Barbara Newman reviews two Boccaccio books for the LRB (Vol. 47 No. 14 · 14 August 2025; archived):
Histories of Italian literature begin with the Tre Corone or Three Crowns: Dante (1265-1321), Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75) and Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch (1304-74), Boccaccio’s intimate friend. All three exalted the Italian vernacular but, to the puzzlement of modern readers, entrusted their most important philosophical works to Latin. This bilingualism is a dominant theme in both Marco Santagata’s new biography of Boccaccio and Brenda Schildgen’s critical study [Boccaccio Defends Literature]. Santagata links Boccaccio’s vernacularity to his appeal to a female audience, while Schildgen considers his contributions to literary theory in the Decameron and his Latin masterpiece, the Genealogia deorum gentilium (Genealogy of the Pagan Gods).
Chaucer, a younger contemporary of Petrarch and Boccaccio, read all three writers. During his early diplomatic career, he learned Italian and eagerly sought out their works. Yet while he proudly cites Dante and ‘Fraunceys Petrak, the laureat poete’, he never mentions Boccaccio, to whom his debts were far greater. Boccaccio’s Teseida became ‘The Knight’s Tale’; his Filostrato inspired Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer borrowed several tales from the Decameron and adopted Boccaccio’s appeal to reader responsibility to defend bawdy stories such as ‘The Miller’s Tale’. Why the reticence? Why, to avoid naming Boccaccio, did Chaucer invent a fictional Latin poet as his source for Troilus? It seems that Boccaccio already had a reputation problem. From the late Middle Ages all the way to Pasolini’s 1971 film of the Decameron, he has been best remembered – understandably, if unfairly – for his most obscene and ribald tales. In Italian, the adjective boccaccesco means ‘lascivious’; the New Yorker once described the Decameron as ‘probably the dirtiest great book in the Western canon’.
Boccaccio himself would have been startled to learn that his immortality rested on that ‘dirty book’, rather than his Latin humanist works. […] Late in life he was certain he had been a failure, especially when he compared his output with Dante’s or Petrarch’s. Yet the same restlessness also led him to experiment in genre and style, making him, in Santagata’s words, ‘the most modern writer of his day’.
Some of Boccaccio’s insecurity stemmed from his inauspicious start in life. He was born in or near the town of Certaldo and grew up in Florence. His father, Boccaccino di Chellino, was a prominent merchant and banker and Boccaccio appears to have been his illegitimate son. He never knew his mother and never married, though he had mistresses and at least five children. His father insisted that he first study banking, then canon law, instead of the literary pursuits he would have preferred. Despite a lifelong aversion to marriage, he loved women and dedicated several early works to them, especially to the semi-mythical beloved he called Fiammetta, his ‘little flame’. Few women could read Latin, so writing in Italian meant writing, in part, for the ‘ladies’ who typically consumed romances and other light fare. In his preface to the Decameron, Boccaccio sympathises with the plight of women, confined to their chambers and denied the mind-broadening occupations of men. Such readers, he hopes, will derive both pleasure and sound advice (Horace’s dulce et utile) from his stories. Yet the light touch of some tales belies the learning apparent in others, not to mention the sophisticated frame story. Boccaccio undoubtedly wanted male readers as well. He was writing for a mixed audience that could appreciate scholarship and entertainment in a single work – an audience that did not yet exist. He aimed to create it through his writing. […]
Boccaccio conceived the Decameron as a kind of commedia profana, but his admiration for the Divina Commedia was unbounded. He personally copied the whole poem three times and several of Dante’s minor works would have disappeared if not for Boccaccio’s autograph copies. Much of his career was devoted to promoting Dante’s reputation, from his Little Treatise in Praise of Dante to the lectures he delivered late in his life – inaugurating a tradition of public readings, the Lecturae Dantis, that continues to this day. The readings were lavishly sponsored by the city of Florence at a salary of 100 florins for the lecturer, perhaps in atonement for the fact that the city had never recalled Dante from exile. Boccaccio’s lecture notes survive, providing one of our earliest commentaries on the Commedia. The sacro poema needed exposition, and also defence. Not only did churchmen take issue with Dante’s theological liberties, but he could hardly have condemned so many of his contemporaries to hell without making enemies of their families. More to our point, fans of Latin literature could not forgive Dante for ‘prostituting the Muses’ by treating such exalted themes in the vernacular. Petrarch himself was among the sceptics. Despite Boccaccio’s efforts, he was unable to persuade his friend of Dante’s merits. Boccaccio and Petrarch corresponded in Latin and exchanged their Latin works, but not their vernacular ones. Humanism, often misunderstood, could be a deeply conservative, elitist enterprise. While the humanists forged the vital tools of philology and textual criticism, their classical revival style was profoundly retardataire. Petrarch may have pinned his hopes for literary immortality on works like his Latin epic Africa, but it was his vernacular Canzoniere that launched an international craze for sonnets, keeping the courtly love lyric in vogue for two more centuries. The runaway popularity of both the Commedia and the Decameron, different as they are, represented the future.
