Giovanni Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375)

Giovanni Boccaccio was born in 1313, most likely in Certaldo or Florence, the illegitimate son of Boccaccino di Chellino, a merchant in the service of the Bardi banking house, and a mother whose identity is not recorded. His father acknowledged him and brought him up in Florence, where the boy received his first schooling and a thin grounding in Dante from the teacher Giovanni Mazzuoli. When he was about ten or twelve his father took a second wife and carried the household toward the family's commercial future. That future was meant to be his own: around 1327 Boccaccio was sent to Naples, where the Bardi had a branch, to learn the trade of a merchant.

He hated it. His father then steered him toward canon law, a second course of study he later described as six wasted years. What Naples gave him instead was the court of King Robert of Anjou, a library, and a circle of scholars and poets. He read the Latin classics there, studied astronomy and learned some Greek, and fell in with the pleasures and rivalries of a cosmopolitan city. By his own later account it was in the church of San Lorenzo, on Holy Saturday in 1336, that he first saw the woman he called Fiammetta, who became the muse of his early romances. The Neapolitan years produced his first works in Latin and the vernacular, among them the Filostrato and the Teseida, poems that Chaucer would later borrow from.

The idyll ended around 1340–41, when his father's finances collapsed with the failure of the Bardi and he was recalled to Florence. He found the city diminished and himself without a patron. He moved through short periods in Ravenna and Forlì in the service of petty lords, and in 1348 he was in Florence when the plague arrived, killing perhaps half the population. His father died in the same epidemic. The catastrophe supplied the frame of the Decameron, his hundred tales told by ten young Florentines sheltering outside the city, which he composed between about 1349 and 1353. The book opens with an unsparing account of the plague and goes on to pass through comedy, cruelty, lust and ingenuity, with clergy and religious among its most frequent targets.

Florence employed him as a diplomat from the 1350s, sending him on embassies to the Romagna, to Avignon and into Germany. In 1350 he met Petrarch, a decade his senior, and the friendship reshaped his intellectual life. Petrarch's example pulled him toward humanism, toward Latin scholarship and the recovery of ancient texts, and away from the vernacular storytelling that had made his name. He promoted the study of Greek in Florence, helped arrange for Leontius Pilatus to hold the first chair of Greek there, and worked on Latin compendia of mythology, famous women and the fortunes of great men. He also copied manuscripts, and some in his hand survive.

His religious life is the part that resists easy summary. Around 1362 a Carthusian monk, Gioacchino Ciani, brought him a message of warning from a dying holy man, Pietro Petroni: repent, abandon poetry, or face damnation. Boccaccio was shaken enough to contemplate burning his works and giving up his books, and Petrarch talked him out of the worst of it. He remained a layman, though he took minor orders and held ecclesiastical benefices in his later years, and the Decameron was not renounced so much as regretted in some moods. His affections and his conscience never quite settled the matter.

In his last years he lived mostly in Certaldo, poor, ailing and increasingly lonely, though in 1373 the Florentine commune invited him to give public readings on Dante's Commedia, an honor cut short by illness. Petrarch had died in 1374, leaving him a bequest for a winter coat. Boccaccio died in Certaldo on December 21, 1375.

His Writing and Its Influence

Boccaccio wrote in two registers and spent his later life uncertain which one mattered. The vernacular works of the Neapolitan and early Florentine years, the Filostrato, the Teseida, the Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, and the pastoral and mythological experiments that followed, established prose and verse in Tuscan as serious literary instruments. The Decameron carried that achievement furthest. Its hundred tales hold the whole range of human conduct in a single frame, and its first great subject is a society's behavior under mortal terror. The collection is not an argument against Christianity, and Boccaccio did not write as an unbeliever. But it treats hypocrisy among friars, priests and the pious as comic material, and it leaves piety and appetite standing side by side without resolving them. The tale of Ser Ciappelletto, the notary whose lying deathbed confession wins him a reputation for sainthood, is the best-known case. Whether it satirizes the credulity of the faithful or the mercy of God is a question readers have never settled.

The Latin works of his later decades are less read but were more admired in his own century. The Genealogia deorum gentilium, the De mulieribus claris, the De casibus virorum illustrium and the geographical dictionary De montibus served scholars for generations as reference works on the ancient world. The Genealogia contains a defense of poetry, in its closing books, against clerics who thought pagan fable corrupting. Boccaccio answers that poetic fiction conceals truth under a veil, and that the church's own use of allegory proves the point. This argument, borrowed from Petrarch and the patristic tradition of reading Scripture figuratively, became a standard justification for the study of classical literature among Christian humanists. He also wrote a life of Dante, the Trattatello in laude di Dante, and delivered the first public lectures on the Commedia, helping to fix Dante's standing as a classic. The Corbaccio, a bitter satire on a widow who rejected him, shows the vernacular writer in a darker and more punishing mood.

His immediate influence ran through other writers. Chaucer drew on the Teseida for the Knight's Tale and on the Filostrato for Troilus and Criseyde, and the Decameron shaped the story-collection tradition from the Canterbury Tales onward. The Latin encyclopedias fed the mythographic habits of the Renaissance. The Decameron was also a target. Church authorities listed it for expurgation, and the revised edition approved after the Council of Trent altered or removed the offending clerical portraits, in some versions turning priests into laymen. Savonarola's circle in Florence burned copies. Protestant polemicists, meanwhile, found in the tales useful evidence of clerical corruption, which is an odd afterlife for a book whose author feared for his soul.

Later Christian readers have taken Boccaccio less as a teacher than as a witness. He shows what a lay, urban, educated Catholic made of a church he neither left nor trusted, and he records the plague's moral and social wreckage with a clarity that few devotional writers of the century attempted. His own late letters, including one to Mainardo Cavalcanti, a sober account of the ruin that sustained his friend's household, show a man who had stopped performing for readers.

Who should read Boccaccio: Readers of this library who want to understand the world in which Julian, Catherine and the Rhineland mystics wrote, a world of plague, anticlerical laughter, wealth and fear, where devout people lived beside the sharpest criticism the church had yet heard. He is useful for those who study how Christian reform and Christian satire fed each other, and for anyone who wants to see what a talented layman made of the church's failures before the Reformation named them. He is not a guide to prayer or doctrine, and the Decameron is frank enough that those who read for edification will need a stronger stomach than patience.