The Florentine writer Giovanni Bocaccio created his witty, tragic, and raunchy masterpiece the Decameron in the aftermath of the plague that ravaged Europe in 1348. The book, a collection of 100 tales told by a cast of 10 narrators, is a major work of Western literature, one sparkling with energy and erudition. We spoke with Wayne Rebhorn, an acclaimed translator of the book, about why it is still very much worth reading. And if you haven’t subscribed already to WHY THE CLASSICS? you should click here — that way you’ll never miss our newsletter, hitting inboxes every Thursday.
Why the Classics: A lot of people vaguely know what the Decameron is and vaguely know who Giovanni Boccaccio was. I was hoping you could talk more specifically about who he was as a thinker, who he was as a writer, and how he comes at around age 40 to write this book that has lasted for centuries.
Wayne Rebhorn: Boccaccio was born about 25 miles outside of Florence to a guy who worked for the Bardi Bank. His father wanted him to go into banking. He didn't want to. He tried canon law for a while. That didn't really work. But at Naples, he was admitted into the circles around the court. Naples was the capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. And he developed his literary taste there as he had earlier in Florence. He was a great fan of Dante. In Naples he began writing poems very much in the medieval vein: love poems, dream visions, long romantic ethics. Most of these are good, but they're not great literature and really are read primarily and taught primarily by medievalists.
Then in 1350, a little after the plague, he met Francesco Petrarca, Petrarch, who is usually credited as being the "father" of the Renaissance who propagandized, especially for the recovery of ancient Latin language and civilization, and was pretty much successful. However, the output that he was encouraging was Latin because Latin was really the lingua franca of Europeans who were educated. Boccaccio was inspired by this and started writing encyclopedic works and the like in Latin. So, he has two phases in his career. Early career he writes medieval allegorical poems and things like that. The latter phase of his career he writes Latin works that are of scholarly eminence, and some of them used as late as the 18th Century.
In between there's this magical moment of three or four or five years when he decides to write a framed tale collection. That is to say the tales take place not in a vacuum: they're a collection of a hundred different stories told by specific people in a specific place and in response, in this case, to the plague. I don't think he was planning to write it as a response to the plague initially because he had written some tales in his earlier production which were told by groups of people. But the plague happened in 1348, about the time he was considering writing such a collection. There were no such collections in Europe. Those that existed came from the east, such as the 1,001 Nights, which is probably the most famous one we know today.
The first thing to say about that is that he wants to situate his collection of stories, which of course are, in some degree, fictional, but that usually involve historical persons. He wants to use it as a way of commenting on the situation in which Italians found themselves in 1347, '48, '49, when the plague first hit and really wiped out a very substantial number of people in the city, far more than the pandemic we're going through. But nevertheless, it was a kind of pandemic because it spread all over Europe and then came back in repeated intervals, irregular intervals, for the next 400 years at least.
I guess I would call it literature is escapist literature. It lets you get away from the horrible reality in which you live. And in fact, he has his 10 storytellers, seven women and three men, meet together in Florence and decide to go out to a palace that one of the relatives has in the country, and after getting there and finding it just a delightful place to be, they decide, well, they'll tell stories to pass the time.
For the next 10 days they tell stories. In many cases, they're stories that have precedence in Western and in Eastern story collections. There are some that he has even rewritten from his own earlier work, just a couple. And these stories are, generally speaking, comic. There's a day devoted to tragic tales of love in which people die, and the last day is more high minded and about virtues like compassion and liberality and generosity. The Italians have an adjective, boccaccésco, which means ribald, irreverent, comic, dirty. We don't of course have that adjective. But I think when people think of Boccaccio's stories, they think of stories that are, generally speaking, ribald, erotic. They're often about men and women finding a way to get together and make love.
So, we move far away from the plague, which has disrupted all of the normal social and political conventions, the rules and regulations in Florence, into a fantasy world, which is a real world in the stories, in which imagined people, or sometimes real people, do things that would not normally be condoned in normal society in which Boccaccio lives. It's an escape from the plague, a way to pass the time agreeably, but also a way to, can I say, rethink the social realities in which people lived before the plague.
It's not quite a revolutionary work in the sense that it calls for a revolution. If you think ahead in the Renaissance to say something like Thomas More's Utopia, that is a revolutionary text, though it's very ironic so More can protect himself from the authorities, but it does suggest that there are better ways of organizing society than the one they already had. And Boccaccio's work implies that, but he almost never makes a direct call, through his characters or in his own person in the collection, for a grand transformation of Florence, or Italy, or what have you. What I'm trying to say is that you can read it merely as escapist literature, and it's a lot of fun. The stories are hilarious in many cases. And at the same time, you can also read it, as all stories can be read, namely as a way of thinking about reality in which people live.
WTC: What might this better world that Boccaccio hints at be?