The choice of a literary language was inextricable from the appeal to an audience, and in particular, the question of women readers. It was easy to mock their naivety. Boccaccio himself tells how the women of Ravenna, passing Dante in the streets, would say to one another: ‘Look, it’s that man who goes down into hell and returns whenever he likes.’ Almost perversely, Boccaccio wrote his encyclopedia of famous women (De mulieribus claris) in Latin, but his viciously misogynist Corbaccio in Italian. […]
It is impossible to overestimate the prestige of the Greco-Roman classics in humanist circles. Yet there had always been some Christian resistance to recycled pagan myths, filled as they were with deities committing rape, incest and other abominations. One standard response was to allegorise the myths, finding profound truths about human nature concealed beneath their artful surface. This is the line Boccaccio takes in his Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, a monument of scholarship that catalogues more than seven hundred mythical figures. More innovative is his impassioned defence of poetry in Book 14. By ‘poetry’ he means all of what we now call literature – prose and verse, pagan and Christian – and he defines it as a ‘stable and fixed branch of knowledge, founded and established on eternal principles’. Speaking against its cultured despisers, he calls poetry a ‘fervent and exquisite invention’ proceeding from the bosom of God, granted only to a few chosen souls and worthy of reverence. Nature in her wisdom has fashioned all human beings with their diverse vocations – carpenters and sailors, merchants and priests, lawyers and kings – but the list culminates in ‘poets, philosophers and sublime theologians’. Moreover, poetry is socially useful: it can teach, console and invigorate the mind. Most significant may be Boccaccio’s understanding of fiction as an autonomous category, neither factual truth nor reprehensible lies. As Philip Sidney would later put it, ‘the poet … nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth.’ In Book 15, Boccaccio goes on to establish an Italian literary canon, seamlessly linking ancients and moderns, Latin and vernacular writers, culminating in Dante, Petrarch and himself. This is not so much self-promotion as a far-sighted vindication of the vernacular and the wider audience it enabled, including women. It also cements the idea of a ‘Renaissance’ with Italy as its heart and soul.
The Decameron includes a more personal, amusing, and in one sense more radical defence. In the introduction to Book 4, Boccaccio offers an early example of reader-response criticism. Although the book was far from finished, its tales had already begun to circulate and not everyone liked them. It seems that prudish critics had been complaining about Boccaccio’s desire to please ladies, interpreting his literary efforts as amorous exploits. Boccaccio disarmingly responds by accepting their critique. Why, after all, should he not love women and take delight in pleasing them? The Muses are ladies, after all, and ‘the fact is that ladies have already been the reason for my composing thousands of verses, while the Muses were in no way the cause.’ There is nothing shameful about writing for women; Dante himself did so. Where would the Commedia be without Beatrice? Concluding the Decameron in his own voice, Boccaccio makes the revolutionary move of placing the moral responsibility for literature squarely on the reader, not the writer. To the pure all things are pure, as St Paul says, while a corrupt mind sees nothing but corruption everywhere. Even bawdy tales have merit for those who know how to interpret them, but a reader who takes offence at trifles can just skip the offending stories and focus on the edifying ones. In short, ‘the lady who is forever saying her prayers or baking … cakes for her confessor should leave my tales alone.’ This is Boccaccio’s greatest contribution to literary theory: vernacularity, writing for entertainment, reader responsibility and the autonomy of fiction are all braided together and gendered feminine. For better or worse, that chain would hold – especially when more women began to write. It is more than gender that binds the elegant storytellers of the Decameron to the ‘damned mob of scribbling women’ that Nathaniel Hawthorne would denounce in the 1850s.
