Tales From the Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio

by Giovanni Boccaccio

  Boccaccio’s reappraisal of conventional wisdom in regard to sexual morals, implicit in the tale of Alatiel, finds much more forcible expression in the stories of Nastagio degli Onesti (V, 8) and Madonna Filippa of Prato (VI, 7). The first of these tells of a wealthy young nobleman of Ravenna, who impoverishes himself in a series of futile attempts to win the love of a beautiful girl of the Traversari family, ‘of far more noble lineage than his own’. He retires in despair to the solitude of a nearby pinewood, where one Friday morning he witnesses the extraordinary scene of a naked girl being pursued and killed by a horseman, and devoured by a brace of hounds. He attempts to intervene on her behalf, but desists on being informed by the mysterious horseman that he and his victim are both in Hell, himself for having committed suicide through his unrequited love for the girl, and she for failing to respond to his amorous entreaties. Their punishment consists in their enacting, over and over again, the horrifying scene to which Nastagio is the reluctant witness. Nastagio turns the situation to his advantage. On the following Friday he invites his kinsfolk and the lady he loves to a banquet in the selfsame clearing in the woods, where, to the consternation of his guests, the gruesome scene is enacted all over again. Being terrified at the prospect of suffering a similar fate, the lady repents of her haughty indifference towards Nastagio and places herself entirely at his disposal. His intentions towards her being impeccable, he proposes marriage, to which the girl promptly agrees, and they settle down to a long and happy life together.

  The message of the story seems to be that no woman should unreasonably withhold her consent to the advances of an ardent wooer, for by behaving like a saint she may discover she is a sinner, and consequently suffer the torments of Hell for her cruel inflexibility. Although parts of the tale have antecedents in medieval literature, the manner of its telling and the conclusion to which it leads are very far removed from anything to be found, for instance, in the Commedia, of which one is constantly reminded by the unusually large number of Dantesque allusions that are woven into the fabric of this novella. There is, for instance, a clear link between the names of the two protagonists and a passage where Dante regrets the decline and extinction of the Traversari and Anastagi families of Ravenna, who once embodied all that was best and most noble in the medieval tradition of love and courtesy:

  … la casa Traversara e li Anastagi

  (e l’una gente e l’altra gente è diretata),

  le donne e’ cavalier, li affanni e li agi

  che ne ’nvogliava amore e cortesia…40

  Then again, the pinewood at Classe, near Ravenna, where the pitiless hunt is enacted in Boccaccio’s tale, serves as the terrestrial point of comparison in Dante’s description (Purgatorio, XXVIII) of the wood constituting his vision of the Earthly Paradise. The description of the fleeing damsel and of the two fierce mastiffs tearing at her flesh is clearly modelled on a famous passage from canto XIII of Inferno, where Dante recounts the gruesome punishments meted out, in the Wood of the Suicides, to one of a pair of scialacquatori, or profligates. And the story contains numerous other verbal borrowings from well-known passages in Dante’s poem. But the use Boccaccio makes of his borrowings from Dante is arresting inasmuch as it frequently involves the deliberate distortion or even reversal of the semantic values of what has been borrowed.41 By no stretch of the imagination would it be possible to conceive that Dante would so manipulate the elements of a macabre infernal vision as to reach the conclusion presented by Boccaccio in the tale of Nastagio degli Onesti, where the traditional conception of the afterworld is set upon its head.

  If, in the story of Nastagio degli Onesti, the author remains within the bounds of Christian morality by allowing his hero to consummate his love only after marrying the woman who is the object of his deep affection, no such deference to conventional ethics is paid in the tale of Madonna Filippa (VI, 7), which on the contrary depends for its narrative force, like so many of the stories of the Decameron, especially those of the Seventh Day, on the proposition that the Seventh Commandment places an unreasonable restraint upon the freedom of the individual. The novella is set in Prato, where an ancient statute requires that any woman taken in adultery should be burnt alive. It is this statute that Madonna Filippa’s husband invokes upon discovering her in the arms of her handsome young lover. Filippa, a beautiful woman, ‘exceedingly passionate by nature’, and full of spirit, is brought before the magistrate, to whom she makes a full and frank confession of her guilt. But she calls into question the validity of the statute, pointing out that it applies only to women, who are much better able than men to bestow their favours liberally and who, when the statute was framed, were not even consulted on the matter. If it is accepted that all individuals are equal before the law, then the statute is bad law. But the clinching argument in her defence comes when, having persuaded her husband to testify that she has always granted him whatever he required in the way of bodily gratification, she turns to the magistrate and asks:

