TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
I. THE WORLD OF THE AUTHOR
The brief and elegant prologue with which Boccaccio introduces the Decameron to his readers should not be interpreted too literally. In it, he claims that his motives in writing the hundred tales were humanitarian, and expresses the hope that they will not only exert a healing effect upon the lovelorn ladies to whom the work is ostensibly addressed, but also provide them with useful instruction and advice. Few people would take seriously his contention that the Decameron is an improving work of literature specifically designed to assist young ladies in the throes of love. The gentle irony underlying the outwardly serious declaration of his aims is obvious to all but the most casual of readers. Yet when he alluded at an earlier point in the prologue to that most lofty and noble love by which he had been inflamed since his earliest youth, the temptation to interpret the passage as referring to a personal experience was one which many of his biographers were unable to resist, especially when read in conjunction with various ‘autobiographical’ motifs that keep on appearing in most of his other literary works. Thus arose the traditional portrait of Boccaccio as a bourgeois youth of humble beginnings who succeeded in winning the love of a royal princess, by whom he was ultimately rejected. But this fanciful account of the writer’s life, based as it was upon an over-literal interpretation of incidents recounted in works of fiction by an author deeply versed in the allegorical conventions of medieval literature, has now been superseded.
The circumstances of the author’s birth, in the summer of 1313, are obscure. What is certain is that he was illegitimate, the product of a liaison between a Florentine banking official, Boccaccio di Chellino, whose family had moved to Florence from Certaldo at the turn of the century, and a lady of whom nothing whatever is definitely known. The fact that his father’s business took him on occasion to Paris, and that one of the writer’s early biographers describes his mother as a Parisian, gave currency to the belief that he was born in the French capital, whence a proud and doting father brought him back to Italy in his infancy. But this romantic account of his origins is almost certainly false. It is now generally accepted that he was born in Tuscany, probably in Florence but possibly in his father’s native town of Certaldo, where Boccaccio was to spend the last thirteen years of his life.
It was at any rate in Florence that Boccaccio spent his childhood. Contemporary records indicate that his infancy coincides with the period when his father was making his mark with the famous Florentine banking house known as the Compagnia dei Bardi. At some time before 1320, his father married Margherita de’ Mardoli, whose family could proudly boast an ancestral connection with Beatrice Portinari, the inspiring force of Dante’s Commedia. From early childhood, therefore, he was ideally placed to acquire the rudiments of that veneration of Dante which is evident in the whole of his work from his earliest compositions to the lengthy but unfinished commentaries on Dante’s poem that constitute his last major literary labour. One of the companions of his childhood and adolescence was Zanobi da Strada, who like Boccaccio was destined to become a poet and to establish himself in Neapolitan society. And it was Zanobi’s father, Giovanni Mazzuoli, acting as tutor to both, who encouraged his pupils to study and admire the work of the poet of the Commedia. Boccaccio’s reverence for Dante was similar in its intensity to that of Dante himself for Virgil. Just as Dante’s poetry is interspersed with echoes and reminiscences of the Aeneid, so Boccaccio’s work is consistently studded with fragments from the medieval epic of his Florentine predecessor. Boccaccio’s description of Dante, in a letter to Petrarch of 1359, as the first guide of his studies (primus studiorum dux) recalls the terminology used by Dante in the Commedia to describe the great Latin poet.
At the age of thirteen, or thereabouts, Boccaccio moved from Florence to Naples, where his father had been appointed to a high-ranking position in the Neapolitan branch of the Bardi bank, which, like the other leading Florentine banking houses, the Peruzzi and the Acciaiuoli, had for many years been the financial mainstay of the kingdom’s Angevin rulers. Even before reaching adolescence, the young Boccaccio had himself been apprenticed by his father to a career in banking, for which he had no natural inclination whatsoever. After what he later described as ‘six wasted years’, he persuaded his father to allow him to take up the study of canon law at the Neapolitan Studium, a Dominican institution established in 1269, which had close links with the university, founded in 1224 by Emperor Frederick II. Although his formal course of studies there was little more congenial to him than the career he had abandoned, it enabled him not only to begin assembling the vast store of erudition that underpins all of his literary work, but also to establish influential contacts in the fields of scholarship and culture in general.