Rebhorn: I'll take the one story, the seventh story of the sixth day. In that story, a woman in Prato, which is a little town not too far from Florence, is caught with her lover by her husband, and he, instead of doing what many an Italian man would do then, doesn't just immediately draw out his sword and stab them both to death or something. He takes her to court. The punishment for adultery in Prato was death. And the woman decides that she will to take on her own defense in court. That's, in itself, is slightly revolutionary because, by and large, women didn't speak in public forums. They were not entirely but largely confined to the house. Men were outside. Women didn't have professions. The only profession they might have had in Italy was becoming a nun.
He takes her to court, and she explains the situation and talks in very high minded terms about the love she has with the man who is their lover, and everyone in Prato comes to the trial because, says Boccaccio in the story, it's such a remarkable case. And the judge wants to do everything he can to let her go but she insists upon confessing that yes, she did have an affair. And the crux of the story comes when she calls on her husband as a witness and asks him whether he was always satisfied by her sexually whenever he asked or wanted, and he says, "Yes." And then she explains to the crowd, "Well, if he was always satisfied and I always give him what he wants, what should I do with the leftovers. Throw them to the dogs?"
The crowd cheers, the judge lets her off, and indeed, the city of Prato goes on to throw out the law that condemned illicit romances by women with capital punishment. That's about as close as Boccaccio comes to actually having some kind of political agenda. He clearly wants a liberalization of laws treating women, treating sexuality. In fact, the one place where he gets political is in the prologue to the fourth day which he writes in his own person, arguing in the prologue to the fourth day that sexuality is natural and, therefore not to be perceived as an evil. It's inevitable, he's saying. Of course, to prove his point he tells a story, which is incomplete, but in which a man has kept his son, raised his son in isolation, away from women. The son says he wants to go down to Florence with his father to help provide and get provisions, and of course, what should happen? He sees women coming back from a wedding and he's already overwhelmed with all the buildings in the city but this really knocks him out. He says, "Daddy, what are those?" I'm paraphrasing here. And he said, "Oh, they're geese," or goslings, rather. Female goslings. And the boy says, "Yes, well, I want one of those." And the father is of course terrified by the idea that his son not only sees women, but he wants one right away. His father says, "No, you don't how much trouble it is to feed them." And the son persists, and then the story ends, because we don't know whether this meant a transformation in the son's and father's relationship, or whether the son was allowed to move back into Florence and see women on a more regular basis.
But the point of the story is clear. It's a very heterosexual story, to be sure. If a man sees a woman, or vice versa, there's going to be some kind of natural sexual reaction. And it's defended as a good thing, not as a bad thing, a natural thing, and, therefore, it runs very much against tradition in the middle ages that we might call of asceticism, because the model for priests and monks and nuns and the like was the life of Christ, and Christ was famously not hitched up with anyone, not in the conventional interpretation of the Bible. The ideal in Christianity was it's okay to have sex in marriage because, as St. Paul said, it's better to marry than to burn, but ideally, you shouldn't have sex. And in fact, if you leap forward a few years to Chaucer, Chaucer's Wife of Bath in her very long prologue to her tale, makes a lengthy defense of sexuality, the pleasures of sexuality. That's really what Boccaccio is doing, what his stories are, in fact, meant to do.
WTC: Can you talk a bit about the book's broader themes, other than this more liberal attitude towards sex that he was advocating?
Rebhorn: When the group goes out into the countryside, they create their own temporary social and political order which is what the storytelling's all about and each day has a king or queen who presides over the telling for that day and often chooses the topic for that day. So, by going out there, they put themselves in a place that isn't the old Florence before the plague and isn't the Florence of the plague. It's an imaginary place in which everyone has a shot at telling a story and being heard on every single day, and everyone has a shot at being the director. In other words, that atmosphere — if you want to call it political structure you can — is more egalitarian than what existed in Florence, in any Italian city, at the time. Though there were republican communes, but the republican communes were exclusively men's province.
As you read these stories, what you notice is that instead of the protagonists being members of the elite, they're the people who are the smartest, the sharpest, the cleverest. And if there's anything that is at the core of Boccaccio’s work, it is the utter importance of intelligence, linguistic skill, and storytelling. In other words, the message of Boccaccio is consistent with the idea of this is escapist literature. Because what allows us to cope with our reality, which is often overwhelmed with rules and regulations, is the ability to tell stories to produce quips and generally to imagine ways to deal with that reality which frees you from its restrictions in a very fundamental way. This book is liberating.
Let me give you an example. After he introduces the plague, he then has his protagonists go out into the countryside and they settle down to tell tales. And the very first tale is about a man named Ciappelletto the worst man who ever lived, we're told in great detail by the narrator. He has been chosen by the king of France to go to Burgundy and to collect taxes. And he stays with two Florentine usurers. We would nowadays called them bankers. He falls deathly ill. And the two usurers are worried that, well, if he has a final confession he'll tell all these things and they'll be in disrepute. And if he refuses a final confession, that'll be a problem for them too.
