Boccaccio, The Decameron

“I do not doubt for a moment that you believe what you say to be true. But as far as I can judge, you have not devoted much attention to the study of human nature. For if you had, you surely possess enough intelligence to have discovered certain things that would cause you to think twice before making such confident assertions. When the rest of us spoke so freely… we were merely facing facts.”

Once again, it has been too long. Another busy couple months went by, during which I read a bit of William of Ockham and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, along with one or two other things, and I didn’t manage to find the time to update. I had planned, was even in my own strange way looking forward to writing a dual post about Ockham and Eco, since the latter’s book is a medieval detective story featuring a Holmesian monk who cut his teeth on Ockham. And Ockham himself had a lot of interesting ideas that I would have liked to have thought more deeply about. Unfortunately, as time went by, I couldn’t bring myself to make sense of the notes I had taken; Ockham’s thought is difficult, and though it pains me to admit I just can’t sit down and read logic for very long. So Ockham and his razor have been shelved for now, until a time when I can revisit him.

Instead, we get the fortuitous opportunity to follow a post about Dante with a post about another Italian writer, Boccaccio, who was deeply influenced by the great poet. In the years since he wrote, he and Dante have gained a complementary relationship. Whereas Dante wrote The Divine Comedy, Boccaccio’s magnum opus, whose official name is the Decameron, has been called the “human comedy.” Although we will return to Dante’s influence, I want to focus now on the “human” aspect of this comparison, because we notice that above all else Boccaccio is concerned with the human.

Granted, in the past we have talked about the human––after all, there isn’t that much else to write about if we are writing about people––but never have we seen humanness take center stage in such a frank way. If Dante writing the greatest epic poem of all time in vernacular allowed his descendents––including Boccaccio––to cast off the shackles of Latin and write for a wider audience, then Boccaccio writing about mankind allowed for everyday human life to become the center of the literary universe in a way that became the status quo.

Truly, the lives of everyday men and women were not written about until this. (Definitely not women, who play lead roles in many of Boccaccio’s tales.) I learned in a course on Shakespeare that stories were once reserved for adventurers, warriors, explorers: those who had a story to tell, so to speak. Yet by gathering together ten men and women seeking shelter from the bubonic plague, Boccaccio proved that everyone (even women) have things to say that entertain not only themselves, but all people.

I put such an emphasis on women because Boccaccio claimed that the Decameron was written to women and for women, so that they who were unable to voice their concerns and laments could see that those laments and those concerns were universal and thereby lighten their unbearable heaviness. Boccaccio does not deny the lovesickness and hardships of men––he recounts that he had also been “inflamed beyond measure with a most lofty and noble love”––but that women, having to hide their love (which is “far more potent than one which is worn on the sleeve”), having to spend “most of their time cooped up within the narrow confines of their rooms,” having to sit “in apparent idleness…reflecting on various matters,” women have a much more difficult time with their burdens. And so he writes to such women, who due to decorum would never reveal their true desires.

I say “such women” because all women were not created equal to Boccaccio. For all his claims of taking pity on “people in distress,” some of his stories (not all by any means, but a portion) are terribly misogynistic. At this point, we must do our due diligence by acknowledging that we as enlightened, 21^st-century people should not condemn people of the past or bind them by our standards of living. Even still, for all Boccaccio’s talk about writing for women, there are many stories of women being tormented at the hands of men. Aside from “tragedies” wherein the mistreatment of the woman is not directed at women in general, there are stories where a man’s triumph over a woman is glorified in a rather disturbing way. I’ll leave it to those more qualified than me to decide what to make of such stories, but it’s good to keep in mind as we’re reading that Boccaccio carries this worldview. Chaucer, as we’ll see in the next post, is much more sympathetic toward women, in word as well as deed. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

To confess, I did not read all of the hundred stories of the Decameron. There are only so many stories about late medieval life that I can handle, and that number ended up being around fifty or so. In thinking about how to structure this post, I decided to concentrate on a few stories that I found particularly interesting or enlightening, and go over the others only briefly.

