Dirty Books

Histories​ of Italian literature begin with the Tre Corone or Three Crowns: Dante (1265-1321), Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75) and Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch (1304-74), Boccaccio’s intimate friend. All three exalted the Italian vernacular but, to the puzzlement of modern readers, entrusted their most important philosophical works to Latin. This bilingualism is a dominant theme in both Marco Santagata’s new biography of Boccaccio and Brenda Schildgen’s critical study. Santagata links Boccaccio’s vernacularity to his appeal to a female audience, while Schildgen considers his contributions to literary theory in the Decameron and his Latin masterpiece, the Genealogia deorum gentilium (Genealogy of the Pagan Gods).

Chaucer, a younger contemporary of Petrarch and Boccaccio, read all three writers. During his early diplomatic career, he learned Italian and eagerly sought out their works. Yet while he proudly cites Dante and ‘Fraunceys Petrak, the laureat poete’, he never mentions Boccaccio, to whom his debts were far greater. Boccaccio’s Teseida became ‘The Knight’s Tale’; his Filostrato inspired Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer borrowed several tales from the Decameron and adopted Boccaccio’s appeal to reader responsibility to defend bawdy stories such as ‘The Miller’s Tale’. Why the reticence? Why, to avoid naming Boccaccio, did Chaucer invent a fictional Latin poet as his source for Troilus? It seems that Boccaccio already had a reputation problem. From the late Middle Ages all the way to Pasolini’s 1971 film of the Decameron, he has been best remembered – understandably, if unfairly – for his most obscene and ribald tales. In Italian, the adjective boccaccesco means ‘lascivious’; the New Yorker once described the Decameron as ‘probably the dirtiest great book in the Western canon’.

Boccaccio himself would have been startled to learn that his immortality rested on that ‘dirty book’, rather than his Latin humanist works. He took great pains with his collection of tales, recounted by seven well-heeled young women and three men in the genteel retreat where they go to escape the Black Death. He revised it extensively and produced several copies with his own hand, including a large-format scholarly edition. But at the end of his life, fearing for his salvation, he developed scruples. In one letter he even fretted that female readers, to whom he had dedicated the book, would consider him ‘a foul-mouthed pimp, a dirty old man’. Yet in his tale of Alibech and Rustico (Day Three, Story Ten), he had instructed girls in a new style of holiness. Deep in the Theban desert, the story goes, a young virgin called Alibech decides to dedicate herself to God. After two holy men send her away because of her beauty, she encounters the hermit Rustico, who takes her in. On finding that she is just as naive as she looks, Rustico conceives a stratagem. He tells Alibech to remove her clothes and kneel opposite him in prayer. He soon experiences ‘the resurrection of the flesh’, and tells the astonished Alibech that the ‘devil’ who has reared up in his body causes him great torment. Although no such devil troubles her own flesh, she does have a ‘hell’, Rustico explains, and nothing would please God more than for them to put the devil back into hell. Alibech soon learns to take such delight in this service that Rustico’s devil is exhausted, though her hell rages more fiercely than ever.

While the Decameron includes one hundred tales, some even more high-minded than this one, it begins with an account of the plague in Florence, painting a vivid picture of its grisly symptoms and the social breakdown that followed in its wake. Boccaccio survived the plague of 1347 but Santagata, his biographer, died in the plague of 2020. His book, awkwardly translated by Emlyn Eisenach, has a telling subtitle in Italian: ‘Fragilità di un genio’. Santagata argues that Boccaccio suffered from ‘psychological fragility’ that often led to self-sabotage. Emotionally unstable and intellectually restless, he experienced frequent mood swings that sapped his confidence. Late in life he was certain he had been a failure, especially when he compared his output with Dante’s or Petrarch’s. Yet the same restlessness also led him to experiment in genre and style, making him, in Santagata’s words, ‘the most modern writer of his day’.