So, they think about chucking him out, and he overhear him and says, "Don't worry, just find me a very pious friar and I will make my final confession. So, the friar comes, and then in his confession, Ciappelletto invents, or reinvents himself, not as the worst man who ever lived but as the best man who ever lived. He even takes over the confession from the friar and says, "Oh, you forgot about this. You forgot about that." He's a great actor. He begins to cry.
So, at the end, the friar, of course, absolves him of all sins and said that he's really a very saintly man. Goes back and tells the prior of the monastery that this man is a saintly hero, and the prior then preaches a sermon which he tells all the people how wonderful Ciappelletto is and how they ought to be like him, practically sin-free, do penance all the time, abstaining, fasting. And they turn out making him into a saint. And now the narrator is cautious. He says, "Well, of course this is a bad guy and he's probably in hell, though you never can tell.” And you wonder, "Well, okay, why does Boccaccio start with this story in which a really diabolically evil man, who's done all sorts of horrible things, concocts this final confession in which he makes himself into a saint, quite successfully, but unbelievably?" We as readers say, "Well, I wouldn't believe that stuff." But the pious friar who listens to his confession does.
So, the story raises the issue: how are we going to judge this guy? The conventional judgment is that which the narrator gives, he's in hell, but is that the way the story is meant to be taken? The two usurers who are overhearing all of this can hardly keep their laughter in check and they think, "What a guy! Here is faced with death and judgment and eternity of punishment and he's still making a joke of it." So, it's interesting that the first hero is really a protagonist in the Decameron is a kind of anti-hero. We're not left with any certain certainty about how to interpret it. Sure, he's a bad man that's going to hell. But that's too simple. Is he admirable? Is he heroic? Is he like a romantic anti-hero who defies God even at the very last moment? Is he heroic because he defies death? Which was a very scary matter for people in the late middle ages, and is still a very scary matter for all of us, whether we're believers or not.
And so Boccaccio undoes any simple allegorical reading of his story. One may think, of course, of his great predecessor, Dante, who works within a Christian framework, and as we are led into hell, we find characters being punished for their sins. And Dante's challenged us to figure out how the punishment fits the crime. This is not that kind of book. Boccaccio was a great admirer of Dante's work, but his perspective is very different. And his perspective is meant to say you listen to people and you need to develop skills at interpreting what they say, and if you are smart enough, you should develop skills that allow you do the same kind of telling of stories of making yourself into something you are not, of getting out of jams with various people.
It's really a celebration of intelligence in all of its many forms.
WTC: Why is it that you believe the Decameron, really alone of Boccaccio's works, has stuck around?
Rebhorn: He was living in a culture of writing, not of printing, and he wrote the book in stages. And in that prologue to the fourth book, he defends himself from people who accuse him of writing trivial stories. It's clear that some of the stories were being circulated in chunks. He knows he has an audience out there. Dante became almost an instant classic, as did Petrarch in their own age. Petrarch was almost contemporary with Boccaccio, and Dante was maybe, oh, 45 years before in terms of the birth.
And Boccaccio himself later on in his life, post-Petrarch, post-plague, had some religious second thought about all these dirty stories he wrote, and was, at one point, tempted to burn his entire collection of writings but was talked out of it. And then in the very last few years of his life, he actually rewrote the book his own hand. It's held in a library in Berlin. He rewrote the entire Decameron, which suggests it had some special meaning to him. And it was an immediate success in Italy, though success not quite in our terms, because remember, it's not a print culture, but people had copies made. And we know, interestingly enough, a large majority of the manuscript copies of the Decameron were in the libraries of what we would call merchants and businessmen. It appealed in a way to a kind of middle-class audience which lived by its wits. But it caught on and it became a model for other writers in Italian and French and English to write frame collections of stories.
He's less well-known than Dante and Chaucer, I think, for two reasons. One is of course he's writing hundreds of years ago when the world was very different in lots of ways so there's a kind of alien quality to him. And secondly, he is, without the word being used, boccaccésco. Ribald, raunchy, witty, funny.
In a certain sense, when we evaluate, when put on our serious hats, we think, "Well, comedy can't be really as great as tragedy or as epic or something like that." If you read Dante's Divine Comedy, it ain't funny, but there are a couple of funny moments in it. But Boccaccio's all about fun, the fun of playing with the language, the use of language to trick other people to get pleasure.
I think it suffers from a kind of assumption that it's not very serious, and I think that's a real mistake. It would be like dismissing Don Quixote as just a parody of epic in which Don Quixote goes around as though he were a knight errant on a quest at a time when that's no longer a reasonable thing to do. But there's a seriousness, I think, to Boccaccio precisely in its comedy, because if anything else, as I said it earlier, it's a liberating work, and most fundamentally, it's about confronting death and the fear we have of death, and diverting us from it, but also having us confront it. What does it mean to face death? Well, let’s tell a story. Let's laugh. Laughter is infectious and human.
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