A Boccaccian Renaissance: Essays on the Early Modern Impact of Giovanni Boccaccio and His Works

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

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Jun 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9780268105914

Book preview

Introduction

Finding the Renaissance Boccaccio

MARTIN EISNER AND DAVID LUMMUS

The persistence of Petrarch’s association with the idea of the Renaissance is well established, from his rediscovery of Cicero’s Letters to Atticus in Verona to the fashion for the Petrarchan lyric sequence that pervades the early modern period. Boccaccio’s equally wide-ranging influence on early modern thought and literature, however, has received considerably less attention.¹ This volume aims to correct this imbalance by examining Boccaccio’s prevalent place in the period, from his articulation of new proto-Humanist political ideals to the impact of his works on several genres in multiple languages. One reason for the absence of sustained attention to Boccaccio’s important position in the Renaissance is likely his own self-presentation. Whereas Petrarch offers himself as a guide to others who want to pursue the path of poetry in his Coronation Oration, Boccaccio imagines his role in much less grand terms. In the Introduction to Day Four of the Decameron, for example, he conceives of his fortune as similar to fine dust in a whirlwind. He writes:

Per ciò che io non veggio che di me altro possa avvenire, che quello che della minuta polvere avviene, la quale, spirante turbo, o egli di terra non la muove, o se la muove, la porta in alto, e spesse volte sopra le teste degli uomini, sopra le corone dei re e degli imperadori, e talvolta sopra gli alti palagi e sopra le eccelse torri la lascia; delle quali se ella cade, piú giú andar non può che il luogo onde levata fu. (4.intro.40)²

[For I do not see that anything can happen to me that is different from what happens to fine dust in a whirlwind. Either it remains where it is on the ground, or if it is moved, it is carried aloft and often deposited on the heads of men, on the crowns of kings and emperors, sometimes even on high palaces and lofty towers, from which, if it falls, it cannot go lower than the place from which it was lifted up.]³

Thus does Boccaccio imagine his fate, with typical self-deprecation, as he evades the attacks of imagined critics. Boccaccio’s apparent lack of concern for the reception of his controversial masterpiece, of course, also evinces a preoccupation with his own posterity. He imagines himself as being ever present, if invisible, and as making a mark, if all but imperceptible, upon the world. Boccaccio’s vision prophesies the realities of the fortune of his works across Europe—spread out like dust and sitting unobtrusively in high places—as mediated by translation, unacknowledged imitation, reanthologization, and censorship.

The fiction that he built around himself as author of the Decameron and other works complicated his authority not only in his own time but also for his future readers. In his early works he was a lover drawn to write by a consuming passion and longing for the imaginary Fiammetta. In the Decameron he was a lovelorn man who had survived a bout of lovesickness thanks to the conversation of friends. He wrote in an istilo umilissimo [most humble style] for women and aimed low, positioning himself and his works in an inimitable place below the heights of great poetry (Dec. 4.intro.3).⁴ In his early Filocolo, too, he warns his work to steer clear of the haunts where the verses of Dante’s Comedy are sung: Né ti sia cura di volere essere dove i misurati versi del fiorentino Dante si cantino, il quale tu sì come piccolo servidore molto dei reverente seguire. . . . A te bisogna di volare abasso, però che la bassezza t’è mezzana via. [And don’t worry about wanting to be where the measured verses of the Florentine Dante are sung, that poet whom you must follow reverently like a lowly servant. . . . You need to fly low, because lowness is your middle way.] (Filocolo 5.97.6–7).⁵ Or one could think of another passage from the introduction to Day Four of the Decameron, where he defends the source of his inspiration, real ladies instead of the Muses of Mount Parnassus:

Che io con le Muse in Parnaso mi debbia stare, affermo che è buon consiglio, ma tuttavia né noi possiam dimorare con le Muse né esse con esso noi; se quando avviene che l’uomo da lor si parte, dilettarsi di veder cosa che le somigli, questo non è cosa da biasimare. Le Muse son donne, e benché le donne quello che le Muse vagliono non vagliano, pure esse hanno nel primo aspetto simiglianza di quelle; sí che, quando per altro non mi piacessero, per quello mi dovrebber piacere. Senza che le donne già mi fur cagione di comporre mille versi, dove le Muse mai non mi furon di farne alcun cagione. (intro.IV.35)⁶