Some of Boccaccio’s insecurity stemmed from his inauspicious start in life. He was born in or near the town of Certaldo and grew up in Florence. His father, Boccaccino di Chellino, was a prominent merchant and banker and Boccaccio appears to have been his illegitimate son. He never knew his mother and never married, though he had mistresses and at least five children. His father insisted that he first study banking, then canon law, instead of the literary pursuits he would have preferred. Despite a lifelong aversion to marriage, he loved women and dedicated several early works to them, especially to the semi-mythical beloved he called Fiammetta, his ‘little flame’. Few women could read Latin, so writing in Italian meant writing, in part, for the ‘ladies’ who typically consumed romances and other light fare. In his preface to the Decameron, Boccaccio sympathises with the plight of women, confined to their chambers and denied the mind-broadening occupations of men. Such readers, he hopes, will derive both pleasure and sound advice (Horace’s dulce et utile) from his stories. Yet the light touch of some tales belies the learning apparent in others, not to mention the sophisticated frame story. Boccaccio undoubtedly wanted male readers as well. He was writing for a mixed audience that could appreciate scholarship and entertainment in a single work – an audience that did not yet exist. He aimed to create it through his writing.

Anticlerical satire was hardly new in Italy, but Boccaccio took it to new heights – or depths – in the tale of Ser Ciappelletto (Day One, Story One). Ciappelletto, he tells us, was among the most heinous of villains: he had committed murder, fomented strife, revelled in all seven deadly sins and blasphemed against God and the Virgin Mary. He lied as easily as he breathed. On a mission to collect a bad debt in a distant city, Ciappelletto fell ill. This disconcerted his hosts, who did not want such a scoundrel to die unconfessed in their house and bring them into disrepute. So, to ease their minds, the old scapegrace asked for a friar to whom he might make his last (and in fact his first) confession. With many tears he confessed the tiniest imaginary offences, never mentioning his actual crimes. The clueless friar, convinced that Ciappelletto was a saint, glorified his holy life so eloquently in his funeral sermon that the people began to venerate him. As the story concludes, ‘God has performed many miracles through him’ for those who seek his intercession. As an inverted saint’s life, the tale strikes at the heart of popular piety and clerical credulity.

In a less cynical mood, another tale (Day One, Story Three) features Saladin, the much admired sultan of Egypt, seeking a loan from the Jewish moneylender Melchisedek. Saladin baits Melchisedek by inviting him to court and asking which is the true religion: Judaism, Christianity or Islam. Melchisedek cleverly sidesteps this trap with a parable. Once upon a time, he says, a man willed a precious ring to his son and heir, who in turn bequeathed it to his own son, until the ring had passed through many generations. Eventually it came into the hands of a father with three equally beloved and capable sons. Unwilling to choose among them, he had a jeweller make two identical replicas, then secretly gave a ring to each. On the father’s death, each brother presented his ring as proof of his inheritance, but since the three rings were indistinguishable, the ‘true’ heir could never be determined. So too with the three religions. Impressed, Saladin strikes up a lifelong friendship with Melchisedek. In an era not known for tolerance, the story’s account of religious difference is remarkably enlightened. Centuries later, Gotthold Lessing would make Boccaccio’s ring parable the centrepiece of his play Nathan the Wise, an appeal for interreligious peace.

Martin Luther, a less tolerant soul, preferred another tale about a Jew for its vigorous anti-Catholic message. In this story (Day One, Story Two), the Parisian merchant Giannotto tries to convert his Jewish friend Abraham out of concern for his soul, but Abraham clings loyally to his faith. Giannotto tries again and finally Abraham says he will visit the Curia in Rome. If he finds that the pope and his clerics lead admirable lives, he pledges to convert. Giannotto, aware of their debauchery, seeks to dissuade his friend, but Abraham insists on making the trip and, on arriving in Rome, finds a cesspool of corruption. In a surprising plot turn, he converts anyway, arguing that no institution so obviously depraved could have survived so long without divine aid. Juxtaposed as they are, the satire on Ser Ciappelletto, the anticlerical tale of Abraham’s conversion and the fable of the three rings get the Decameron off to a provocative start. It should be no surprise that it found its way onto the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books in 1559, more for its religious than its sexual improprieties. One result was the production of expurgated versions: offending monks become students, while naughty nuns turn into ‘ladies’.

