine Comedy. At the end of each day one of the group sings a song celebrating the rapture or the anguish of love, often with covert allusions of a personal nature, puzzling to his hearers and equally so to readers of the work. That the title should be in Greek is in line with Boccaccio's practice, beginning with the Filocolo. Its subtitle, “Prince Galeotto,” with reference to the legendary friend of Lancelot who carried messages from his lord to Guinevere, signifies a dedication of the work to the service of love.

One may see if one chooses, in the framework of the book, an allegory of the flight from intolerable reality to the solace of art: the creation of one's own world, as it were, as a refuge from the ugly and sordid conditions of the true world of experience. If there is such an allegory it seems only fair to point out that the world into which the young people are subsequently borne from their ivory tower on the wings of their own creative fancy is no utopia or fairyland but a pretty naturalistic cosmos in its own right. So art flees life only to return to it, as it must if it would have meaning.

The design, employing a series of narrators within a fictional frame, is not entirely new. In the fifth book of the Filocolo Boccaccio had himself set before us in an idyllic background a group of young aristocrats who tell in turn brief narratives, all of which present questions calling for comment and eventual adjudication by the “queen,” who bears the name of Fiammetta. And before Boccaccio's time there had long circulated, in medieval literary circles, versions of the originally oriental compilation of the tales of the Seven Sages. But Boccaccio, setting his scene against a realistic and contemporary background and enlivening his presentation with his own brio, makes something new out of the old pattern. One may say much the same of the hundred tales themselves. It is doubtful if any one of them is strictly original with the author; certainly the vast majority are not. The sources are varied. Some, in fact, may be found in the book of the Seven Sages; some have an origin of equivalent venerability. Some have a classical source; on the other hand, many of the livelier ones are from the medieval stock of fabliaux (which had been anthologized, as were the lives of the troubadours, also drawn on by our magpie author); some are bits of Florentine gossip or merely current anecdotes. But to all of his tales Boccaccio gave new life and vigor, localizing, characterizing, polishing their plots and performers with shrewd variation and a resourceful and versatile style—and thereby making them truly his own, even as Shakespeare with Macbeth and Hamlet and even Henry V.

Let us grant that not every story is a masterpiece. At one extreme some items are simply witty sayings attributed to well-known figures of the day—and the wit is not always perceptible to twentieth-century tastes. (Some of us may have similar reservations about the drolleries of some of Shakespeare's clowns.) At the other end of the scale, particularly, I think, on the last day, where the author is aiming at indoctrination, some of the characters may seem a little too good to be true. But the great residue is made up of stories memorable for their sharpness of characterization, their skillful construction, and for the indefinable creative magic that enables them to transcend their times and delight a reader of today as much as a contemporary of their creator. Collectively the variety of the work's articulate dramatis personae and the authoritative presentation of their milieu compel us to include Boccaccio in that small and select group of writers who may truly be said to have created their own worlds.

The world of The Decameron is vast and varied. Even topographically it covers a lot of ground. As if deliberately to suggest the breadth of the author's scope—and incidentally adding an authenticating element to its plots—the settings range from Armenia to Spain and from England to Egypt, although, naturally enough, Italian backgrounds predominate and the tales set in Florence or its environs are more numerous than those of any other group. The social range is no less all-inclusive than the geographical. Vittore Branca calls the book the “epic of the merchant class,” but that definition, I think, has reference rather to its ethos than to the status of the characters that are set before us. E. H. Wilkins in his History of Italian Literature, calling the roll of the actors who parade before us on this vast stage, notes that among them are “kings, princes, princesses, ministers of state, knights, squires, abbots, abbesses, monks, nuns, priests, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, philosophers, pedants, students, painters, bankers, wine merchants, inn-keepers, millers, bakers, coopers, usurers, troubadours, minstrels, peasants, servants, simpletons, pilgrims, misers, spendthrifts, sharpers, bullies, thieves, pirates, parasites, gluttons, drunkards, gamblers, police—and lovers of all sorts and kinds.”² To be sure, some of these categories overlap; even so, it is an impressive list and could be enlarged by some refinement: poets, housewives, and hermits come readily to mind. Perhaps a tentative social census of The Decameron would be illuminating; a few random figures may here be cited as evidence of the proportions of the various social levels represented in the tolerant register of Boccaccio's world. My census, admittedly approximate, gives me a total of 338 characters, of which 255 are male and 83 female. Some of these, classical and legendary figures for example, are not appropriate fodder for social classification; of those that are eligible, the middle class comes out ahead, with 140 representatives. It should be said that, especially with regard to the Italian personae, the line between the nobility and the haute bourgeoisie is not sharply drawn, so that it may be that a few of the 102 characters that I class as “noble” might more properly have gone to swell the middle-class contingent. Twenty-three individuals are specifically defined as “merchants” or wives of merchants; perhaps as many more might be added to that number if we scrutinized them more closely. Some sixty-eight characters, by my tentative count, could fairly be described as belonging to the lower classes: peasants, laborers, and artisans of the humbler callings. This is a sizeable proportion, and it certainly stands out in contrast to the Divine Comedy, where, programmatically, as Cacciaguida tells the pilgrim, only people of prominence can serve the didactic ends of the poem. In fact, it is notable that in the Comedy even the thieves and highwaymen are of well-known families. Boccaccio too, of course, often used “persons known to fame” to lend authority to some of his tales; what is interesting is the substantial quotient of the obscure. Italians outnumber aliens by about three to one in the world of The Decameron and the Florentie colony is by far the largest. The church is not so well represented as one might expect; there are less than a score of clerics clearly identified as such, although their central role in some of the more memorable tales gives them a notable impact, and The Decameron would not be the same without them.