Naples was at that time a flourishing intellectual centre, attracting poets, philosophers, artists and men of letters from all over Europe, especially from France and northern Italy. King Robert the Wise, who occupied the throne from 1309 to 1343, was the most powerful ruler in the Italy of his day, and an enlightened patron and practitioner of the arts. Dante had expressed a poor opinion of the Angevin monarch in the early years of his reign, dubbing him the king who was fit only for writing sermons. But Boccaccio was later to describe him as a second Solomon, and one of the leading Florentine chroniclers of the period, Giovanni Villani, wrote that he was ‘the wisest of the Christians of the last five hundred years’. The language of Robert’s court being French, the influence of French culture was all-pervasive.
The ‘six wasted years’ of Boccaccio’s apprenticeship as a minor banking official were wasted only in the sense that they temporarily prevented him from pursuing the career as a scholar and poet for which he had always considered himself instinctively suited from early childhood. The Neapolitan branch of the Bardi bank was situated in the Ruga Cambiorum (‘Exchange Street’), in a quarter of the city that offered him the opportunity of daily contact with various aspects and personalities of a dynamic business and commercial world that is reflected in much of his later writing, in particular in many of the stories of the Decameron. His duties would have taken him regularly, for instance, through those areas of the city that he describes in such graphic detail in the famous story of Andreuccio of Perugia (II, 5). As a bank teller and bank messenger, he had regular dealings with a broad cross-section of the trading and seafaring classes that constituted the core of a thriving commercial society in what was regarded as one of the most important centres of economic activity in medieval Europe.
At the same time, because of his father’s high standing with the Angevin court, the young Boccaccio was enabled to mix freely with the Neapolitan nobility. Many years afterwards, in a letter written to a friend in 1363, he recalled with deep nostalgia this period of his life when he had entertained in splendid style and with true Florentine hospitality the sons of the aristocracy, who ‘were not ashamed to come and visit me in my house’. He was thus familiar with the life-style of a sophisticated courtly society, and his keen observation of the refined manners and sentiments of that milieu is reflected in many of his writings. The world of the storytellers in the Decameron, for all its heightened, ‘literary’ and deliberately unreal quality, is an idealized image of a society in which Boccaccio himself participated, albeit as a foreigner and an outsider, during the formative years of his life in Naples.
Even more important from the point of view of his future development as a writer were the numerous contacts he established in those years with the outstanding scholars and men of letters who had been attracted to Naples by the renown of its learned sovereign and patron of literature and the arts. Among those who guided and encouraged Boccaccio in his innate vocation for the study and practice of poetry was Paolo da Perugia, the curator of the Royal Library, with its rich collection of material in the areas of philosophy, mythology, medicine and theology. Paolo’s encyclopaedic compendium of ancient myths, the Collectiones, was specifically acknowledged by Boccaccio as the inspiring fo
rce for his own immensely influential Latin work on the same subject, Genealogia deorum gentilium (Genealogy of the Gentile Gods), composed towards the end of his life. In an affectionate tribute to Paolo in the latter work, he describes him as a scholar, advanced in years, who would take enormous pains to track down references whenever the king sought his help and advice. In the same passage, Boccaccio regrets that on Paolo’s death his shrewish wife destroyed his Collectiones along with other works of his, thus making Boccaccio’s own task all the more difficult. He concludes by claiming that Paolo had no equal in such studies.