Love, Intelligence, Fortune

Dante, as we have said, used the Commedia as a way of summing up all that came before him. In Boccaccio, we occasionally see references to the old stuff: a Greek name here or there, a biblical character recast. But the absolute most striking feature is Boccaccio’s unabashed modernness. His prologue, the very first we read of his writing, immediately mentions three qualities: gratitude, pity, and love; love is the greatest cause of distress; pity is taken on those in distress; gratitude, the result of pity, is, in his words, the virtue most worthy of commendation. Apart from love, these are not the usual virtues we’ve encountered, especially in our recent slew of Christian texts (and Boccaccio’s love is not exactly Christian love either). Sure, gratitude and pity are aspects of greater virtues, but they themselves are not primary.

The three principal themes of the Decameron, according to my translator, are love, intelligence, and fortune; since there is little mention of God (only mention of the depravity of His creation), we must conclude that the love and intelligence are not divine, but human. It is the love between men and women, between kin, between friends, between enemies even that is glorified. Auerbach wrote that “the Decameron develops a distinct, thoroughly practical and secular ethical code rooted in the right to love.” The narrators, the ten hiding from the plague, have been taken to represent the drama of the human soul, which pits “the rational appetite against the lower irascible and concupiscible appetites… the intellectual power of reason [against] the baser human emotions of anger and lust.” That intellectual power runs the gamut between the new ethical code that Auerbach indicates and “strategems adopted by wives and the religious to achieve the gratification of their sexual desires.”

Of the three, only fortune is still distinctly inhuman, but even it is less a god or supernatural being than a force of nature. As intelligent as his characters often are, they still see themselves as subjects of fortune, and do not appear to have the uniquely Machiavellian insight that fortune can be tamed by forethought and intelligence.

Aside from this, Boccaccio’s modernness is manifest throughout the work. Some stories, for example, get their tragic conclusion by way of “blind and unthinking adherence to an outmoded concept of honour.” Rather than having things work out because of virtue, virtue, especially a rigid conception of such, is a hindrance in Boccaccio’s world.

Which, granted, is not hard to imagine. It’s a time when people are running around trying to escape the plague. And as I read (I forget if it’s Boccaccio’s own words or the translator’s introduction), the plague acted in a way as natural selection. For example, women had female attendants who were, among other things, allowed to see them nude for things like dressing. But due to the plague, many of these attendants were dead or else just didn’t want to touch these plague-stricken old broads. So the women who wanted to survive would often ask male attendants to wash them or attend to their sores. As such, Boccaccio (I think) implies that the women who made it out of the plague were distinctly less concerned with decorum than those who died. Not exactly scientific, but an interesting argument nonetheless. Think of it as survival of the sluttiest. (Sorry.)

Tancredi and Ghismonda; Guillaume and His Wife

Of course Boccaccio’s masterwork wouldn’t be a masterwork if there were simply a hundred stories that were only loosely connected by a framing device. Ten people telling ten stories each is relatively uninteresting by itself, and so there should be some sort of internal structure lurking below like a shark beneath the waves.

Indeed, there is such a structure, and if I had read more closely, I likely would have discovered more than just the two examples I have below. But let’s not dwell on my shortcomings and instead focus on the stories that complement each other so well.

One occurs in day four, the first story, wherein Prince Tancredi discovers that his daughter has been sleeping with a man of whom he has not approved, and he takes the reasonable action of killing the young man and sending his daughter the man’s heart in a chalice, at which point the daughter becomes distraught and poisons herself and dies. Before the heart incident, however, Tancredi to his credit lets his daughter know that he is aware of her transgression and asks her to stop. What follows is rather unprecedented: his daughter, the unfortunately-named Ghismonda, delivers a long speech to her father declaring that she has done nothing wrong, that she has acted of her own volition and chosen someone whom she considers worthy of her, and that she, as an individual should be allowed to make such choices. The entire speech is rather abrupt, especially for the time: who would give a woman such a long speech? In fact, Boccaccio says in the first story of day six, “it is more unseemly for a woman to make long speeches than it is for a man.”

