Women, Enjoyment, and the Defense of Virtue in Boccaccio’s Decameron

V. Ferme

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137490551
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137482815
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Providing new ways of reading Boccaccio's masterpiece, Decameron , Ferme analyzes the dynamics between the women who rule the first half of the story. Peeling back the many narrative layers within and outside of the framework, this book unearths the complications and trickery surrounding gender and death in Boccaccio's world and culture.

CHAPTER 1

GALEOTTO: A PROLOGUE BY WAY OF THE PROEM

“Comincia il libro chiamato Decameron, cognominato prencipe Galeotto, nel quale si contengono cento novella, in diece dì dette da sette donne e da tre giovani uomini” [Here begins the book named Decameron, surnamed prince Galehaut, which contains one hundred stories told in ten days by seven women and three young men] (Decameron 3).¹ These words, which precede the narrative incipit of the Decameron, have long attracted the attention of Boccaccio and Dante scholars. The connection with Dante has been remarked both for the cross-textual reference implied in the qualifying nickname galeotto (Galahad or Galehaut) given to the book—which Dante first used in Canto V of his Inferno—and for the reliance on the numbers 3, 7, and 10 that, in the Decameron, replicate the numerology subtending Dante’s Divine Comedy.² The issue of the cognomen (surname, nickname) is particularly vexing, because scholars differ on how to interpret Boccaccio’s attribution of “Prince Galehaut” to his work. Since Dante’s original mention is fraught with the negative connotations directly or indirectly contained in Francesca’s words, many wonder why Boccaccio would so prominently display his book’s association with the legendary Arthurian hero Galehaut and his role as intermediary in the illicit love affair between Queen Guinevere and Sir Lancelot; especially because Boccaccio insists on this association by making the nickname also the last word of the book (“Thus ends the book called Decameron, surnamed prince Galehaut” [1261, emphasis added]).

Initially, readers of the Decameron understood the cross-textual reference as the first of Boccaccio’s many nods to the authority of Dante, a writer Boccaccio admired, as suggested in his Trattatello in laude di Dante and in his acceptance to give public lectures on Dante’s Divine Comedy toward the end of his life.³ The surname refers to a book/legend that, in Dante’s Comedy, acts as the intermediary for the infelicitous love affair between Francesca and her brother-in-law Paolo Malatesta (“Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse” [Galehaut was the book and who wrote it] Inf. V, 102). The Arthurian legend’s negative valence is clear in Francesca’s words (which do not necessarily reflect Dante’s point of view). By having Francesca attribute the fault for the love affair to the book and who wrote it (not her or Paolo), Dante shows that the sinner is unable to recognize her agency in the sin. In doing so, and this becomes important when exploring Boccaccio’s use of the term, he distances himself as pilgrim and writer from Francesca’s words, and questions his own interpretation of the Arthurian legend, courtly love, and even the stilnovisti’s further elaboration of the theories of love en vogue during the late Middle Ages. Therein lies, for many, the crux of the issue. In referring intertextually to the Arthurian legend mentioned in Dante’s Inferno, is Boccaccio alerting his (female?) readership to the negative valence that Francesca assigns to it?⁴ Or is he parodically reversing the negative valence that Francesca and possibly Dante attribute to the Arthurian tale to shine a more positive light on the world of courtly love that it subtends, while taking a jab at Dante?

Lucia Battaglia Ricci espouses the latter possibility in Ragionare nel giardino. Boccaccio e i cicli pittorici del “Trionfo della Morte.” The author explores the complex relationship between Boccaccio’s Decameron (in particular the group of storytellers and the locus amoenus of the garden) and the cultural zeitgeist embodied most ostensibly by the invitation to repent one’s earthly delights championed in frescos like the “Triumph of Death” in the Camposanto of Pisa, which predates rather than follows Boccaccio’s Decameron, as some critics once suggested;⁵ by Jacopo Passavanti’s sermons to repent the sins of the flesh;⁶ and, ultimately, even by Dante’s literary trip through the afterlife. Through a careful analysis, Battaglia Ricci concludes that the fresco might have provided an inspiration for Boccaccio’s choice of the brigata (the group of storytellers) and the narrative loci of secluded, harmonious gardens to offer an alternate philosophy of life to his audience. Moreover, as she juxtaposes the worldview proffered by Boccaccio’s brigata—through the author’s galeotto book—to Dante’s as it is presented especially through the episode of Paolo and Francesca, Battaglia Ricci shows that, in the Decameron, Boccaccio “worries about exonerating writing and the usefulness of literary texts, for which one can appropriately say ‘We read one day for pleasure,’ from the accusation that Dante had succinctly leveled in the blunt formula contained in the famous verse ‘Galeotto was the book and who wrote it’” (180, emphasis in the original). As evidence, she adduces an example of rebellion by Boccaccio against the authority of his putative, literary father, Dante.