More significant than the emergence of the proletariat in the world of The Decameron is the proportion and nature of its female element. Here we may remind ourselves of the author's affirmation in his preface to the effect that his compilation was made specifically for the solace of women afflicted by the pangs of love. Lest there be any doubt about his attitude, he breaks off the narrative sequence at the beginning of the fourth day to make explicit avowal of his devotion to ladies and his intention to do everything he can to please them. After all, he says, the Muses are women, and if it does not necessarily follow that women are Muses, still they look like them at first sight. And women have inspired him to write a thousand verses whereas the Muses have not occasioned as much as one.

It is possible to see in this breezy manifesto simply a light-hearted bit of self-mockery. But to most readers it will seem a sincere declaration, supported, as critics have noted, by the record of all the author's preceding works, which are without exception oriented toward love and women. And the statement is authenticated as well by the testimony of The Decameron itself.

For confirmation let us again call on statistics. As noted above, a rough count gives us eighty-three women mentioned by name or clearly identified in the course of the hundred tales. This may not seem unduly large if measured against the quotient of over 250 males. Yet it may be said that the ladies have come a long way in less than fifty years, for Dante's Comedy, which has a population slightly larger than that of The Decameron, contains only a score of women, of which the greater part is composed of exempla from antiquity. Of contemporary women, real women, there are but five in the Comedy. Further, in Boccaccio's work, the women, like the clergy, make an impression that more than compensates for their numerical inferiority. Indeed, out of the 100 stories there are thirty-two wherein women have a central role and another forty-two in which their part is so significant that there would be no story without them. Of the remaining underprivileged twenty-six, more than half are not stories at all but simply anecdotes or witty sayings. Of the approximately eighty-five items that are truly stories women are either dominant or essential in seventy-nine. The Decameron is the nearest thing to a woman's world between Lysistrata and Clare Boothe's celebrated comedy.

A social census of the females of The Decameron—one would like to say the “ladies” but the term would not always be appropriate—would show that, as in the case of the other sex, all categories of society are represented. The presence and the ubiquity of women is one of the clearest signs that with The Decameron a new culture comes into being, or at least achieves literary recognition.