Other outstanding representatives of learning and the arts with whom Boccaccio came into contact during his sojourn in Naples were the astronomer Andalò da Negro, the theologian and rhetorician Dionigi da Borgo San Sepolcro, and the two leading figures of early Neapolitan humanism, Barbato da Sulmona and Giovanni Barrili. All of these scholars, especially Paolo and Dionigi, had a considerable influence on Boccaccio’s development as a writer, both in the broadening of his literary knowledge and in the formation and refinement of his style and technique. A further important figure in this respect was Cino da Pistoia, the poet whose work marks the transition between the dolce stil novo and the poetry of Petrarch. Cino was in Naples pursuing his profession as one of Italy’s leading academic lawyers, and Boccaccio is known to have attended the lectures on jurisprudence that he gave in the university there. Evidence of his regard for Cino may be seen in the affectionate reference to him that occurs in the Introduction to the Fourth Day of the Decameron. Boccaccio may also have attended lectures given by another famous lawyer of the period, Luca da Penne, who had written an important commentary on the Justinian Code which reveals him as a scholar of impressive erudition.
All of the influences to which reference has been made are apparent in the works Boccaccio wrote during his ‘Neapolitan’ period, from La caccia di Diana (Diana’s Hunt), a brief but immensely complex mythological poem listing the young women of all the more important Neapolitan families of the day, to the beautifully measured narrative in octave rhyme, Filostrato, the ultimate source for Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. The remaining two major works of this period were Filocolo, a prolix, rambling prose version of the well-known French medieval romance narrating the adventures of two young lovers, Flore and Blanchefleur, and the narrative poem Teseida, intended by its author as the first Italian martial epic, from which Chaucer was to derive the material for his Knight’s Tale.
In writing the Filocolo, Boccaccio’s indebtedness to French literary models is seen not only in the narrative itself, but also in his handling of the amour courtois material of the Provençal troubadours, in particular the literary device known as the Court of Love, a kind of debating chamber for deciding affairs of the heart. A typical case submitted to the Court’s judgement concerned a lady who listened to one admirer whilst squeezing the hand of another and touching with her toe the foot of a third. Which of her three admirers was the one she favoured most? Although no such question arises in the pages of the Decameron, the Filocolo is of special interest for the lengthy episode in Book IV where the hero, Florio, delayed in Naples by a storm during his sea-voyage in search of his beloved Biancofiore, attends afesta held in his honour. There he is invited to join a company of four ladies and nine gentlemen, who in turn propose and discuss thirteen questioni d’amore, or questions concerning love. The structure of the episode is makeshift and rudimentary by comparison with the elaborate ‘frame’ of the Decameron. The locus amœnus where the discussions take place is very briefly described. The oldest of the men who are present, Ascalion, is unanimously elected King of the company. But Ascalion, claiming to have spent his life in the service of Mars rather than of Venus, declines the honour and bestows it instead on Fiammetta, whom he crowns with a garland of laurel. The initial suggestion that the company should spend the hotter part of the day in discussing various questions of love comes from Fiammetta, using much the same argument as the one Pampinea will use in the Decameron to persuade her companions to engage in storytelling. In each case, the object of the exercise is to gain profit and amusement from time that would otherwise be spent in idle pursuits. Likewise, the formulas used to introduce the questioni in the Filocolo are often similar to those that preface the novelle in the Decameron. Two of the thirteen questioni involve the recounting of stories that Boccaccio later refines and inserts into the Decameron itself (X, 4 and X, 5). But whereas the Decameron is distinctively Florentine, the background to the Filocolo is decidedly Neapolitan, or Parthenopean, as the author, in his determination to classicize his text, prefers to describe it.