Boccaccio’s questioning of Dante emerges as he interprets Dante’s meeting with Francesca and Paolo in the Esposizioni sopra la Commedia (V, 147–158). Rather than corroborating Dante’s version of the events (the meeting in the garden between the in-laws, their reading of the Arthurian legend, the falling in love, and its tragic consequences), Boccaccio dismisses it: “I do not recall ever having heard anywhere how this love brought her to lie with Paolo except for what the author writes about it here [ . . . ] I suspect that the story was invented more from what was possible than from what was actually true, given that it is hard to believe that the author could have known what took place” (Expositions, V, par. 151, 280).⁷ In its place, Battaglia Ricci explains, he offers an alternate version for how the lovers came to their demise that does not hinge on the reading of the Arthurian legend. Boccaccio lays the blame on Francesca’s father for using her as a pawn in a game of political alliances, because he tricked Francesca into believing she was marrying the handsome Paolo rather than his valiant, but lame, brother Gianciotto (Gianni). When Francesca woke up after the first nuptial night to find Gianni in her bed instead of Paolo, “She was furious when she realized she had been tricked. None of this, however, did anything to diminish the love that Paolo had inspired in her” (V, 151, 280). Eventually, the love for Paolo precipitated the events that led Gianciotto to discover the lovers in her bridal chambers and kill them both; though, as Boccaccio recounts, Francesca died only because she put herself in the way of Gianciotto’s sword, destined for Paolo: “Gianni had already raised his sword and was thrusting it downward with all his might. What happened next was not at all what Gianni had in mind: the rapier’s tip passed completely through Francesca’s bosom and pierced Paolo on the other side” (Expositions, V, par. 154–155, 281).

At this point, I might interject (Battaglia Ricci does not) that Boccaccio’s narration is almost amusing in its undercutting of Dante’s authority. It is as if Boccaccio dares his audience (during his Florentine lectures or as we read the Esposizioni) to connect the dots and see through his assumptions. How can one read Boccaccio’s statement, “I suspect that the story was invented more from what was possible than from what was actually true, given that it is hard to believe that the author could have known what took place” (emphasis added), without finding it subversive? To claim that Dante, who was 20 years old when Francesca died and would have heard of the events firsthand, could not have known what took place, but he, Boccaccio, who was born almost 30 years after the events occurred, knows the true story, is daring. It becomes more so knowing that Guido Novello da Polenta, Francesca’s nephew, hosted Dante during his exile in Ravenna (where he was eventually buried). By disputing Dante’s story, Boccaccio also undercuts his mentor’s auctoritas (authoritativeness).⁸

Why would Boccaccio endorse an alternate ending that removes the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, and the galeotto book as intermediaries for the love of Paolo and Francesca? Why would he undermine the authority of Dante so blatantly, since there is little doubt that his use of the surname galeotto for the Decameron refers intertextually to Dante’s use in the Comedia? As Vittorio Russo has suggested, Francesca represents, in the ideal of courtly love that her unfortunate love for Paolo embodies, the type of heroine that might have been the protagonist of stories in the Decameron, like Ghismonda or the wife of Guiglielmo Rossiglione on Day IV. Thus, by further fictionalizing her demise, Boccaccio would relate her to his views about love and, in contrast with Dante’s strong condemnation, make her “also a victim of the incurable disagreement between the bonds of morality and of the institutions and the impulses of love that are natural and shared by every human being” (Russo 157). Boccaccio might have also wanted to protect his legacy, by distancing his galeotto (the Decameron) from Dante’s as he reflected on its fame at the end of his life. If Boccaccio understood the function of galeotto as a positive one, one that can provide diletto (enjoyment) and utile consiglio (useful advice) to women in love, then he needed to remove the negative connotations that Dante’s antecedent cast on books about (illicit) love, such as the Arthurian romances and, de facto, the Decameron itself. In this sense, we might say that Boccaccio operates a double act of subversion toward Dante’s authority. First, he cites Dante’s original use in opening his book to change its valence: from its role as the instigator for the illicit love of the in-laws and thus a dead end to their story, to its role as a literary go-between that can provide enjoyment and useful advice for women in love. Then, later in his old age, in the Esposizioni, Boccaccio completely removes Dante’s adversarial valence by claiming it was a fiction that had no validity. In its place, he constructs a better fiction that accounts for the death of Paolo and Francesca, and removes the negative agency that a book about love could have on the destiny of the two lovers. In doing so, Boccaccio continues the defense and apology pro Decameron that he had begun in the Introduction of Day IV and continued in the Conclusion of the book 20 years earlier.