Scholars of literary history may debate as to whether Boccaccio, traditionalist, fashioner of allegories, disciple of Ovid, should be assigned to the Middle Ages or whether his humanism, his approach to the classics, a certain indifference to transcendental values, may justify us in seeing in him a precursor of the Renaissance. Without venturing a final verdict on this delicate matter, one may certainly affirm that the world of The Decameron is no longer the world of the High Middle Ages. In this connection we may appropriately cite the second story of the first day, very early on in the sequence. In this significant fabula Melchisedech the Jew, pressed by the sultan to say which of the three great religions, Christianity, Judaism, or Mohammedanism, is the true one, replies with the story of the three rings. He tells the sultan of a great king who let it be known that whichever of his three sons should on his death be given his gold ring should be regarded as the heir to all he possessed. But when death drew near, finding it difficult to choose between them, he had two copies of the ring made, perfect imitations of the original, so that when he died, each son had a gold ring and no man could tell which was the true one. And so it is with the great faiths, concludes Melchisedech; one of us has the true one but we shall not be able to say, in this world at least, which of us has it. This is a far cry from the Song of Roland, which had proclaimed with certainty that Christians were right and pagans were wrong; and it was this assurance that had motivated Christian thought and action through the succeeding centuries and which no authoritative spokesman of the West, down to and including Dante, had thought of questioning. In such a society the knight and the priest were supreme: the former, exalting and exemplifying military virtues, fought God's battles, and the latter, in celibate and abstinent meditation, was a constant reminder to the faithful of the transient nature of this world of the living. Undeniably, both knight and cleric have left us precious legacies. They incarnate, however, an idealism of such rigidity as to be beyond the grasp of ordinary mortals. In somber truth, in the High Middle Ages, knightly valor often found its outlet in brigandage and brawling, while the other-worldly posture of the priest, asking too much of frail humanity, was recurrently distorted by venality and corruption. It must be said too that, even at their best, crusading militancy and contempt for this world were hardly likely to build a viable society; neither one was, we might say, “good for business.” The business of the chivalrous-ascetic age was in fact carried on by unsung merchants, moneylenders, artisans, and peasants, and it is precisely this sector of society that in The Decameron comes into its own, gaining intellectual recognition and winning in some degree pragmatic and even philosophical justification.

So the citizens of the Decameronian commonwealth are less concerned with preparing for the world to come, either by the conscientious slaying of infidels or meditation on the hereafter, than with enjoying what the world of the living has to offer. The achievement of The Decameron is in its cheerful and realistic depiction of this Zeitgeist. Critics have attacked and conditioned but never refuted the statement of De Sanctis that the moving spirit of the work is “a violent rejection of the mystical and the other-worldly”; and recently Aldo Scaglione has pertinently remarked that the sense of sin is utterly absent from its pages—a striking contrast to the Divine Comedy, or the Rhymes of Petrarca, for that matter. All of the characters, with the exception of a few pious exempla, inserted, one may suspect dutifully, into the carefree procession, accept the world as it is. They realize that they are powerless against the accidents of fortune and they readily—one might say eagerly—yield to the irresistible impulses of their own passions and appetites. Their defense against fate and their ally against the excesses of their instincts is their intelligence. Many readers have seen in the work a programmatic glorification of human ingenuity. (It may be noted that of the seven days that have prescribed topics, no less than four call for tales exemplifying wit or astuteness, and the theme recurs in the other days as well.) Against this assertion the transcendent values of the feudal age pale into insignificance or at least irrelevance. It is possible to schematize the work and see in it a kind of Dantesque progression, as Ferdinando Neri has, and the numerology is faintly suggestive.³ The numbers 3, 7, 10, and 100, unobtrusively present in The Decameron, were also very meaningful for Dante. But such considerations of a quasi-formal nature do not affect the substance, and much less the spirit, of the work. No one is likely to see in The Decameron an Itinerarium mentis in Deum. If there is a progression from the wickedness of Ciappelletto to the “saintliness” of Griselda, it is a most irregular movement, with much backtracking. And in truth Ciappelletto is not presented to us as exemplifying evil but rather ingenious resourcefulness, and Griselda is less a saint than a pathological case, verging on the monstrous. In the presentation of the gallery of the good on the last day, one may see not so much an echo of Dante's last cantica as simply another medieval palinode, such as we find in Andreas Cappellanus, or the troubadour poets, or even in the closing items of Petrarca's Canzoniere. Considered objectively, the “virtuous” characters of the last day are not especially saintly. Some of them are decent individuals moved by human compassion and generosity but a few of the more famous examples—the hermit Nathan, the devoted friend Gisippus, and the masochistic Griselda—are simply victims of obsessions, basically egocentric, that take them beyond the pale of normal humanity. Their limitations, in truth, may serve to illustrate the sad state of transcendental values in the culture of the times—or at least as perceived by their creator. Certainly most of the characters in the hundred tales live in this world and are quite content with it; even when luck goes against them they are seldom disposed to forsake it to put their hopes in a dubious hereafter. The case of Ciappelletto, the protagonist of the first story, may be cited as illustrating this hardheaded and, from a religious point of view, disconcerting spiritual disposition. Nothing could be more shocking to the faithful than a false confession made on the point of death. On the face of it, although Panfilo, who tells the tale, piously and correctly points out that a split second of true repentance may have saved him at the last, Ciappelletto has damned his soul for all eternity. But he has saved the good name of his business partners in this world, and for this cause he is quite ready to take his chances in the next. If he has not saved his soul, he has certainly saved appearances, thereby setting an example to his fellow citizens in the world of the hundred tales, where the saving of appearances becomes a consistent motif. Suffice it to cite here, as supplementary evidence, the case of the oriental princess Alatiel as told in the seventh story of the second day. Abducted en route to her wedding, the hapless maiden is forced, in the course of her wanderings, to submit to no fewer than nine ravishers, yet in the end, profiting by a turn of fate and following the advice of a wise counselor, she is able to present herself to her unsuspecting fiancé as still intacta. And everyone lives happily ever after. So too in the chronicles of these ten lively days there are a score of women so successful in concealing their infidelities that no one thinks any the worse of them, nor does any of them have an uneasy conscience. This is all very cynical but it does betoken a respect for the conventions. The social order is not to be flouted, indeed it is to be honored; it may also be acceptably manipulated—if one is clever enough.

