Dear readers, after much sturm und drang I have decided not to place Giovanni Boccaccio‘s The Decameron on my list of 400, but given its importance to literature and its sheer vitality, I wanted to make sure everyone is at least aware that it’s well worth reading!
Boccaccio (1313–1375) was something of an avant-garde by the standards of 14th century Italy. Not only did he write in the vernacular, but he wrote stories that are positively earthy, sexual, and realistic in their portrayal of people’s lives. Tutored as most well-off young people were in science, literature, and law, Boccaccio — although not himself being a member of the nobility — seemingly had the world at his feet. He was engaged socially with some very powerful people, including close advisors to royalty. But it was storytelling that captured this Italian’s mind. This was an era of constant social upheaval between haves and have-nots, or between rival clans of haves. It was also a time of recurrent bouts of plague; the Black Death swept through Florence in the 1340s, killing more than 50% of its citizens (a fate repeated throughout Europe). But Robert of Anjou, ruler of southern Italy, was, like many Renaissance leaders, determined to be a new Charlemagne, bringing culture and art to his court, and Boccaccio would be (thankfully) swept up in this.
“Ad fontes!” (“to the sources!”) was the cry heard around the western world in the mid-14th century, as artists sought to recapture the great heritage of western Europe, much of which had been lost in the Dark Ages, whether by loss of manuscripts or a lack of understanding (no-one could speak ancient Greek well enough to understand Homer until Boccaccio’s day). Like the modern American South, modelling so many of its civic buildings on the Greeks, there was a determination here to connect with a history that was seen as vibrant, pivotal, and one of the heights of human achievement. Startling to think that, in the midst of cleaning up the mutilated corpses of the vast majority of one’s acquaintances, a society would reach new artistic peaks, but perhaps in an era when death was more of an everyday occurrence, there was a resilience — perhaps even a need to repress and rebuild — that we in the comfortable modern west can’t quite grasp. While some artists sought this classicism almost to redeem what they saw as a weakened modern society, others — like Dante — stretched the mould somewhat by engaging with modern ideas infused with a classical perspective. But Boccaccio was no Dante; his writing challenged basic ideas held about fictional prose, and to those who would see his kid of work as lacking in a moral perspective, or just plain low. The combination of the plague and the return to classicism egged Boccaccio on to his great work, The Decameron.
Ten young adults — seven women and three men — flee Florence during the Black Death outbreak, taking shelter in a secluded villa in the country nearby. (I won’t ask why they didn’t offer to take other at-risk people with them to this evidently lush, Edenic garden; just for once, I’ll let class politics slide.) While entertaining themselves with games and perhaps other pursuits, the ten tell stories. Each day for ten days, one of them assigns a topic, and all ten pick a tale to narrate, making 100 in all. As with the other anthologies we have met, among them Ovid’s Metamorphoses and The Arabian Nights, the stories have diverse provenances. Some are older Italian folk tales or stories from France and Spain, some have more ancient origins from as far east as India, others may be Boccaccio’s own invention.
The stories also have diverse tones and ideas, from pointed barbs at the Catholic church, traditional folk stories, tales of pirates, deceitful lovers, magical cures, surprise affairs, adventure narratives, and at times seemingly deliberately scandalous tales. Day Three ends with a story in which a monk convinces a young virgin that sex is how they will become closer to God. The young woman becomes so addicted to the act that the man is almost exhausted and ruined from the frequency. Finally, when she is forcibly married off by her family to a suitor they prefer, the woman tells her friends about how sad she is that she will no longer be able to get closer to God; the other women knowingly assure that her new husband will also be able to help her in this regard. (John Payne’s 1886 translation, unsurprisingly a bit priggish, can’t bring himself to bring these sequences into English, and instead writes: “The translators regret that the disuse into which magic has fallen, makes it impossible to render the technicalities of that mysterious art into tolerable English; they have therefore found it necessary to insert several passages in the original Italian.”)
Although Boccaccio had a great connection to Dante, and deeply admired him, there is a pivotal difference between them. Dante or at least his authorial persona, as we will see next time, felt that he knew all; he preached the right and the wrong. Boccaccio has a playfulness and delights in the different voices of his characters and the sense of a world in which no viewpoint is quite right. Something similar would happen in England in the next generation, with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. What elevates Decameron is its very humanism. Writing very early in what would become a great movement across Europe, Boccaccio is passionate about how people act in all sorts of situations; how we respond to what we think of as rational thought, but which is often completely absurd. He captures humans of their time (admittedly, middle- and upper-class humans) in all of their dimensions. Certainly, it’s by no means as gritty as a French realist novel of the 19th century, but there is a vibrant tone that is missing in much literature from prior to the 14th century. But I won’t go on. This is one of those short blog posts that I’ve heard of in fables. If you want more, Wikipedia really is a good source on this book. You’ll find translations online, although beware the extremely old copyright-free ones that will read with difficulty. G.H. McWilliams’ Penguin translation (revised in 1995) is available in stores at a very reasonable price, a clear reading with lovely notes and a history of the work. More recently, a W.W. Norton translation was released by Wayne A. Rebhorn but I have not read much about it yet.
We will encounter Boccaccio again. He pops up as a source for Shakespeare on more than one occasion (the Bard couldn’t read Italian, but individual stories had been translated into other languages, and then on to English, by his time). If you’re looking for it, you’ll find The Decameron in Tennyson, Swift, Keats, and the famous Pier Paolo Pasolini film of 1971. We’ll meet a Decameron-esque story again much later in the 20th century from a Russian perspective, and then there is The Heptameron, a work of 72 short stories by the Frenchwoman Marguerite of Navarre. Sadly dying before she could reach the full 100, Marguerite sets her story in an old abbey where a group of travellers are waiting for a bridge to be completed to allow them on their way. One suggests that they take turns reading the Bible, but mercifully another member of the band has read Boccaccio, and suggests they do the same.
While we’re on the subject of women, Boccaccio is notable for having written the first collection of biographies exclusively of women in all of western literature. De Mulieribus Claris (Concerning Famous Women) came out later in his life, profiling 106 women from history, although many of them are mythical. (For a more modern take, are you familiar with Judy Chicago’s fantastic yet controversial art installation The Dinner Party?) Finally, for some reading material on The Decameron, check out this piece at Duke University; a brief musing by Nicholas Lezard for The Guardian; and this piece on the newest (2013) translation at the New Yorker.