Lots more at the link; I posted Brown’s bilingual online version of Boccaccio over two decades ago and am pleased to see it’s still up and running. (Incidentally, Spectrum is supposedly upgrading our service, with the result that I’ve been offline most of the day; I’m taking this opportunity to post, but we may well lose service again while we’re eating lunch and who knows when we’ll get it back, so if your comment goes into moderation, please be patient.)
That is quite a read, Hat, and an amazing window onto the start of the modernity as we know it.
I’m glad you liked it!
The Little Hours (2017) leans into the “trashiness” of the Decameron, with period sets and costuming but completely modern dialogue. I don’t particularly care for it, and it got mixed reviews, but some people think it is a brilliant piece of comedy.
A propos of Boccaccio’s popularity among the bawdy, and of being fed up with conservative humanism, last month I had the lucky chance of seeing exhibited in Venice a rare copy of Lorenzo Venier’s (1530-ish) La Puttana errante, a book that’s decidedly obscene both in its poetry and even more so in its copious illustrations, and whose preface is both hilarious and refreshing — at least if you’re Italian and had to study Petrarch in school.
It would take a better translator to do this screed justice, but roughly:
I’m particularly fond of the sadly hard to translate “incazziti fernetichi di Messer Petrarcha,” which I’m adopting as a brief description of this sonnets.
On a less entertaining note, we were taught in school that by the 16th century Boccaccio and Petrarch had ended up as the chosen models of Italian humanists for Italian prose and poetry respectively. Dante was left as the odd one out, strange as that may seem to our post-romantic sensitivity. Surely this is an oversimplification for schoolchildren, yet it doesn’t seem to be a crass misrepresentation of Pietro Bembo’s views. Again the school version of language history may overstate his importance, but again he truly seems to have been quite influential.
@gp
Would the word “tromba” also have had obscene connotations, at least in this preface? If so, maybe translate “instrument”.
This might be the place to mention the note that I encountered in an edition of Payne’s translation of the Decameron:
“The translators regret that the disuse into which magic has fallen, makes it impossible to render the technicalities of that mysterious art into tolerable English; they have therefore found it necessary to insert several passages in the original Italian.”
(The mysterious art in question being just that of putting the devil in hell.) It appears that Payne himself actually did translate the relevant section, but that his translation of it was omitted from the versions I have seen.
@Brett (and others): have you seen the recent Decameron series from Netflix? if so, what did you think?
i quite liked it – including its looseness with the source. it felt to me very much like a try at making a new installment in the Decameron branch of the frame-story tradition (to get menocalian about it), which to my sensibility is a satisfying way to go about adapting boccaccio.
Die Wanderhure on Netflix. Haven’t watched it, don’t know if it’s even related, but now I strongly suspect it’s at least inspired by Venier’s.
Wasn’t there, for a while, the attitude that his Tuscan wasn’t pure enough?
…wait, is that angeli with a Russian ë, or what happened there?
La Puttana errante
The polite word for “prostitute” in Kusaal (as in the Bible translation) is pu’agɔɔndir “wandering woman.”
Aha! Jianghu woman!
“incazziti fernetichi di Messer Petrarcha”
That is indeed quite… something.
Maybe “Mr. Petrarch’s horned-up ravings”?
From Florio’s 1598 dictionary (surely one of the greatest and most entertaining works of lexicography ever created, and certainly the best Italian dictionary of its day):
Incazzire,zisco,zito, as Incazzare.
Incazzare, to rage lecherously with or for a standing pricke.
Fernético, frantick, raving, humorous, toyish, mad.
Dante was left as the odd one out, strange as that may seem to our post-romantic sensitivity.
Wasn’t there, for a while, the attitude that his Tuscan wasn’t pure enough?
I’m not sure that it was regarded as “impure” exactly, but it certainly wasn’t the same language as that of Boccaccio and Petrarch, mainly because of the evolution of the Tuscan dialect in the time that separated them. Since Bembo and his contemporaries were endeavouring to establish a standard literary form of the Italian language, they could not use Dante as a reference alongside Boccaccio and Petrarch, as there were too many linguistic differences.
According to Rohlfs’ historical grammar, there is a Tuscan tendency to turn postaccentual a and e to o before l. He mentions as examples debole, fievole, possevole, nespolo, agnolo and Old Italian utole and nobole.
I never knew that, and it explains a lot.