If such a code is ethically questionable, it is fair to say that one of its by-products is tolerance, a quality alien to the medieval rigidity which had characterized the ethos of earlier generations. To this new attitude the fable of Melchisedech may be seen as contributing a quasi-theological support. In this connection, too, a focus on the new feminism of The Decameron may prove instructive. For the womenfolk of The Decameron exemplify in the sharpest terms the rational-hedonistic, earthbound texture of the work. As we have noted the indulgent democracy which allows scope for the appearance of representatives of various social classes, so we might ponder for a moment the sentimental-psychological categories into which the self-possessed and articulate females of the work might be divided. It should be said at once that for all of the women love is all that matters; there are a few stories in the collection in which men are motivated by purposes unconnected with the sex drive but there is no woman in the course of the hundred tales who is not somehow involved with a man, whether she be predator or prey or (as is most often the case) cheerful accomplice. Which is by no means to say that all the women are alike. One might, fancifully, distinguish two broad categories. The first could be defined as consisting of the inexperienced but eager. Many of these make their appearance in certain stories for years regarded as the naughtiest of the book, precisely because their innocence permits titillating doubles entendres and often calls for specific physiological allusion. Perhaps the best examples would be the maiden Alibech, who finds that putting the Devil in hell is an exercise as joyful as it is meritorious, or the ardently experimental Catharine of Romagna who cannot rest until she has captured the nightingale. The most articulate of this group, however, is assuredly the unnamed little nun of the first story of the third day (told, somewhat oddly, by Filostrato, who prescribes tales of tragic import when his turn comes). For this assured young woman, neither her pledge of chastity nor the more practical hazard of pregnancy can avail to alter her purpose: she has heard, on good authority, what it is that brings the greatest joy to a woman and she is determined to experience it for herself. Her confidence sweeps away all objections; indeed not only does she have her way but her example infects her sisters—and to the content of all concerned. Masetto leaves the convent, in due course, with a pleasant sense of mission fulfilled, and if any of the children he has fathered are born of his first discoverer, we may well believe that she has no regrets. This saucy young miss also exemplifies the alert opportunism characteristic of the Decameronian community; when Fortune provides her with an occasion to enrich her experience she takes prompt advantage of it. Indeed, in her practical, earthbound moral attitude and her opportunistic inventiveness she is clearly kin to Ciappelletto.