The available information about Boccaccio’s sojourn in Naples – by common consent the most crucial period of his career – is in fact remarkably sparse compared to the wealth of accessible documentary material relating to his later life in Florence and elsewhere. Opinions differ concerning the precise date of his return from Naples to Florence, but in all probability it was during the winter of 1340–41. This is because on the one hand he declares in his commentary on Dante’s Commedia that he was not in Florence during the plague of 1340, whilst on the other hand he does not seem to have been in Naples during the early spring of 1341, when Petrarch visited the city en route to Rome, in April of that year, for his coronation as poet laureate. Boccaccio’s return to Florence was at all events dictated by a combination of political and economic factors. The traditional ties of friendship between the Florentine commune and the Angevin monarchy had come under considerable strain, partly because of King Robert’s refusal to support the Florentines in their protracted wars against Lucca, and partly, also, because the dependence of the Angevins on Florentine bankers had by that time dwindled to comparative insignificance. Boccaccio’s father had already left Naples after breaking off his connection with the Bardi company in or around October 1338, and some of Boccaccio’s biographers have suggested, without any real evidence, that his own return to Florence was an inevitable consequence of his father’s bankruptcy. A more probable explanation is that far-reaching changes in Neapolitan foreign and economic policy had impaired his social links with the Angevin court and raised the spectre of insecurity, though there may well have been some more pressing reason for his reluctant departure.
That his departure from Naples was indeed reluctant is attested by a letter he wrote from Florence on 28 August 1341 to the friend and companion of his Neapolitan youth, Niccola Acciaiuoli, now a powerful and influential figure in the Angevin court. Acciaiuoli, three years older than Boccaccio, was a fellow Florentine who had gone to Naples in 1331. According to the chronicler Giovanni Villani, his meteoric rise to fame and fortune was not unconnected with his having become the lover of Catherine of Valois, sister-in-law to King Robert and Empress of Constantinople. It was Acciaiuoli who had been instrumental in introducing Boccaccio to the ranks of Neapolitan high society, and in the letter of August 1341 Boccaccio tells him of his dissatisfaction with life in Florence,1 at the same time strongly hinting that his former friend could perhaps bring about a change in his fortunes, presumably by finding him a sinecure at court. But his plea, like others he addressed to Acciaiuoli on later occasions, fell upon deaf ears.
In a work Boccaccio wrote some two or three years after his return to Florence, the Elegy of Madonna Fiammetta, there is a passage which to some extent clarifies his motives for leaving Naples, at the same time confirming the distaste for life in Florence of which he had written to Acciaiuoli. In Book II, the Neapolitan heroine is remonstrating with her young Florentine lover, Panfilo, concerning his decision to abandon her and return to the distant city of his birth. It is mid-winter, a detail that accords with the hypothesis that Boccaccio’s own return took place in the winter of 1340–41. Although, as stated earlier, such ‘autobiographical’ passages require to be treated with caution, it seems reasonable to assume that Panfilo, whose name will later be given to one of the three male storytellers of the Decameron, is an idealized self-portrait. It is perhaps revealing that Panfil
o explains his decision to abandon Fiammetta as being due to the love he bears towards his father, who is now an elderly widower, bereft of all his remaining children and kinsfolk. Filial piety was of course a popular literary topos, and one that the author had already exploited in his Filocolo, in an episode where the hero is attempting to dissuade his father from sending him abroad. But it happens that Panfilo’s description in the Fiammetta of his father’s circumstances corresponds more or less exactly with the known facts about Boccaccio’s own father at the time in question. His wife, Margherita de’ Mardoli, was now dead, and so too were the children of that marriage, so that his natural son would indeed have seemed the sole remaining comfort of his declining years.
In another passage from the Fiammetta, the Neapolitan heroine reminds her Florentine lover of his own description of his native city:
… as you once told me yourself, your city is full of pompous talk and cowardly deeds, the servant not of a thousand laws, but of as many opinions as there are people in it, bristling with arms, at war both at home and abroad, teeming with greedy, proud, and envious people, and full of countless anxieties: all of which things are ill-suited to your own temperament. As for the city you are preparing to leave, I know that you acknowledge it to be contented, peaceful, flourishing, liberal, and subject to a single ruler: and these things, if I know you at all, are greatly to your liking.2