@PlasticPaddy:
Any word has obscene connotations if properly wielded … Trumpet obviously admits usage as one particular obscene metaphor. It doesn’t work for me here, but then I’m not a 16th-century Venetian humanist. So your reading is as good as mine.
@David Marjanović:
If ë sounds like /jo/, no: there’s no i-like sound in angiolo. It’s just angelo with /o/ instead of /e/, an unobjectionable variant though rarer in my experience. A diminutive requires it: an angioletto cannot be an *angeletto. The more distant variant agnolo is archaic.
On the derivation of all these variants from Latin, ulr knows more than I. Possibly relevant to Venier’s word choice is that the Venetian word seems to be anzolo.
@Nat Shockley:
In Italian incazzato and incazzito are no longer synonyms, if they ever were.
Incazzato is a very common though vulgar word for “angry.” It no longer means anything else. It’s unclear if it ever meant fired up with an emotion other than anger. The only anger-free option in the Battaglia dictionary is a rare transitive usage: “Che razza di gioia pazza, allor t’incazza.”
Incazzito is unprecedented in my experience and absent from lesser contemporary dictionaries. Battaglia defines it as: “Alterato dalla libidine, dalla foia (la voce),” quoting Aretino and Venier themselves; or “Eccitato, esaltato (una persona),” quoting Vasari. It separately defines incazzirsi as “ostinarsi,” in plebeian usage according to the Tramater dictionary (Naples 1829-40).
I perceive it as implying with satisfying precision that Mr Petrarch’s ravings are at the same time overexcited, stubbornly obsessive, and ultimately lecherous behind their conservative façade. Horned up does not belong to my active English vocabulary, but it sounds accurate enough.
Horned up does not belong to my active English vocabulary
Don’t think I’ve ever seen it before, but it sounds like a plausible expression.
Two, actually.
The [j] only surfaces as such if there’s no preceding consonant; if there is one, it gets palatalized (and if that’s not possible, you get just /o/). Plain e does the same. So I was half-joking that ge becomes gio…
Looks like the /l/ was velarized at some point.
Ah, sorry, my knowledge of Russian was obviously insufficient to get your half joke. My ignorance may likewise be a barrier to any discussion of velarization.
With this important caveat, in Venetian from Venice (but not the whole of Veneto) intervocalic l is famously weak and seems to disappear before front vowels. To take an example of tourist interest that’s exactly parallel to angiolo / anzolo, traditional cornmeal cookies are sold as zaeti to visitors who I suspect rarely realize that’s nothing exotic but just Venetian for gialletti, a rather banal name for such small and yellow things. Maybe such lenition involves velarization?
I don’t think standard Italian has dark l anywhere, but again I could be mistaken or simply ignore that something else is also a velarized l
@rozele: When it came out, I tried watching the Netflix Decameron. However, I noped out about a minute after the end of the opening credits of the first episode, after I saw it featured Zosia Mamet doing her standard shtick, which I cannot stand.
@Giacomo Ponzetti: Cornmeal cookies by any name seem pretty exotic to this American.
I enjoyed your translation from Lorenzo Venier, so thanks!
@Brett: fair enough!
Incazzato is a very common though vulgar word for “angry.” It no longer means anything else. It’s unclear if it ever meant fired up with an emotion other than anger.
I would be inclined to think that Florio’s entry for the word makes it fairly clear that it did once mean something other than angry. The man was, after all, Italian himself, and – as the rest of his dictionary makes abundantly clear – he was both very familiar with the vulgar slang terms of the Italian language and also very willing to enter them in his dictionary (unlike, say, the Accademia della Crusca).
And being slang terms, they are unlikely to have appeared much in written works, making it difficult for later lexicographers such as Battaglia to capture them. For such areas of the language, Florio is now one of our most important and reliable sources.
Unlikely. But “darkness” is volatile. Current Italian lacks it, current Venetian also seems to, but things may well have been different in the 1530s. In, roughly, Central Bavarian dialects, /l/ rounded preceding vowels (reintroducing rounded front vowels into the sound system) and then disappeared or became /ɪ/ in the syllable coda – schnell, zählen, voll, Himmel come out as [ʃnœ], [t͡søn], [foɪ̯], [ˈhʏmːɪ]; it looks like the rounding was triggered by velarization that was later lost without any other trace (…but is preserved farther southwest).