You could say that Boccaccio erred only when he ventured out of his home territory: realism. Action, pure action, without intended meaning or ethics, gains depth, lucidity and mystery from those details that no amount of serious moral intention could give it. Think of the little towered cities, and the villages, with shepherds and sheep, in the far distance, behind the Virgin Mary or St.
Francis or whomever, in Renaissance paintings. Love of the world: these painters had it, and so, Moravia says, did Boccaccio. What if happiness, including sexual happiness, were itself a moral virtue? In the Middle Ages, acedia , spiritual torpor or gloom, was regarded as a sin. Happiness may also foster tolerance—toward Jews, for instance see the story of Abraham , and women most of the time. Such open-mindedness is a subdivision of a general spirit of good will in the Decameron. One example is the story of Ferondo, a wealthy peasant.
When Ferondo wakes up, a monk instructed by the abbot tells him that he is in Purgatory, and then beats him to a pulp. Ferondo must therefore be brought back. That is accomplished, and Ferondo tells the neighbors how he was in Purgatory, and what it was like. They all ask him how their relatives are doing there, and he makes up wonderful stories, which they believe.
He is now an important man in his town. The wife and the abbot still get to rendezvous occasionally. Everyone is content.
Finally, the high spirits of the Decameron have political force. They help make the book proto-democratic. Yet, because he clearly liked these people, he did raise them. They seem to have a hundred lovely metaphors, with a donkey or a bucket or whatever, for everything in life. And, however improper the goings on in the Decameron, the language is almost never filthy.
Dubin, and described by R. Fabliaux are comic tales, in verse, composed between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries, typically in northern France. Most of them are anonymous. Most of the tales also describe, not politely, how people had sex, and dealt with bathroom matters.
This is fun, until you get tired of it. Likewise, the sentence structure is paratactic: ABCD. The knight said such-and-such; then the peasant said such-and-such; then his wife said such-and-such. To this, Boccaccio is like a castle to a cave. His lovers grind at the mill; they give the wool a whacking; they make the nightingale sing. Even more intelligent is his syntax. Because the knight said such-and-such, the peasant said such-and-such, even though his wife had previously said such-and-such.
This is the kind of sentence structure that was handed down to us by Latin, and that Western people, whether or not they ever studied Latin, recognize as their own. Italians before Boccaccio had written prose in a sophisticated form. Dante was the first truly distinguished practitioner, but his monumental work, the Divine Comedy, is written in verse, not prose.
Today, it is the primary medium of literary writing: novels, short stories. In Italy, the pioneer of that change was Boccaccio. In his time, many educated people still regarded the language of everyday life as too rough a medium for an ambitious piece of writing. Most literary works were in Latin. In Italy, the banner-carrier in the campaign against this policy was, again, Dante. The Divine Comedy was written in the Florentine dialect. Others, in turn, copied him. More and more books were written in the common tongue and as was not the case with Dante about commoners.
From that seedbed grew the idea that the lives of ordinary people could be described in literary language, and thereby ennobled. Again with a concern for the common reader, he has tried to make the slang sound natural, and he succeeds. Also, he repeatedly runs into the problem of having to combine low language with high. It should be said, though, that Rebhorn, in his endnotes, explains his decisions. He tells us a lot more as well.
When Boccaccio describes a baker, Cisti, whose shop was next to the Chiesa di Santa Maria degli Ughi, Rebhorn tells us that in there was, in fact, a baker named Cisti, whose shop was situated there. He relays the going wisdom: Genoese are misers; Florentines are sly; Perugia is full of homosexuals.
He explains the jokes. In one story, there is an ugly man named Scannadio. We should, though. But the most important point about this version is that it is heavily abridged. Without this context, not to speak of the missing tales, one loses much of the flavor—indeed, much of the meaning. And yet, this is the version I would recommend to many readers. A hundred stories is a lot of stories.
Patient Griselda is in there. Furthermore, this version, as one of the excellent Norton Critical editions, includes a number of the most intelligent essays on the Decameron. If you have more time, and want the true, mixed, fourteenth-century book that Boccaccio wrote, choose Rebhorn. In , as Boccaccio was writing the Decameron, he met Petrarch, who at that time was the most famous writer in Italy and the foremost Italian representative of Renaissance humanism, the return to ancient values and ancient literature that in some measure unleashed the High Renaissance.
He did, however, like patient Griselda. He translated the story into Latin and showed it to friends of his. They wept, he says. Like his father, he never married, but he produced a number of illegitimate children. He complained of having no money—possibly with reason. These activities not only improve our sense of wellbeing but also connect us with others.
Some of the lessons from 14th-century Tuscany seem to have been relearned in 21st-century China. During the long days and nights of enforced isolation when some Chinese cities were in lockdown due to the coronavirus, residents sought new ways of connecting with others. Online book clubs and cooking forums sprang up. DJs live-streamed sets and people turned their apartments into impromptu nightclubs.
Such activities remind us of the importance of connection when we are socially isolated. They certainly make for a better experience than following the example of one man who was isolated during the Covid outbreak in China.
He passed his days running an ultra-marathon by circling his tiny apartment. Giovanni Boccaccio - , the Italian writer who was born in Tuscany, circa His major work was the 'Decameron'.
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By Smart Energy GB. In the year then of our Lord , there happened at Florence, the finest city in all Italy, a most terrible plague…. Giovanni Boccaccio introduces his acclaimed collection of novellas, the Decameron , with a reference to the most terrifying existential crisis of his time: the decimating effects of the bubonic plague in the outbreak known as the Black Death. A classic of medieval plague literature, it continues to be cited by physicians and epidemiologists to this day for its vivid depiction of a disease that held a city under siege.
The Decameron is a tale of renewal and recreation in defiance of a decimating pandemic. Boccaccio attributes the cause of this terrible plague to either malignant celestial influences or divine punishment for the iniquity of Florentine society. Unlike the plague of - which killed an estimated 15, Florentines - that of was, according to Boccaccio, far more contagious, spreading with greater vigour and speed.
It was extraordinary, in his view, that the disease did not merely spread from human to human but crossed species too. He saw two pigs dying within moments of biting infected clothing in the street. Florentine officials removed household waste and contaminants from the city in attempts to eradicate the deadly pestilence, and banned infected people from entering.
They issued public pleas and advised residents on measures that would minimise risk of contagion, such as social distancing and increased personal hygiene. Boccaccio, in the same introduction, takes aim at those who fled the sick to protect their own health and in doing so degraded the social fabric. Extreme interpretations of social distancing led to people shunning neighbours and members of their extended and immediate families.
In some cases, he writes, parents even deserted their children. Read more: Guide to the Classics: how Marcus Aurelius' Meditations can help us in a time of pandemic.
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