Boccaccio conceived the Decameron as a kind of commedia profana, but his admiration for the Divina Commedia was unbounded. He personally copied the whole poem three times and several of Dante’s minor works would have disappeared if not for Boccaccio’s autograph copies. Much of his career was devoted to promoting Dante’s reputation, from his Little Treatise in Praise of Dante to the lectures he delivered late in his life – inaugurating a tradition of public readings, the Lecturae Dantis, that continues to this day. The readings were lavishly sponsored by the city of Florence at a salary of 100 florins for the lecturer, perhaps in atonement for the fact that the city had never recalled Dante from exile. Boccaccio’s lecture notes survive, providing one of our earliest commentaries on the Commedia. The sacro poema needed exposition, and also defence. Not only did churchmen take issue with Dante’s theological liberties, but he could hardly have condemned so many of his contemporaries to hell without making enemies of their families. More to our point, fans of Latin literature could not forgive Dante for ‘prostituting the Muses’ by treating such exalted themes in the vernacular. Petrarch himself was among the sceptics. Despite Boccaccio’s efforts, he was unable to persuade his friend of Dante’s merits. Boccaccio and Petrarch corresponded in Latin and exchanged their Latin works, but not their vernacular ones. Humanism, often misunderstood, could be a deeply conservative, elitist enterprise. While the humanists forged the vital tools of philology and textual criticism, their classical revival style was profoundly retardataire. Petrarch may have pinned his hopes for literary immortality on works like his Latin epic Africa, but it was his vernacular Canzoniere that launched an international craze for sonnets, keeping the courtly love lyric in vogue for two more centuries. The runaway popularity of both the Commedia and the Decameron, different as they are, represented the future.

The choice of a literary language was inextricable from the appeal to an audience, and in particular, the question of women readers. It was easy to mock their naivety. Boccaccio himself tells how the women of Ravenna, passing Dante in the streets, would say to one another: ‘Look, it’s that man who goes down into hell and returns whenever he likes.’ Almost perversely, Boccaccio wrote his encyclopedia of famous women (De mulieribus claris) in Latin, but his viciously misogynist Corbaccio in Italian. De mulieribus claris is remarkable: no such compendium had been produced before and the criterion for commemorating each woman was simply fame, not virtue. Although the work has no obvious feminist intention, Christine de Pizan would draw heavily from it in her Book of the City of Ladies (c.1400). Il Corbaccio is utterly different, something of an embarrassment to Boccaccio scholars. Its title is not an ordinary noun, but a calque on the author’s name coupled with the word for ‘crow’, a bird of ill omen. The work, which may or may not be autobiographical, has no known occasion. But it may be related to an untoward event of 1361, when a dying monk prophesied Boccaccio’s imminent death (he was mistaken) and warned that he must abandon poetry to save his soul. In response, the writer vowed to do so and deepened his piety. Il Corbaccio is dedicated to the Virgin Mary in thanksgiving for a ‘special grace’, namely Boccaccio’s deliverance from lust. In it the narrator, enamoured of a beautiful widow, has a dream in which he meets her deceased husband. Spouting contempt for his wife’s physical and moral flaws, the ghost persuades the narrator that ‘a woman is an imperfect creature, excited by a thousand foul passions,’ more abominable than a pig. Today, the work’s bitterness and vulgarity are more shocking than all the obscenity of the Decameron.

While blaming women might seem straightforward, praising them could be ambiguous. A case in point is the last of the hundred tales (Day Ten, Story Ten), which sings the praise of ‘patient Griselda’. A poor girl marries a marquis and vows at his command never to disobey his will. Obsessed with testing his wife’s fidelity, the husband stages the fake murder of both their children, then repudiates Griselda in favour of a younger, prettier bride who is in fact her daughter. As a final test, he recalls her from her hovel, still dressed in rags, to prepare his palace for the wedding feast and supervise the servants. Griselda bears all this with stoic equanimity, earning the ‘reward’ of a renewed matrimonial pact and reunion with her children. Petrarch, though he was no great fan of the Decameron, admired this tale so much that he retold it in Latin, turning it into an allegory of God and the soul. (In the years after the Black Death, God might have seemed very much like an abusive husband.) Chaucer read both Boccaccio’s and Petrarch’s versions, and his ‘Clerk’s Tale’ manages at once to praise Griselda, excoriate the marquis, retain the Petrarchan allegory and end with a spoof of the whole tale. In his envoy, the clerk warns husbands that ‘Grisilde is deed, and eek hir pacience,’ while encouraging ‘archewyves’ like the Wife of Bath to ‘stondeth at defence’ and ‘suffreth nat that men yow doon offence’. Taken at face value, the tale is almost unbearable, but Boccaccio adds neither moral nor satire. Griselda’s heroism stands at an uneasy crossroads between hagiography and horror.