  … if he has always taken as much of me as he needed and as much as he chose to take… what am I to do with the surplus? Throw it to the dogs? Is it not far better that I should present it to a gentleman who loves me more dearly than himself, rather than allow it to turn bad or go to waste?42

  The logic of her novel argument is unanswerable, Madonna Filippa is freed, and the statute is amended so that it applies in future only to those wives who commit adultery for monetary gain, a class of women for whom the author registers his profound contempt in the story of Gulfardo and Guasparruolo (VIII, 1), where, as in Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale, a wife’s ill-gotten gains turn out to have been borrowed in advance from her husband, in whose presence she is later forced to acknowledge that the debt has been fully settled.

  Madonna Filippa’s outrageous but ostensibly rational defence of her wayward behaviour has been used to illustrate the thesis that for Boccaccio love consists in the gratification of instinctive sexual desires, whether within marriage or outside it. Such a view draws some support from several other stories in the Decameron, for instance the tales of Paganino of Monaco (II, 10), of the anonymous lady who uses a priest as her unwitting go-between (III, 3), of Zima and the wife of Francesco Vergellesi (III, 5), of Ricciardo Minutolo and Catella Sighinolfo (III, 6), of Teodoro and Violante (V, 7), and of the wife of Pietro di Vinciolo (V, 10). Other stories that are relevant in this connection are the tales of the Seventh Day in general, the tale of the three beds (IX, 6), and the prolix account of the remarkable friendship of Titus and Gisippus (X, 8). In several of these stories, the Christian view of marriage is questioned just as vigorously and outrageously as in Madonna Filippa’s spirited defence of her adultery.

  In the tale of Paganino, the Monegasque pirate, for instance, the beautiful young wife of a senile Pisan judge, who with the aid of a calendar of Saints has accustomed her to a frugal sexual regime matching his own limited physical powers, is seized by a dashing young pirate who wastes no time in supplying her with a more wholesome diet. The judge discovers where she is living, and goes to fetch her home, but she refuses to return with him, treating him to a torrent of vulgar abuse for his failure to satisfy her natural needs. When he appeals to her sense of honour, she replies that she will defend what remains of her honour as jealously as anyone, adding that she wishes that her parents had shown an equal regard for her honour when they bestowed her in marriage on an impotent and elderly husband.

  The allusion to honour is interesting, for it triggers a powerful attack on the hypocrisy of a society in which the institution of marriage has been reduced to the status of a commercial transaction, no attention being paid to the natural inclinations or aspirations of the prospective bride. This of course is the standard way of justifying adulterous relationships in such a society. But it is also worth noting that Boccaccio is sufficiently sensitive towards generally accepted social conventions as to conclude his tale, as in the resolution of the story of Nastagio degli Onesti, with a reference to the marriage of the two protagonis
ts, an outcome made possible in this case by the death of the disillusioned senex.

  In most, but not all, of Boccaccio’s stories of adulterous love (and it should be noticed incidentally that, contrary to popular belief, they account for only about a quarter of the hundred novelle) the senility of the husband is a major contributory factor. But the exceptions to this general rule should place us on our guard against concluding too readily that the author’s object is purely the polemical one of calling into question the morality of the arranged marriages that were a common feature of the society in which he lived. This was no doubt a part of his intention, but it must never be forgotten that Boccaccio’s main purpose is aesthetic. What he is chiefly concerned with is the communication, in as elegant and articulate a form as he can devise, of a series of interesting narratives, which, albeit for the most part inherently improbable, are rendered plausible by the manner of the telling.

