A Boccaccian Renaissance

Essays on the Early Modern Impact of Giovanni Boccaccio and His Works

Martin Eisner, David G. Lummus, Martin Eisner, David G. Lummus

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780268105891
• eBook ISBN: 9780268105914
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Renaissance History
• Index: Literature

A Boccaccian Renaissance brings together essays written by internationally recognized scholars in diverse national traditions to respond to the largely unaddressed question of Boccaccio's impact on early modern literature and culture in Italy and Europe. Martin Eisner and David Lummus co-edit the first comprehensive examination in English of Boccaccio's impact on the Renaissance.

The essays investigate what it means to follow a Boccaccian model, in tandem with or in place of ancient authors such as Vergil or Cicero, or modern poets such as Dante or Petrarch. The book probes how deeply the Latin and vernacular works of Boccaccio spoke to the Renaissance humanists of the fifteenth century. It treats not only the literary legacy of Boccaccio's works but also their paradoxical importance for the history of the Italian language and reception in theater and books of conduct.

While the geographical focus of many of the essays is on Italy, the volume concludes with three studies that open new inroads to understanding his influence on Spanish, French, and English writers across the sixteenth century. The book will appeal strongly to scholars and students of Boccaccio, the Italian and European Renaissance, and Italian literature.

Contributors: Jonathan Combs-Schilling, Rhiannon Daniels, Martin Eisner, Simon Gilson, James Hankins, Timothy Kircher, Victoria Kirkham, David Lummus, Ronald L. Martinez, Ignacio Navarrete, Brian Richardson, Marc Schachter, Michael Sherberg, and Janet Levarie Smarr

PART 1
Boccaccio and Renaissance Humanism

CHAPTER 1

Boccaccio and the Political Thought of Renaissance Humanism

JAMES HANKINS

For there is none of you so mean and base

That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.

—Shakespeare, Henry V

Someone who wishes to learn about Boccaccio’s political thought and situate it amid the varied strands of political reflection in late medieval and Renaissance Europe faces several obstacles at the outset. One is that Boccaccio simply has never been taken seriously by historians of political thought, especially in anglophone scholarship. There are, to take some key examples, only a couple of passing references to him in Quentin Skinner’s canonical Foundations of Modern Political Thought and none at all in the relevant volume of The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought. It hasn’t helped that Boccaccio’s political ideas are developed at greatest length in the De casibus virorum illustrium, a text written in awkward and often obscure Latin and deploying considerably less narrative charm than the Decameron.¹ Another obstacle is the persistent classification of Boccaccio as a “medieval” writer, most famously in Vittore Branca’s Boccaccio medievale, but the same conceptual framework is found in the writings of Giuseppe Billanovich and other postwar scholars as well.² This classification has been reinforced, for the history of political thought, by the modern historiographical tradition, which emphasizes republican liberty and civic humanism as the central themes of humanist political thought. That interpretation was first laid out by Hans Baron and Eugenio Garin in the middle decades of the twentieth century and corrected and elaborated by John Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and other writers after them.³ It is still, broadly speaking, the consensus view. Among other things, the Baronian interpretation sees the origins of Renaissance political thought in the “crisis” years around 1402, when the folklore of the popular medieval commune was fused, in Florence, with the learned but politically quietist traditions of Petrarchan humanism, creating a new, hybrid political tradition Baron labeled “civic humanism.” This understanding of Renaissance political thought, it will be seen, places Boccaccio on the “medieval” side of Baron’s crisis date of 1402.

It my goal in this chapter to approach Boccaccio’s political thought with a fresh eye, set aside the consensus view, and apply, as far as our horizons of thought permit, empirical tests to the task of situating Boccaccio. In it I will try to clarify how various remarks of a political tenor in Boccaccio’s works relate to the principal written traditions or discourses characteristic of late medieval and Renaissance Italy. The three principal traditions are (1) scholasticism, that is, the formal political discussions of politics coming from the arts, theology and law faculties of medieval universities; (2) a courtly and communal literature, mostly in the volgare, on the art of ruling, the virtues of the ideal prince or magistrate, and the nature of good government; and (3) the writings of the early Italian humanists, beginning with Mussato and Petrarch, mostly written in Latin. This third tradition or discourse is to some degree an elaboration of the second, but it also breaks new ground in various ways, becoming immensely more analytical, more historically informed, and more “secular” in the medieval sense of the word, that is, concerned with the temporal rather than the eternal ends of human society. My contention in this chapter will be that, though there may be certain elements of his political thought reflecting the scholastic, courtly, and communal discourses of late medieval Italy, Boccaccio is best classified as a representative of Renaissance humanism.⁴