Lacking independent means, Boccaccio held a variety of minor civic offices in Florence, with the result that he was caught up more than once in the political feuds that roiled the Italian city-states. Twice he was sent as ambassador to the pope in Avignon. In difficult times, his friendship with Petrarch was a stabilising force in his life, and the two collaborated on many humanist projects. Their greatest success came in 1360, when they persuaded the Studium of Florence to establish a professorship in Greek. The position was given to Leontius Pilatus, an eccentric Byzantine scholar from Thessaloniki, who was to give public lectures, tutor private pupils in Greek and produce a Latin translation of Homer. But he lasted for only two academic years, unable to adapt to Italian ways, and died from a lightning strike during a storm at sea. He did, however, complete the translation, which he left in Boccaccio’s hands. The triumphant Boccaccio boasted that he ‘was the first who, at my own expense, called back to Tuscany the writings of Homer and of other Greek authors, whence they had departed many centuries before’.

It is impossible​ to overestimate the prestige of the Greco-Roman classics in humanist circles. Yet there had always been some Christian resistance to recycled pagan myths, filled as they were with deities committing rape, incest and other abominations. One standard response was to allegorise the myths, finding profound truths about human nature concealed beneath their artful surface. This is the line Boccaccio takes in his Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, a monument of scholarship that catalogues more than seven hundred mythical figures. More innovative is his impassioned defence of poetry in Book 14. By ‘poetry’ he means all of what we now call literature – prose and verse, pagan and Christian – and he defines it as a ‘stable and fixed branch of knowledge, founded and established on eternal principles’. Speaking against its cultured despisers, he calls poetry a ‘fervent and exquisite invention’ proceeding from the bosom of God, granted only to a few chosen souls and worthy of reverence. Nature in her wisdom has fashioned all human beings with their diverse vocations – carpenters and sailors, merchants and priests, lawyers and kings – but the list culminates in ‘poets, philosophers and sublime theologians’. Moreover, poetry is socially useful: it can teach, console and invigorate the mind. Most significant may be Boccaccio’s understanding of fiction as an autonomous category, neither factual truth nor reprehensible lies. As Philip Sidney would later put it, ‘the poet … nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth.’ In Book 15, Boccaccio goes on to establish an Italian literary canon, seamlessly linking ancients and moderns, Latin and vernacular writers, culminating in Dante, Petrarch and himself. This is not so much self-promotion as a far-sighted vindication of the vernacular and the wider audience it enabled, including women. It also cements the idea of a ‘Renaissance’ with Italy as its heart and soul.

The Decameron includes a more personal, amusing, and in one sense more radical defence. In the introduction to Book 4, Boccaccio offers an early example of reader-response criticism. Although the book was far from finished, its tales had already begun to circulate and not everyone liked them. It seems that prudish critics had been complaining about Boccaccio’s desire to please ladies, interpreting his literary efforts as amorous exploits. Boccaccio disarmingly responds by accepting their critique. Why, after all, should he not love women and take delight in pleasing them? The Muses are ladies, after all, and ‘the fact is that ladies have already been the reason for my composing thousands of verses, while the Muses were in no way the cause.’ There is nothing shameful about writing for women; Dante himself did so. Where would the Commedia be without Beatrice? Concluding the Decameron in his own voice, Boccaccio makes the revolutionary move of placing the moral responsibility for literature squarely on the reader, not the writer. To the pure all things are pure, as St Paul says, while a corrupt mind sees nothing but corruption everywhere. Even bawdy tales have merit for those who know how to interpret them, but a reader who takes offence at trifles can just skip the offending stories and focus on the edifying ones. In short, ‘the lady who is forever saying her prayers or baking … cakes for her confessor should leave my tales alone.’ This is Boccaccio’s greatest contribution to literary theory: vernacularity, writing for entertainment, reader responsibility and the autonomy of fiction are all braided together and gendered feminine. For better or worse, that chain would hold – especially when more women began to write. It is more than gender that binds the elegant storytellers of the Decameron to the ‘damned mob of scribbling women’ that Nathaniel Hawthorne would denounce in the 1850s.