[That I should dwell with the Muses on Parnassus is good counsel, I agree, but we cannot always live with the Muses, any more than they can live with us. And so, if a man sometimes happens to leave them, he is not to be blamed if he delights in seeing that which resembles them, for the Muses are women, and although women are not as worthy as the Muses, yet at first sight they do look like them, so that if they pleased me for no other reason, they should do so on this score. Besides, women have been the occasion of my composing a thousand lines of poetry, whereas the Muses never caused me to write anything.]⁷

These key moments of self-reference have given rise to critical stances toward Boccaccio’s works that, if we understand them literally and autobiographically, underestimate their sophistication and the importance of their reception by the Parnassus of Italian literature. In his own words, Boccaccio and his works inhabit a sublunar realm in which value is shifting and unstable. He is no Dante. He is no Petrarch. Indeed, even in his later Latin works, Boccaccio continued to fashion himself in a similarly modest way as Petrarch’s devout, if unworthy, student. At the beginning of his tome on myth, the Genealogie deorum gentilium, Boccaccio describes his most daring work as inevitably inferior to what Petrarch could have potentially produced. Petrarch, he writes, is celesti ingenio preditus et perenni memoria [endowed with a celestial talent and eternal memory], while he himself has a ingenium tardum et fluxa memoria [slow talent and a fluid memory] (Genealogie 1.Proem.20–21).⁸ In each case, we could read his self-deprecation literally, as an admission of some sort of lack in the face of someone else’s greatness, whether that of Dante or that of Petrarch. The persistence of this modest stance across his career, however, suggests that it is a sophisticated way of differentiating his efforts from those of Dante and of Petrarch and the poets of a new Parnassus. Given Boccaccio’s self-representation and presentation of his works as lowly, it is no wonder that his imprint on posterity has been distorted, especially within a literary historical tradition that took him at his word.⁹

The fact that Boccaccio was the mastermind behind the canonization of Dante and Petrarch as having written works at the core of a Florentine literary tradition has also contributed to his invisibility in the Renaissance. Boccaccio hid himself in the authorization of others.¹⁰ Furthermore, in his cultural project he was perhaps the closest of the three crowns of Florence to the generations that immediately followed.¹¹ His rehabilitation of Dante and Petrarch as Florentines, the co-presence of Latin and vernacular in his oeuvre, the enthusiasm he showed for Greek and his engagement in learning it, and his dedication to the Florentine republic are just a few of the elements that link him to Renaissance Humanists. During the earliest period of his reception, then, Boccaccio did not demand the same kind of attention as the other two crowns, whose absence from Florence and often difficult ideological positions required explanation and rehabilitation within the Florentine context. The relative silence of his immediate heirs, combined with Boccaccio’s own humble self-representation, perhaps led to the haphazard reception of his works in the later Renaissance, which often found more to censor than to imitate. One thing that these Humanists shared with later Renaissance thinkers was an appreciation of Boccaccio’s prose, especially in the Decameron. Boccaccio clearly represented the best of vernacular eloquence, even if it was employed for an ethically questionable erotics.¹² Being the best at prose, however, could also be considered faint praise if it is taken to mean (as it was) that he was inconsequential as a poet.

Early critical approaches to Boccaccio’s works, focusing on the Decameron, found in Boccaccio’s more licentious content the beginnings of the secularization of culture associated with modernity.¹³ In response to this tradition that paid little respect to the historical context of the work’s creation and saw in Boccaccio’s Decameron a precursor to early modern hedonism and skepticism, new approaches were formulated to historicize Boccaccio’s works and to etch out a place for him in Italian literary history on his own terms. Vittore Branca’s influential formulation of a medieval Boccaccio, author of a mercantile epic, must be seen in this light,¹⁴ as must Francesco Bruni’s idea of Boccaccio as the inventor of a middling literature (letteratura mezzana) that fell between courtly evasion and classicizing engagement.¹⁵ For Branca, Boccaccio sat firmly in a medieval world, looking neither forward nor backward. He was timely and representative of his contemporary world. For Bruni, however, he was neither medieval nor Renaissance, but rather in-between. He mediated the two different worldviews that form the two main stages of his writing, before and after the Decameron. Both approaches see this division in Boccaccio’s career in relation to a nostalgic dedication to Dante and to a reverence for Petrarch that brought about a complete change in perspective. Only a certain brand of Boccaccio is functional for the ideal literary history constructed by these critics: a medieval Boccaccio who transformed the fabliaux and exempla of the medieval world into the updated literary form of the novella and paved the way for early modern short-form fiction.