A larger and perhaps even more characteristic category could be defined as the experienced and aggressive. Examples abound: we may cite the third story of the third day, wherein an unnamed Florentine lady, making an accomplice of a naive priest, conducts, as it were, her own seduction and ingeniously brings her willing lover to her bed. Another case would be that of Lydia (the ninth story of the seventh day) who, bent on making the timid Pyrrhus her lover, makes excellent use of the magic pear-tree, a most extraordinary plant that will later serve Geoffrey Chaucer. Gillette of Narbonne (in the ninth story of the third day) uses her scientific knowledge to win a reluctant husband and, when he abandons her, devises a complicated scheme to recover his person and eventually his affections. Her aggressive ingenuity appealed to Shakespeare who retells her story in All's Well That Ends Well. This purposeful and pragmatic brigade includes the most outspoken and clear-minded females in The Decameron; they know what they want even as the men, who usually want the same thing, and are prepared not only to work for the fulfillment of their desires but to defend them with eloquence. The wife of Ricciardo da Chinzica, in the tenth story of the second day, is very explicit in describing what a woman looks for in her spouse; her language is racy and amusing but her requirements are no different from those of Ghismunda of Salerno who, as befits a princess in a tragic situation, speaks a more elevated—and quotable—language. It is Fiammetta who in the first story of the fourth day tells us how Ghismunda, daughter of Prince Tancredi, having been married and widowed at an early age, secretly and discreetly took a lover, a young man of excellent character but of low social degree. When Tancredi, discovering the affair, reproaches her she impenitently replies: “I was fathered by you and am of flesh and blood, and have not lived so long that I am yet old—for both these reasons I am full of amorous desire, which has also been greatly increased by my marriage which taught me how pleasurable it is to satisfy such desires.” She adds that she chose her lover carefully, with regard, however, to his character rather than his social position for, she affirms, “we are all made of the same flesh” and nobility is a matter of conduct and not lineage. It is interesting to note how the defense of love and the woman's right is combined with a democratic social thesis; the pervading dominance of love—even at its lowest level—is an essential element in the egalitarian spirit of The Decameron.

Occasionally, it must be admitted, the claims of these self-assured and full-blooded women are pressed a little too far. It is one thing to ignore the artificial barriers of class distinction and quite another to subvert the foundations of society, at least as they have been traditionally understood and accepted. “Doing what comes naturally,” however satisfactory to the individual, can threaten the social fabric. Filippa of Prato carries her principles to their extreme. In the seventh story of the sixth day—again from the lips of the versatile Filostrato—we learn how there was once upon a time in Prato a law decreeing death for a woman taken in adultery. A certain Filippa, he tells us, was once caught in the act; brought to court for her sentencing, however, she makes no attempt to deny her guilt but instead boldly attacks the law. Laws, she argues, should be equal for all and should, moreover, be made with the consent of those whom they affect. “Such,” she affirms, “is not the case with this statute, which binds only us poor women, who after all have it in our power to give pleasure to many more people than a man ever could. But when the law was drawn up not a single woman gave her consent nor was even consulted.” She then, in the presence of the court, asks her husband if she has ever rejected his advances. He admits she has not. And Filippa triumphantly rejoins: “Since he has always had all he wanted of me, what was I to do with what was left over? Isn't it far better to let it give pleasure to some poor fellow that loves me rather than allow it to go to waste?” And so persuasive is her argument that she wins not only her freedom but also abrogation of that unjust law. On reflection one is forced to conclude that although the collection may contain many spicier items, the story of Filippa may well be the most subversive of them all.

It is the prevalence of this type of frank, self-possessed, and sensual womanhood that gives The Decameron its particular flavor. Are there no cases of the woman as victim in all the hundred tales? Precious few—and they are not the victims of predatory lovers but rather of circumstance or sheer bad luck. Isabetta of the famous and touching story of the pot of basil (the fifth story of the somber fourth day, told by the tender Filomena) is a victim of her brothers' snobbery and greed. Perhaps Alatiel, whose romantic peregrination we have mentioned earlier, is a victim of her nine successive ravishers but she seems to enjoy every moment of it—and she comes out all right in the end. Of course the victim, par excellence, of the collection is the patient Griselda of the final climactic tale, but she is as much a victim of her own masochism as the perverted sadism of her husband; Petrarca's tears for her to the contrary notwithstanding, a reader of today would consider her a pathological case. The conventional victim of man's lust, exploited, betrayed and abandoned, who has contributed so many pathetic pages to world literature is simply not found in The Decameron. Most of Boccaccio's feminine creations are far too intelligent for that sort of destiny. There are to be sure a few silly women in the gallery, of whom the most memorable is the young Venetian matron who was so readily convinced that the Archangel Gabriel was in love with her (in the second story of the fourth day sagaciously chosen by Pampinea to dissipate the gloom occasioned by the sad end of Ghismunda)—but then, Boccaccio remarks, all Venetians are silly, and in any event she turns out to be no more self-deluded than her deceiver. What is perhaps more surprising, and an eloquent token of the new world that emerges in The Decameron, is that there is no example of the spiritualized donna angelica, the inspirational, untouchable lady of Dante and the troubadours. It is true that the vision of the fair Iphigenia in the forest glade inspires Cymon to give up his boorish style of life and turn to the pursuits of a polished gentleman and courtier, including abduction, violence, and piracy; it does not turn his vision heavenward nor lead him to study St. Thomas Aquinas. And of that love which is the source of chastity, in the words of the Provençal poet, there is hardly a trace at all in Boccaccio's pages. Au contraire, one might say.