In situating Boccaccio this way, I begin, not from the consensus view of humanist political thought, but from my own interpretation, based, if I may be allowed to say so, on a much broader evidentiary base than the consensus view, including some hundreds of formal treatises, histories, orations, letters, dialogues, dramatic works, and so on, that touch on politics, written by humanists, mostly in Latin, between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.⁵ My own interpretation of humanist political thought does not attach any particular importance to the year 1402 and in this way opens up the possibility of taking Boccaccio’s political thought seriously and aligning him primarily with the humanist approach to political philosophy. Let me briefly outline the main features of my interpretation.

My chief claim concerns the central theme of humanist political theory. That theme is not “republican liberty,” as has been assumed by many influential modern authorities. The kind of liberty enjoyed by citizens under popular regimes is praised by some humanists, including important ones like Leonardo Bruni and Bartolomeo Scala, but this is a minority view overall and tends to emerge mostly in Florence and in specific, often propagandistic, contexts. Most humanists do not embrace what has been called the “non-domination” model of liberty, which goes back in some respects to the Romans and was revived in the popular commune of the thirteenth century.⁶ Generally, Renaissance humanists preferred what I would call the “philosophical” model of freedom, which sees freedom in terms of individual character, as a state supervening on the rational control of passions and appetites or as personal freedom of action delimited by justice and reason. Only the virtuous merit freedom; in the humanist tradition, freedom is not usually considered a natural right.⁷ The humanist type of freedom, interior freedom, is compatible with voluntary obedience to a prince, and loss of moral liberty, that is, servility of character, can occur under any kind of regime. The belief that Italian humanism, as a movement of thought, was centrally concerned with promoting popular or oligarchic regimes in preference to monarchical ones is, in my view, both false and anachronistic. It is an artifact of confirmation bias stemming from modern political interests and values.

One reason for this mistaken view is that twentieth-century scholarship failed to appreciate that the word respublica did not acquire its modern meaning of “non-monarchical republic” until the middle of the fifteenth century. It did not specify a constitutional form before the 1440s, when Leonardo Bruni first used the word to translate politeia, Aristotle’s virtuous popular regime. For most Renaissance authors, the dominant sense of respublica remained “any virtuous regime that serves the common good and not particular interests.”⁸ It was a term of praise that could be claimed by any regime, whatever its constitution, just as the word “tyrannical” could be applied to popular, oligarchic, or princely regimes. Renaissance republicanism is, in my view, best understood as a movement to revive the moral principles of ancient government in general and does not necessarily advocate a particular type of regime or a particular understanding of political liberty. It is in this sense, too, that I would prefer to understand the term “civic humanism,” to the extent that that term remains useful.

What is the central concern of humanist political theory, in my view, is the same question that animates Plato’s Republic and Confucius’ Analects: how to produce wise and virtuous rulers and how to keep them from corruption once in power. The humanists saw virtue in the ruling class as the key to better government and the cure for corruption. In other words, they cared more about governors than governments, more about the morality of rulers than the legality of regimes. Scholastic thinkers, by contrast, were primarily concerned with analytical issues such as the status and scope of politics in a fallen world, the correct juridical relations between church and state, the nature and extent of ecclesiastical authority, whether and how plenitude of power should be limited by consent or other means, the nature of law and the justifications for coercion, the moral status of property, and the legal and constitutional conditions that needed to be met for a government to be called legitimate.⁹