The study of Boccaccio’s impact on early modernity has been stymied to a certain extent by the ideologies behind the creation of an Italian national literary history. Although Boccaccio’s influence on the Italian prose tradition is undeniable, there was far more to his impact than merely his masterpiece’s status as a stylistic and linguistic model. Although it is right to situate Boccaccio firmly within a medieval worldview that was in a phase of social and epistemological transition, the teleological tendencies of literary history should not blind us to Boccaccio’s uncanny modernity or to the problems and opportunities that his work offered future generations of readers.¹⁶ Recent scholarship on Boccaccio, in fact, has become increasingly aware of the unity of Boccaccio’s ideology across his career and subsequently of its independence from that of the other two crowns.¹⁷ Decoupling Boccaccio from the expectations of a predetermined literary history has allowed for a reappraisal not only of the novelty of Boccaccio’s works but also of his role in formulating the questions that would obsess early modern writers.

In the critical space that has been created in the flurry of scholarship around the seven hundredth anniversary of Boccaccio’s birth in 2013, we can reconsider the question of whether there is a Boccaccism lurking unacknowledged in the pages of early modern writers akin to the universally recognized European Petrarchism. We can look to the Humanists of Renaissance Italy in search of their relationship to Boccaccio’s worldview. We can return to his works and ask without our tongues in our cheeks what kinds of modernity Boccaccio himself represents in his various works and how Renaissance authors received him as an author and his works as authoritative. This volume brings together essays from several critical and disciplinary perspectives to respond to the question of Boccaccio’s impact on early modern literature and culture in Italy and Europe. The essays build on papers that were originally delivered at a conference held in 2013 at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Stanford University, organized by Albert R. Ascoli and David Lummus. The goal of the volume is to explore the figure and works of Giovanni Boccaccio from the point of view of early modernity to establish the limits of Boccaccio’s own modernity and to trace it into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Not only did Boccaccio’s Decameron exert a strong influence on Italian and European fiction in the Renaissance; his vernacular romances, alongside his Latin mythography, historiography, and bucolic poetry, experienced a lasting success well into the sixteenth century. Looking beyond his own source material, the essays collected here investigate how Boccaccio himself became a source and came to terms with what it meant to follow a Boccaccian model. While scholars have examined how Boccaccio’s Decameron served as a model both in Italy, where it inspired Sacchetti’s Trecentonovelle and Basile’s Cunto de li cunti, and abroad, where one thinks of well-known adaptations such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron, these essays also excavate the presence of some of Boccaccio’s less familiar works in different fields, including political theory, pastoral poetry, grammar, and theater.¹⁸

The volume opens with a section that examines the novelty of distinct elements of Boccaccio’s cultural project and their impact during the first century after Boccaccio’s death. In the opening chapter, James Hankins explores Boccaccio’s place in early modern political thought, with particular attention to his De casibus virorum illustrium and its relationship to later Humanist reflections. Hankins’s focus is on the nature of Boccaccio’s conception of virtue in human behavior and its manifestation in the state. Drawing attention to Boccaccio’s several civic responsibilities beginning in the 1350s, this chapter reveals a facet of Boccaccio’s thought that, although it has not drawn the attention of modern scholars, nonetheless shaped future discussions of the relationship between virtue and political power. While Hankins is careful to underline the presence of the more traditional features of Boccaccio’s thinking, what emerges from his analysis is a new appreciation for Boccaccio’s significance as a political thinker.

In the second chapter in this section, Timothy Kircher reflects on how Renaissance Humanists perceived and imitated Boccaccio’s dialogic imagination in the Decameron. After a review of the lukewarm reception of Boccaccio’s vernacular prose, principally the Decameron, among fifteenth-century Humanists, he argues that writers as diverse as Leonardo Bruni, Leon Battista Alberti, and Poggio Bracciolini could find in the Decameron hermeneutical questions about the nature of the truth. Despite their differences, these men shared with Boccaccio a preoccupation with hypocrisy and deception. Attracted by Boccaccio’s narrative genius, they come closest to the dialogic and diegetic complexity of the Decameron in dialogues like Bruni’s Dialogi ad Petrum Istrum, Alberti’s Theogenius, and Bracciolini’s Contra hypocritas, but his narrative imagination is also lurking in the shadows of works like Alberti’s Intercenales or Bracciolini’s Facetiae. For Kircher, Boccaccio was the forerunner of these Humanists inasmuch as he represented meaning as unfolding in time, through language, and in the shifting relationships between speakers. Kircher’s reflection leads us to see how Boccaccio’s project was far closer to those of the Florentine Humanists than even they themselves would have ever admitted.