It is indeed easy to understand, save for the coarse if realistic figures of the fabliaux, that the spirit of the Middle Ages could not find room for women of the Decameronian stamp. Knighthood had cast about its ladies an idealistic veil, flattering, no doubt, but hampering natural movement; the medieval monk could see in the female only temptation incarnate. Petrarca's Laura in fact labors under both of these handicaps. Only in a society prepared to appreciate and enjoy the things that this world of the living has to offer can normal women be observed and portrayed without the distortions of sublimations of one kind or another. Boccaccio, to be sure, did not invent normal women. But he may claim to be a pioneer in seeing them with a clear eye and depicting them with an understanding pen. And the woman who moves before us in The Decameron is here to stay. We shall find her living on in the Mirandas and the Portias and the Rosalinds of Shakespeare and, indeed, we can recognize her legitimate descendants today, in letters as in life.

The naturalistic character of Boccaccio's women and the racy situations in which they play an emancipated role have given The Decameron over the years its well-known reputation for looseness verging on the pornographic. Readers of the late twentieth century will find this hard to understand in view of the kind of literature that floods our permissive bookstalls nowadays. Indeed by contrast The Decameron seems quite innocuous. For all its eroticism it is surprisingly limited: there is but one case of homosexuality recorded in the hundred tales and nothing in the least unnatural or perverse. There is no scatological scene nor word—in fact the language, though sometimes suggestive, is never coarse. There are no “four-letter words” in the book. Yet, until recent years The Decameron was considered by many to be a “dirty book” and was read rather furtively by all save the emancipated as recently as a generation ago. There is no reason for us to be ashamed of the “Victorianism” of our ancestors in this matter; the author himself came to repent of the creation of his masterpiece. He would have burned it along with his other youthful works had not Petrarca dissuaded him, and in his old age he begs his friend Cavalcanti to keep the book out of reach of his womenfolk. His devotion to the fair sex turned to acrimonious misogynism in the Corbaccio (the final version of which is of the early sixties but it probably had a much earlier genesis), and the Boccaccio who scathingly assails the hypocrisy of the friars in the course of the hundred tales has, before 1360, taken minor orders himself. Indeed somewhere in his mid-forties he underwent a “conversion.”

Clearly, if we survey panoramically the production of this gifted and versatile artist we can see that his masterpiece must have been the product of a special set of circumstances, a particular and vitalizing moment in his career. His works offer convincing evidence of his ready response to his environment. Under the influence of a feudal and courtly society he wrote chivalrous romances; moving to Tuscany, he turned to allegory. Probably contact with the hardheaded merchants of Florence directed his pen to the creation of the “epic of the merchant class.” One may suspect too that The Decameron came into being during a time of his own erotic involvement; though he never married he had five illegitimate children, born, it seems likely, during the years immediately following his return to Tuscany. The birth date of Violante (the “Olympia” of Buccolicum Carmen XIV) has been tentatively assigned to 1349-50; she was not the oldest of his children. The cultivation of Petrarca's friendship and the desire to emulate his master provide, as it were, yet another spiritual milieu and he turns to the more scholarly exercises of compilation and theorizing, forsaking the narrative, whether romantic or realistic. It will creep in from time to time, in the Treatise on Dante and in the interstices of the Book of Famous Women and the other compendia, but it will never again be deliberately cultivated. Villani bears out the artist's own statement when he records that Boccaccio would gladly have recalled his masterpiece but could not. We today who delight in the vigor and honesty as well as the art of the hundred tales may be happy that his efforts to suppress them were in vain. For, as Carducci said many years ago, in the range of Italian letters, at least, and perhaps beyond that range, the Human Comedy of The Decameron is the one work worthy to stand beside the Divine Comedy of the master whom Boccaccio so deeply revered.

Notes

1. Boccaccio medievale (Florence: Sansoni, 1970), p. 243. In matters of biographical-bibliographical chronology, I have followed Vittore Branca's Giovanni Boccaccio: profilo biografico (Milan: Mondadori, 1967).

2. History of Italian Literature, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 108-9.

3. See “Il disegno ideale del Decameron,” in Poesia e storia (Turin: Casa Editrice Giuseppe Gambino, 1946).