The humanists mostly ignored these questions. They changed the subject. While scholastic political thinkers were trained as lawyers and theologians, the humanists were teachers, diplomats, and administrators, men and women of letters, professionals in the language arts, and amateurs (in the best sense) of antiquity. They saw education and public eloquence as the most effective means to reform cities. It was believed that, if future elites were educated in the classics, if they immersed themselves in a world of thought and language populated by noble Greeks and Romans, they would absorb the values of that world. These values were thought to be superior, in secular matters, to those of the contemporary world and could be the basis for reforming it. By acquiring eloquence at school, future leaders would also be able to articulate and promote pristine ancient virtue in modern circumstances. From the 1390s onward, humanists and their allies established an array of opportunities to speak in public—at funerals and weddings, at the beginnings of university courses and the terms of magistrates, at the beginnings and ends of wars, before battles, on diplomatic missions—and these occasions were used to persuade fellow members of the elite that ancient virtue and wisdom were the best guides to action. This was a kind of social technology: using praise and blame, shame and honor—eloquently expressed by respected figures—as a means of motivating fellow members of the ruling class. It involved persuasion by the use of admirable examples rather than coercion by laws and open force. The legal system in general was seen as venal and corrupt—and we remember here that many humanists, including Boccaccio, were failed lawyers. Hence humanists tended to regard what I call legitimacy of origins—inherited privilege, immemorial tradition, divine sanction—as unimportant; many of them, like Poggio or Guicciardini, maintained that all political power was violent and illegitimate in its origins. Like the modern Chinese Communist Party and its supporters, they did not want to think too much about where the power had come from and how it may have been used in the recent past. They saw prudent and just administration in the present, actuated by devotion to the common good, as the true source of legitimacy—what I call legitimacy of exercise. Virtue, in other words, was a necessary and sufficient claim to rule. As Giovanni Nesi writes in his De moribus: “[Distributive justice is satisfied] when honors, ranks and other rewards and signs of virtue are so divided up in a state that everyone receives his due share, and those who deserve more distinction for service to the commonwealth are marked out with rewards of higher distinction, and those who excel others in virtue also excel the rest in authority. Offices should be determined and ranks conferred in proportion to the merits and virtues of individual citizens.”¹⁰

If what has been said so far makes the humanists sound like elitists, confident in their own abilities and impatient with legal niceties, that impression is not a false one. But this does not mean that humanists in general were conservatives in the sense of “supporters of the status quo.” In fact, the humanists were in one respect quite radical, and that was in their insistence that any sociopolitical hierarchy be justifiable in moral terms. This radicalism is expressed in their insistence on merit as the basis for all claims to rule. Ancestry and hereditary privilege alone were not enough. The humanists made this point obsessively throughout their writings, most visibly in their treatises on true nobility, which, as Paul Oskar Kristeller noted long ago, were far more numerous and widely circulated than their treatment of any other theme.¹¹ The humanists’ goal was to open up the ranks of the political elite to those who were truly virtuous, not merely noble by descent, and to force noblemen to compete for power on the terrain of virtue. For some humanists, like Francesco Patrizi, even merchants and tradesmen and others of low position could and should participate in government provided that they were virtuous—government was not just for aristocrats and princes. The idea of a mercantile elite participating in political life was truly radical from the point of view of ancient political theory. The need for princes and other leading figures to acquire virtue was, to be sure, the central theme of the mirror-of-princes treatise, a form of literature that goes back to the early middle ages.¹² What was new with the humanists was the idea of meritocracy, the idea that virtuous character was not merely desirable in princes but also a condition of exercising power in general. Furthermore, merit could be acquired by anyone, of any class, through an education in classical literature and philosophy. In this way the humanists introduced an entirely new concept of equality: equality in the capacity to be virtuous and therefore, potentially, in the right to rule. In an era in which the privileges of nobility were increasingly defined by law in terms of descent and it was common to believe that noblemen and noblewomen excelled commoners morally and intellectually thanks to superior...

Table of contents

• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Advisory Board
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Finding the Renaissance Boccaccio
• PART 1. Boccaccio and Renaissance Humanism
• PART 2. Framing the Renaissance Boccaccio
• PART 3. Boccaccio in Renaissance Italy
• PART 4. Boccaccio in Renaissance Europe
• Contributors
• Index