The second section turns to examine the ways in which Boccaccio himself represented his works and how they were presented to a Renaissance readership visually, materially, and linguistically. Victoria Kirkham begins this section with a survey of early depictions of the Three Crowns of Florence, showing how Boccaccio’s representation alongside Petrarch and Dante is interwoven with developing notions of the Florentine cultural and literary canon. Included in this chapter is a chronologically organized appendix of portraits and descriptions of the Three Crowns of Florence between 1350 and 1600. Jonathan Combs-Schilling’s chapter examines Boccaccio’s pervasive yet transgressive engagement with pastoral, from the first eclogues in the vernacular that he includes in the Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine through the Ninfale fiesolano, Decameron, and Buccolicum carmen. Scrutinizing Boccaccio’s remarkably wide-ranging deployment of the genre, Combs-Schilling argues that Boccaccio’s entire literary project can be seen in the light of pastoral, which is the privileged place of his literary experiments. Combs-Schilling develops this claim through close readings of three pastoral dialogues, one from the Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine and two from Buccoliucm carmen, where Boccaccio’s reflections on the pastoral genre are particularly prevalent.

In the next chapter of this section, Rhiannon Daniels examines the material reception of early modern biographies of Boccaccio, highlighting their close connection to new editions of Boccaccio’s works and how they reflect shifting assessments of Boccaccio’s status. Her chapter pays particular attention to Girolamo Squarzafico’s biography, which first appeared in a 1472 edition of Boccaccio’s Filocolo and was reproduced several times, so that it became the standard account of Boccaccio’s life in the period. Emphasizing that the biography was originally produced to accompany Boccaccio’s work, Daniels situates it in the context of contemporary biographies to reveal the distinctive features of Squarzafico’s account and analyzes the significance of its material layouts. Simon Gilson concludes this part of the volume with a case study of translations of Boccaccio’s popular Humanist works Genealogie deorum gentilium and De montibus. He shows how Boccaccio’s Latin works circulated not only among the Humanists in Latin but also through vernacular translations that shaped the mythological imagination of non-Latinate literary and artistic circles. A close examination of two sixteenth-century vernacularizations offers a detailed account of the cultural context in which these works were produced. It also includes Betussi’s dedicatory letter for the Genealogie as an appendix.

The third section of the volume presents different examples of how Boccaccio became a model in spite of, or perhaps because of, the controversial nature of the content of his Decameron. So much of Boccaccio’s fortuna in early modern Italy was linked to Pietro Bembo’s choice of Boccaccio’s language in the Decameron as an ideal model for literary prose. While superficially this might seem to have ensured for Boccaccio the pride of place in Tuscan prose—a position that earlier Humanists also gave him—a deeper reading of the matter shows that Bembo’s operation also carried dire consequences for Boccaccio’s work. In the first chapter of this section, Michael Sherberg puts Bembo’s Boccaccism to the test by arguing that the qualified praise of Boccaccio in Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua put the Decameron on the path to disaster inasmuch as this work showed the same misgivings about the content of the Decameron and the moral judgement of its author that would lead to its condemnation on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1559.

In the second chapter of this Italy-centered section, Brian Richardson examines how three kinds of readers (editors, grammarians, and lexicographers) engaged with the Decameron in the period after 1525, concluding with the fate of the book after its placement on the Index. Despite the Bembian effort to make the Decameron a model for the prose of his time, its editors often sought just as much to adapt Boccaccio’s usage to their own conventions and, in several instances, rejected the reading of what we now know to be an autograph copy of the Decameron. The linguistic engagement with Boccaccio’s text was accompanied by a desire to make use of it for life. Editors and readers applied an increasingly heavy hand to the content of Decameron in order to adapt it to the moral codes of the age. This form of engagement proved far more difficult to manage than the linguistic one. If Renaissance editors of the text took advantage of its problematic diffusion to update many of Boccaccio’s stranger modes of writing, the early Reformation censors so completely updated the moral messages of the book that by the end of the century a priest could publish without irony a Spiritual Decameron.