Are we to take him at his word here? That would be difficult since Ghismonda’s speech is so perfectly reasoned as to make her father seem like a backwards, oafish moron. In fact, it reminded me quite a bit of Nora’s speech from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House both in its veracity and in its utter incongruence with the rest of the story. I would conclude that it is not unseemly to Boccaccio for a woman to make such a speech; rather, Boccaccio is demonstrating his more enlightened opinion of women, namely that they are capable of deep and original thinking, and that they should be taken seriously; all this taking place more than 600 years ago.

Anyway, in spite of or perhaps due to Ghismonda’s tenacity, her father kills her lover and his brutishness causes her to kill herself. Her father realizes the error of his ways far too late, and mourns her death.

In the ninth story of the same day, Guillaume finds out that his unnamed wife has been sleeping with another man, coincidentally also named Guillaume. He kills this pseudo-Guillaume and feeds his heart to his unnamed wife, who, upon finding out what she has done, throws herself off of a casement sans speech, whereupon the living Guillaume sees the error of his ways and repents.

What do we make of these parallel stories? There are subtle differences. Tancredi suffers a speech from Ghismonda, who commits suicide despite not having ingested the heart of her lover as Guillaume’s wife did. Both women reach their end because of the lover’s death rather than the abject horror of cannibalism.

But let’s not speculate whether Guillaume’s wife would have killed herself had she only seen and not eaten the heart of Guillaume-Part-Two. Instead, we can notice that Ghismonda speaks her mind, yet comes to no better conclusion than Guillaume’s wife who does not get to plead her case. (Hell, she doesn’t even have a name.) The guy writing the introduction to my edition stresses that for all Boccaccio’s progressive tendency, he still carries a great deal of anti-feminist and misogynistic baggage. Which granted, yes he does. But I would argue that these parallel stories are something of a lamentation. In saying that it is unseemly of women to make long speeches, Boccaccio is lamenting the lack of voice women have; that a brute like Tancredi can act so violently even in the harsh light of reason; that for all their erudition and intelligence, women are subject to the whims of men––or more broadly, fortune––regardless. Or at least that’s what I gather.

Mithridanes and Nathan; Gisippus and Titus

In day ten, there is another pair of complementary stories. In the third story, a generous man named Mithridanes is envious of an even more generous man, Nathan, and decides to kill Nathan so that he can be the most generous man alive. Nathan, being of almost Christlike generosity, says that men have been killing other men all throughout history and is happy to see that Mithridanes is motivated not by hatred, “but in order to be better thought of,” a motivation Nathan considers noble. Nathan then speaks of how commonplace killing is, and that, despite being on the receiving end of Mithridanes’ murderous rage, there is “nothing marvelous or novel” about it. In the end, Mithridanes does not kill Nathan, cannot kill him, and the two end up being friends.

There is something wonderfully subversive about this story, as if Nathan were some amalgam of Christ’s simple compassion, John Galt’s overwritten, objectivist dispassion, and McCarthy’s Judge Holden’s apassion; can you not hear the ringing tones of “War is God” in Nathan’s serene meditation on murder?

In the eighth story of the same day, Gisippus is pledged to marry Sophronia. His friend, Titus, however, has meanwhile fallen so in love with Sophronia that he cannot imagine being with another and is constantly tormented by his thoughts of her. Titus confesses this to Gisippus who, instead of being outraged by his friend's treachery, says “The laws of Love are more powerful than any others; they even supplant divine laws, let alone those of friendship.” He then offers Titus Sophronia’s hand, though not telling her about this arrangement at all. Of course this backfires and the story runs for a while, eventually turning out positively for both men. Sophronia, despite being tricked into sex with and marriage to another man ends up pretty alright as well, all things considered.

The similarity between these two stories is the elevation of vice to divine principle. Nathan opines that murder is a fact of the world, and that he should feel honored that he is being murdered out of a desire to be better rather than something more hateful like power or wealth. Similarly, Gissipus finds that Titus is subject to some universal force the maw of which he cannot escape. As such, he is sympathetic to his friend and offers him exactly what he desires, regardless of the difficulties such an act inevitably present to him. In both stories, there is praise of sin and kowtowing to new world-principles. Boccaccio sees the power of love and wrath in the world; no doubt since he writes so many stories about sex and violence. Yet rather than condemning them categorically as evils, he sees gray areas, times when such transgressions should be praised. This transcends the otherwise acceptable nature of his humanism, or at least the nature that is acceptable to us in our time. Sin is not black and white to Boccaccio. There is some indication of means being justified by ends, or even those means not being all that mean to begin with. (Jokes.)