In Dante’s citation, there exists a further level of interpretation. When Francesca says, “Galeotto was the book and who wrote it,” the text suggests that Francesca still follows the irresponsible assumption that she and Paolo had little agency in their affair, and that the book and its writer were at fault for what befell them (Boccaccio’s interpretation in the Esposizioni, through Battaglia Ricci’s reading, suggests that even Dante blames the book). In the Decameron’s heading there is no such distancing. The book is nicknamed galeotto by the author/narrator himself, not by a fictional, dead character created by Dante. His attribution is not one of blame as in the Dantean reference, but one of clarification (i.e., “this book is named Decameron but nicknamed galeotto, so you know what awaits you”). Boccaccio thus embraces his Galehaut and, in so doing, subtly undermines the authority of Dante, claiming that being a galeotto is not a bad thing and, within the right context, can lead to more useful advice than Francesca and Paolo received from their reading of the book.

Battaglia Ricci reaches similar conclusions in revisiting the episode of Paolo and Francesca through Boccaccio’s Esposizioni. Boccaccio’s substitution of Dante’s story with one in which Francesca is a pawn and no book mediates the love affair suggests that Boccaccio did not want the world of courtly love and Arthurian romances to be sullied by implications of impropriety. More broadly stated, when Battaglia Ricci juxtaposes this reading with her interpretation of other texts such as the “Triumph of Death,” Passavanti’s sermons, and even other Dantean references to courtly love and sin, as well as to Boccaccio’s authorial interventions in the Decameron, she sees a parodic flipping of “traditional materials and narrative models held by fourteenth-century readers” (187). Thus, while Dante could look back on his engagement with the ideals of courtly love and the dolce stil novo (the Sweet New Style, as presented in the Vita nuova and also the Divina Commedia) as the result of youthful errors that led to perdition, Boccaccio wishes to revalue the enjoyment but especially the useful advice contained in his book’s playful narratives. Indeed, in the brigata members’ oft-repeated statement that their actions, if not their stories, have remained chaste and unsullied, she finds “precisely the ability not to buy into the models proffered by the narration immediately and a-critically [ . . . ] without moral failings or dangerous compromises enacted by the brigata itself” (190). In turn, this undermines the forbidding worldview presented by Dante and promotes “a complete reexamination of the literary word” (196) through books like Boccaccio’s own, which become the catalysts (a new meaning of galeotto) for a more balanced understanding “of the overall complexity of human experiences” (197). In the end, Boccaccio is more interested in revaluing the pleasure of reading tout court, and Arthurian romances in particular, as a balm for those who suffer from similar pangs of love, bypassing the negative valences implicit in Dante’s infernal reference.⁹

Battaglia Ricci’s interpretation conflates the accusations that Francesca levels on the book and “who wrote it” with Dante’s point of view. From this perspective, then, Dante believes that the responsibility for the illicit love affair lies not only with the lovers’ flawed carnal impulses, but also with books, and characters, that suggest improper relationships against the framework of moral and religious teachings that dictate his worldview. This attitude is what Boccaccio takes exception with in defending the Decameron against his critics in the Author’s Conclusion:

Appresso assai ben si può cognoscere queste cose non nella chiesa, delle cui cose e con animi e con vocaboli onestissimi si convien dire [ . . . ] né ancora nelle scuole de’ filosofanti, dove l’onestà non meno che in altra parte è richesta, dette sono, né tra’ cherici né tra’ filosofi in alcun luogo ma ne’ giardini, in luogo di sollazzo, tra persone giovani, benché mature e non pieghevoli per novelle [ . . . ] dette sono. [. . .] Le quali, chenti che elle si sieno, e nuocere e giovar possono, sì come possono tutte l’altre cose, avendo riguardo allo ascoltatore (Decameron 1256, emphasis added).

[One also should recognize that these things are said not in church, where one must speak with virtuous soul and words, nor in the schools of the philosophers, where virtue is required in no lesser degree than elsewhere, nor among clerks or philosophers in any place. Instead, they are told in gardens, in a place open to fun times, among young people, though mature and unlikely swayed by stories [ . . . ] Which stories, whatever they might be, c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1.  Galeotto: A Prologue by Way of the Proem
• 2.  Contested Interlude: The Plague
• 3.  Pampinea’s “Honorable” Leadership in the Decameron
• 4.  Sicurano da Finale and Paganino da Mare: Of Corsairs, Merchants, and Identity in the Late Middle Ages
• 5.  Giletta of Narbonne: Chastity and Matrimony on the Day of Sexual Excesses
• 6.  “Love and Death”: Male Authority and the Threat of Violence under Filostrato’s Rule
• 7.  Fiammetta’s Revolution: Honor, Love, and Marriage on Day V
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index