In the third chapter of this section, Ronald L. Martinez shows how Boccaccio became the vernacular source of choice for the content of plays of the comedia erudita, alongside classical sources like Apuleius. Playwrights combined Boccaccian content with the comic structures of Plautus and Terrence, often imitating Boccaccio imitating Apuleius or other classical sources such as elegiac comedies. Specifically, Martinez traces the prehistory of Boccaccio’s established place as the source for plays by Ariosto, Bibbiena, and Machiavelli in analyses of the contamination of classical and Boccaccian sources in texts by Piccolomini, Mantovano, del Carretto, and Accolti. These three chapters together demonstrate how Boccaccio’s Decameron was attractive to writers in some circles for the same reasons it was problematic to readers in others.

The chapters in the final section of the volume take up the question of Boccaccio’s influence on literature beyond the Italian peninsula. In the first foray beyond the Alps, Marc Schachter investigates Boccaccio’s mercurial place in the Renaissance historiography of Burckhardt, Michelet, and Sainte-Beuve. His chapter reveals the almost immediate and sustained reception of Boccaccio among French authors beginning in the early fifteenth century and shows how Boccaccio’s works were transformed in French translations and adaptations. He argues that these transformations reflect twin anxieties about Italian cultural influence and the adequacy of French, which he finds manifest in a French translation of the final story of Day Five of the Decameron.

In his contribution, Ignacio Navarrete demonstrates the extent of Boccaccio’s popularity in Renaissance Spain in a close analysis of his presence in Juan de Flores’s sentimental novel Grimalte y Gradisa. Based on Boccaccio’s Elegia di Madonna Fiametta, de Flores’s novel not only stages the reading of Boccaccio’s work within it but also has the Boccaccian characters Fiammetta and Panfilo interact with its protagonists. The Spanish adaptation, which Navarrete shows to be a metaliterary tour de force, establishes its own characters’ actions as an interpretative gloss on Boccaccio’s original, which explores reading and writing as acts of desire.

In the final chapter, Janet Levarie Smarr shows how the ethical questions surrounding gender and class relations in the Decameron continue to provide inspiration even in works that are great-grandchildren or third cousins of the Decameronian original. She offers a comparative analysis of two early seventeenth-century versions of the story of Griselda and Walter, thrice-removed from the original: The Pleasant Comedie of Patient Grissil, by Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle, and William Haughton, and The Honest Whore, Part 1, by Dekker and Thomas Middleton. In both plays, Dekker and his collaborators change the gender of Griselda for varying effect, even if the ultimate reason seems to be to test whether Griselda’s patience is a virtue that can become masculine and thus be applicable to all of humanity. These last three chapters show how Boccaccio’s texts and characters take on veritable lives of their own after they have been extricated from the ideological context of the Italian literary canon. The text no longer needs an author in order to survive on its own; it becomes autonomous in the community of readers and raconteurs that it has created.

The chapters in this volume collectively show how complex and far-reaching Boccaccio’s impact was on the readers and writers of early modern Europe. Individually, each chapter provides a new approach to questions that have heretofore either gone unexplored or to commonplaces that have been left unquestioned. They also leave signs of how much work still needs to be done and from what perspective that work must begin. If we are to find the Renaissance Boccaccio, we first have to know how to look for him.

NOTES

1. On Petrarch’s place in the historiography of the Renaissance, see Martin Eisner, In the Labyrinth of the Library: Petrarch’s Cicero, Dante’s Virgil, and the Historiography of the Renaissance, Renaissance Quarterly 67 (2014): 755–90. For studies of Petrarch’s influence as a poetic model, see William J. Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); The Site of Petrarchism: Early Modern Sentiment in Italy, France, and England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Petrarchism at Work: Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2016).

2. Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Vittore Branca (Turin: Einaudi, 1992), 469–70.

3. Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, trans. Wayne A. Rebhorn (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 306.

4. Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Branca, 460. If no source for a translation is indicated, then it is our own.

5. Giovanni Boccaccio, Filocolo, ed. Antonio Enzo Quaglio, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, 10 vols., ed. Vittore Branca, vol. 1, 46–675 (Milan: Mondadori, 1967), 674.

6. Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Branca, 467–68.

7. Boccaccio, Decameron, trans. Rebhorn, 305.

8. Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogie Deorum Gentilium, ed. Vittorio Zaccaria, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, 10 vols., ed. Vittore Branca, vols. 7–8, 11–1813 (Milan: Mondadori, 1998), 20–21.