  With this important reservation in mind, it is none the less possible to detect where the author stands in relation to certain issues. So far as marriage is concerned, the institution is one that he respects, provided that it is based upon the mutual love and trust of the husband and wife. It is when this condition is not fulfilled that the kinds of irregularities which provide the raw material of Boccaccio’s adulterous tales are most likely to occur. In the story of Pietro di Vinciolo (V, 10), for instance, the reader is told of a buxom young woman with red hair and a passionate disposition who finds herself wedded to a pederast. With the assistance of an old bawd, she takes steps to provide herself with what her husband has denied her, until one evening, as she is entertaining a handsome young man to supper, her husband returns home unexpectedly. The young man conceals himself beneath a chicken-coop, whence he involuntarily reveals his presence when he yells with pain as his projecting hand is trampled on by an ass. But all is satisfactorily resolved when the husband sees what a pretty young fellow his wife has been consorting with. As the narrator phrases it, in the concluding paragraph of the tale:

  How exactly Pietro arranged matters, after supper, to the mutual satisfaction of all three parties, I no longer remember. But I do know that the young man was found next morning wandering about the piazza, not exactly certain with which of the pair he had spent the greater portion of the night, the wife or the husband.43

  This outrageous but tidy resolution of the dilemma of the characters is in keeping with the novella’s overall tone, which is engagingly frank and direct vis-à-vis the problem with which the wife of the sodomitical husband is initially confronted. Her musings upon her predicament, together with the old bawd’s lengthy discourse on the role of women, who in a world dominated by men should make the most of the opportunities that fall in their path, are reminiscent of the harangue to which the wife subjects the impotent Pisan judge in the story of Paganino, already referred to above. In both of these stories, it is strongly implied that the satisfaction of sexual needs is a necessary prerequisite for successful conjugal relationships, and that, in the absence of such a condition, a wife is fully justified in seeking her pleasures elsewhere. Boccaccio, be it noted, draws no fine distinction between love and lust, in the manner of the Christian moralist, and in this respect he stands decisively apart from his medieval predecessors and contemporaries. Or, as one critic has observed, one of the most original features of Boccaccio’s work is that ‘in the world of the Decameron there is no immorality perceived as such, but rather the feeling that man is a part of nature, which is not governed by moral laws or principles, but answers only to instincts and impulses and biological phenomena that fall outside the scope of ethics’.44

  No analysis of Boccaccio’s handling of amatory material in the Decameron would be complete without some reference to the concept of courtly love (amour courtois), which originated with the Provençal troubadours, and which occupied so prominent a position in both the lyric poetry and the prose romances of the later Middle Ages. In classical times, amorous relationships in high places had been described in some detail by Ovid in his Ars amatoria, at the cost of his banishment for life from Rome to the Black Sea by Emperor Augustus, and it was Ovid’s poem that initially inspired the codification of the doctrine of courtly love by medieval theorists. Of these latter, the most notable was Andreas Capellanus, whose Liber de arte honeste amandi et reprobatione inhonesti amoris (Book on the Art of Loving Honourably and the Reproof of Dishonourable Love), written towards the end of the twelfth century, was enormously influential in shaping the attitudes of later writers, including Boccaccio, towards this particular topic. For Andreas, the business of the courtly lover was to serve his lady with absolute fidelity, no matter what obstacles (such as the fact that she was already married to another) were placed in his path. By a strange paradox, adulterous love thus acquired an exalted status.