Joseph and Melissus

Finally, I want to mention my favorite story. The ninth story of the ninth day involves Melissus meeting a man named Joseph while both are on their way to consult with the biblical ruler Solomon about what to do with their respective predicaments; Joseph has a stubborn wife, and Melissus seeks to be loved by his fellow man (no homo). Solomon is terse with both men: he tells Melissus to “love”, and Joseph to “go to Goosebridge.”

At Goosebridge, the two men see a farmer beating the crap out of his stubborn mule, telling the men that sometimes stubbornness answers only to wrath. Inspired, Joseph returns home and violently beats his wife until she becomes submissive to him. Literally, that is what he takes away from the encounter at Goosebridge. This scene occurs in front of Melissus, and it is described in great, often repulsive detail. I say great detail mostly in comparison to Melissus’ part of the story; after watching his companion beat his wife half to death for a full page or two, Melissus simply returns home and tells a wise man what Solomon said, and the wise man tells him that it is true, that one must love others to be loved in return. At which point the story says that Melissus was loved from then on, and concludes. Josephus gets pages for his domestic violence, and Melissus gets literally a paragraph, and a short one at that.

The obvious point to make here is that Solomon gives opposite pieces of advice to the men: though they both desire something from other people, Solomon advises one to love (that is, be generous in some way toward others) and the other to berate (to withhold pity and kindness); the opposing pieces of advice both produce the desired effects. The advice to Joseph to beat his wife takes a little bit of convincing, however: when they arrive at Goosebridge and the muleteer beats his mule, the men are taken aback at the man's savagery. Yet when it produces results, they cannot object. Perhaps Boccaccio is advocating something akin to sparing-the-rod.

What perplexes me more, though, is the brevity with which he treats the advice given to Melissus. Whereas Joseph needs to be convinced firsthand, Melissus needs only short words of encouragement to understand the importance of love. Love, then, may come more naturally in Boccaccio’s mind than hate. Whereas love is our natural tendency and requires only a nudge in the right direction, we must be convinced that wrath and discipline are occasionally necessary. (This goes back to our earlier point that vice can occasionally be elevated to virtue.) Forgetting for the moment that domestic violence is terrible, we should remember the difficulty and roundabout-ness it took for Joseph to be convinced to beat his wife: first, he is not told to be wrathful, but rather to go to a certain place. At that place, he fortuitously encounters this man. It took the power of chance (that Solomon in his wisdom could somehow control), of fortune, to convince Joseph of the right course of action. The words of a stranger, even one as exalted as Solomon, would not have been enough.

Stray Observations

• The Decameron is similar in structure to the Arabian nights: “the spectre of imminent death is held at a manageable distance” by the telling of stories; here it is the spectre of the plague.
• The translator: "[When Boccaccio says] the power of Love is greater than your power or mine [he] seems intent upon showing its validity. Not only that, he implies that any attempt to interfere with the natural progression of instinctive forces is doomed to failure.”
• Of wicked clergy: “They had applied the name of ‘procuration’ to their unconcealed simony, and that of ‘sustentation’ to their gluttony, as if… God were ignorant of the inventions of their wicked minds and would allow Himself to be deceived, as men are, by the mere names of things.” Man, if I had paid more attention to Ockham, he probably would’ve had a lot to say about that.
• “There is a certain proverb, frequently to be heard on the lips of the people, to the effect that a dupe will outwit his deceiver – a saying which would seem impossible to prove but for the fact that it is borne out by actual cases.”
• In story one of day five, a dullard, Cimon, acquires wisdom after he falls in love with Iphigenia. Recall in Gilgamesh when the wild man Enkidu is tamed by sex.