9. Boccaccio’s biographers from the fifteenth century onward have tended to understand his autofictions and rhetorical self-fashioning in literal terms. For Vittore Branca and Giuseppe Billanovich, this meant that Boccaccio was Petrarch’s most devoted disciple. For Amedeo Quondam and Francisco Rico, this means that Boccaccio was Petrarch’s most incapable follower. For a more detailed review of these positions, see Lummus, Review Essay: Boccaccio, Medieval Review 14.02.01 (February 2014). https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/tmr/article/view/18509.

10. This argument is advanced at length in Martin Eisner, Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature: Dante, Petrarch, Cavalcanti and the Authority of the Vernacular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). On Boccaccio’s role in canonizing Dante, see also Jason M. Houston, Building a Monument to Dante: Boccaccio as Dantista (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010).

11. This idea is suggested in Lummus, Boccaccio’s Hellenism and the Foundations of Modernity, Mediaevalia 33 (2012): 101–67 (154–55 n 5); Eisner, In the Labyrinth of the Library: Petrarch’s Cicero, Dante’s Virgil, and the Historiography of the Renaissance, Renaissance Quarterly 67, no. 3 (2014): 755–90 (780–82); and Lummus, Placing Petrarch’s Legacy: The Politics of Petrarch’s Tomb and Boccaccio’s Last Letter, Renaissance Quarterly 71, no. 2 (2017): 435–73 (470).

12. On how Boccaccio’s erotic poetics were received in the Renaissance, an important point of reference is James C. Kriesel, Chastening the Corpus: Bembo and the Renaissance Reception of Boccaccio, Italianist 31, no. 3 (2011): 367–91.

13. See De Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana, 6th ed., vol. 1 (Naples: Morano, 1893), 287–357. De Sanctis most clearly expresses this idea of a modern Boccaccio when he writes of Boccaccio: L’autore volge le spalle al medio evo e inizia la letteratura moderna. Di un mondo mistico-teologico-scolastico non è più alcun vestigio. Oramai tocchiamo terra: siamo in cospetto dell’uomo e della natura. [The author turns his back on the Middle Ages and begins modern literature. There is no more trace of a mystical-theological-scholastic world. We have by now touched ground: we are in the presence of man and of nature.] (317)

14. See Branca, Boccaccio medievale e nuovi studi sul Decamerone (Florence: Sansoni, 1981), which is an expanded edition of his original 1956 collection of essays on Boccaccio. Recently the examination and interpretation of the manuscript tradition of the Decameron by Marco Cursi has led to a re-evaluation and reversal of Branca’s idea of the Decameron as a mercantile epic that was immediately popular among a middle-class reading public. Of Cursi’s extensive paleographic work on Boccaccio, see especially Il Decameron: Scritture, scriventi, lettori; Storia di un testo (Rome: Viella, 2007).

15. See Bruni, Boccaccio: L’invenzione della letteratura mezzana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990) and the illuminating review of this book by Victoria Kirkham, "Boccaccio: L’invenzione della letteratura mezzana; Francesco Bruni," Speculum 68, no. 1 (January 1993): 113–16, whose translation of Bruni’s title we have borrowed.

16. A major twentieth-century example of an approach that portrays Boccaccio’s medieval heritage as the key to his modernity is Giuseppe Mazzotta, The World at Play in Boccaccio’s Decameron (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). More recently, a heightened awareness of the novelty of Boccaccio’s medievalism also informs James C. Kriesel, Boccaccio’s Corpus: Allegory, Ethics, and Vernacularity (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018).

17. Two demonstrative examples of this tendency in Anglophone approaches to Boccaccio are Boccaccio: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham, Michael Sherberg, and Janet Levarie Smarr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), and The Cambridge Companion to Boccaccio, ed. Guyda Armstrong, Rhiannon Daniels, and Stephen J. Milner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

18. For some other recent attempts to address Boccaccio’s influence beyond the novella, see Johannes Bartuschat, ed., Boccace à la Renaissance: Lectures, traductions, influences en Italie et en France (Grenoble: Gerci, 2008); Gian Mario Anselmi, Giovanni Baffetti, Carlo Delcorno, and Sebastiana Nobili, eds., Boccaccio e i suoi lettori: Una lunga ricezione (Bologna: Mulino, 2013); and Antonio Ferracin and Matteo Venier, eds., Giovanni Boccaccio: Tradizione, interpretazione e fortuna: In ricordo di Vittore Branca (Udine: Forum, 2014).

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