  Several of the stories in the Decameron reflect this aspect of the manners and ideals of the feudal society of an earlier age, and some contain traces of the actual terminology used by the love theorists. One instance is the story (VII, 7) of Lodovico and his successful wooing of the Bolognese married woman, Madonna Beatrice, the fame of whose beauty has spread to the corners of the earth. The preliminaries to the tale pointedly present Lodovico as the son of a Florentine nobleman who, living in Paris, is obliged by his straitened circumstances to become a merchant. After making a huge fortune, he secures a place for his son in the French royal household, ‘where he was brought up with other young nobles and acquired the manners and attributes of a gentleman’. Having thus established the link in Lodovico’s upbringing between his father’s mercantile concerns and the feudal values of the French court, Boccaccio goes on to relate how Lodovico learns of the extraordinary beauty of Madonna Beatrice from a knight who has recently returned from the Holy Sepulchre. The earliest practitioners of the poetry of amour courtois are in fact thought to have been inspired by a knowledge of the mystical philosophy of the Islamic world brought to western Europe by the Crusaders. But what gives Boccaccio’s tale a more specific connection with the troubadours is the idea of amor de lonh (‘distant love’) that is associated with the poetry of Jaufré Rudel of Blaye. When Lodovico, having changed his name to Anichino, arrives in Bologna from Paris, he finds that the lady is even more beautiful than he had been led to suppose, and secures a place in her husband’s household. A further echo of the story’s French antecedents is the way he reveals his love to Beatrice through allowing her to beat him at chess, a stratagem commonly used by aspiring lovers in the medieval romances. The game of chess is the foreplay, the first of the four stages commended to the lover by Andreas Capellanus for achieving the object of his desires. There follow the kiss as pledge (arra) of ultimate reward, the embrace, and the fulfilment. Not content with the ingredients from the French literary tradition he has already inserted freely into his story, Boccaccio rounds it off with an account of the delight experienced by the lover in administering a sound thrashing to the husband, for which precedents are found in the French fabliaux.

  The standard metaphors and terminology of the medieval love theorists are found in many of Boccaccio’s other narratives. Introducing her story of Ricciardo Minutolo’s seduction of the virtuous wife of Filippello Sighinolfo (III, 6), Fiammetta says she will show how the lady was led ‘to taste the fruits of love before she even noticed they had blossomed’. Elissa concludes her tragic account of Gerbino’s amor de lonh for the daughter of the King of Tunis (IV, 4) by observing that ‘the two young lovers met a violent end without ever having tasted the fruits of their love.’ In the bawdy tale of the nun and the abbess (IX, 2), we are told that for some little time the nun and her handsome young admirer ‘sustained without fruit’45 their love for one another. A similar image is found near the end of the story of King Charles the Old (X, 6), who ‘married off the girl he loved without having taken or gathered a single leaf, flower or fruit from his love’. In the story that follows, King Peter of Aragon learns (from a troubadour’s song) that an apothecary’s daughter is dying of her
love for him after witnessing his feats of valour in a jousting contest. He effects a cure by paying her a visit, then bestows her in marriage to one of his young courtiers, providing them with a rich dowry, and saying: ‘Now we desire to take the fruit of your love which is our due.’ Then, holding her head between his hands, he implants a kiss on the young woman’s brow. This tale of literal amour courtois is sealed with the comment that the king ‘always styled himself her loyal knight for as long as he lived, and never entered the lists without displaying the favour she had sent him’.

  Other common features of amour courtois are the lover’s sighs and the lover’s tears, both of which Boccaccio exploits to good effect in many of the tales. The account of Lodovico’s amor de lonh for Madonna Beatrice (VII, 7) includes an episode where Lodovico, having allowed Beatrice to defeat him in a game of chess, heaves an enormous sigh as a prelude to revealing his love for her, after which she too begins to sigh. In the story of Zima’s adulterous love for the wife of Francesco Vergellesi (III, 5), the lady’s ‘barely perceptible sighs’ are the only means she has of responding to the amorous outpourings of her admirer, for she has been forbidden by her husband to utter a word during the meeting he has arranged between them for purposes of his own.46 Although the tale is set in fourteenth-century Pistoia, its connection with the literature of Provence is observable in a seemingly anachronistic reference to Zima’s tilting at the jousts and his troubadour-like skills in the composition of aubades. But even more indicative of its amour courtois antecedents is the lengthy monologue addressed by Zima to the lady, so fulsome in its protestations of love as to leave the impression that Boccaccio is engaged, as in the story of Titus and Gisippus (X, 8), in a deliberate parody of his literary models.