Boccaccio (1313–1375)

Boccaccio's allegiance to the social and political ways of republican and bourgeois Florence was always ambiguous. Even while breathing the air of Florentine mercantilism and occasionally serving the Florentine republic, he never outgrew his early experiences at the Neapolitan court; for the remainder of his life he went on hoping to become once again a courtier, preferably again at Naples under the aegis of Niccolò Acciaiuoli, or else at such minor courts as that of Francesco Ordelaffi at Forlì. His hopes were all in vain, but not for want of trying.^[54] It was the courtly environment of Naples that prompted him to fashion for himself a background of nobility by pretending to be the illegitimate issue of an affair between a Tuscan banking agent and a Parisian lady of royal blood, and then to create the elaborate, prolonged fiction of his romantic involvement with Maria d'Aquino, the king of Naples's illegitimate daughter who allegedly married a count of the Aquinas house. Boccaccio reflected his intoxication with the charms of the Neapolitan court in what is perhaps his first work, the Caccia di Diana (1333 ?, 1339 at the latest), a celebration of Venus in a courtly atmosphere where sixty ladies behave like noble courtiers, obliviously hunting and jousting away in the name of love.

Boccaccio's life is shot through with medieval readings, and the romances left their mark on his fervid imagination. In the Filocolo (1336 ?)—a massive, meandering novel in which all the characters are noble—the lengthy digression of the Questions of Love (book 4, chaps. 17–72) clearly echoes French court habits (at least from literature). The love story of the Filostrato (1335 ?, 1339 ?) is grounded in courtly love: Troiolo's total devotion owes much to that tradition, rather than to an

anachronistically romantic exaltation in an overpowering passion. The Teseida (1339–1341) is an original mixture of classical epic and medieval romance, with heavy emphasis on disguising ancient warriors as chivalrous knights. Arcita and Palemone, the two rivals for the love of Emilia, conduct their wooing in knightly style by testing their prowess in an elaborate, bloody tournament. While they wait for the decisive test, they entertain lavishly to display their virtue and wealth. Before the battle Theseus formally dubs them both. Finally, on his deathbed the victorious Arcita magnanimously yields Emilia to his rival. The Amorosa visione (1342) lists Arthurian knights and ladies in the triumph of Fame (Canto 11), Lancelot and Tristan in the Triumph of Love (Canto 29). In the Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta (1343–1344) Fiammetta compares herself to Isolde (chap. 8). Instead of prayer books, the Corbaccio's (1355 ?) lusty widow reads Lancelot's story and is sexually aroused by it. The De casibus virorum illustrium (1355–1362) asserts that the story of King Arthur, apparently drawn from Geoffrey of Monmouth, deserves mention because of its popularity, but is of doubtful historicity: it can serve as an example of the fragile nature of immodest conquest.

As to the Decameron (1349–1353 ?), the men of business who studied the pages of that “epic of the Florentine merchant” with their daring forays into unknown and dangerous lands and their often triumphant, sometimes puzzling displays of ingegno, would have delighted in the description of their fate and praise of their achievements that Hugh of St. Victor had given more than two centuries earlier (see my chap. 5). It took all this time for a fully conscious representation of mercantile psyche and ethos, first by the pen of Boccaccio, then by the equally able one of Chaucer.^[55] Likewise we can see registered in the Decameron the fully autonomous presence, also, perhaps, for the first time, of women as real characters with their own personalities, needs, desires, and points of view. Whereas women had been rather regularly represented before as no more than other selves of the masculine observer or mere allegorical symbols, such characters as madonna Beritola (2.6), Alatiel (2.7), Zinevra (2.9), Bartolomea (2.10), Monna Filippa (6.7), and a score of others, not to speak of Fiammetta in the Elegia, cannot be dismissed as such—even if their artistic representation is loaded with irony and symbolism. It was no mean achievement.

Much speculation has verged on the exact meaning of the Decameron' s subtitle “libro soprannominato il Galeotto,” a reference to Sir Galehault of the Lancelot Vulgate cycle also alluded to by Dante in Inferno 5. The “stories of adventure” of the Second Day are patterned

after the sense of adventure that informed the French romans d'aventure, but with the decisive difference that Boccaccio's stories fit perfectly the experiential mercantile world: the medieval merchant was no less adventurous than the knight errant, and perhaps more successful in taking his chances.

Courtly love was thought to have transcendent redeeming qualities;the lady could perform miracles, substituting for God's Grace. Boccaccio presents this medieval idea in a classical garb in the striking story of Cimone, the boorish character who is turned into a paragon of utter refinement by the sight of Iphigenia's naked beauty (Decameron 5.1). In the Caccia di Diana Boccaccio first used this chivalric motif of “the civilizing influence of sexual love” that would emerge again in the Filocolo, in the Commedia delle Ninfe Fiorentine (1341–1342), and in the story of Cimone.^[56] In this favorite allegory the uncouth young man owes his “education” to beauty and love, thus emerging from a rustic state of nature to one of social refinement. The theme turned to a Dantesque philosophical discourse in the Amorosa Visione (1343). The Filocolo, the Ninfale fiesolano, and several stories of the Decameron dwell on a love that irresistibly draws two young people together despite legal, social, or economic barriers.^[57] It is as though Boccaccio, born to a more open society, were struggling against the feudal social fetters that had shaped an illustrious literary tradition.

We find exemplary cases of cortesia in the Decameron stories of Federigo degli Alberighi (5.9), Bergamino (1.7), Guglieimo Borsiere (1.8), Neerbale (3.10), Ghino di Tacco (10.2), Natan and Mitridanes (10.3), Gentile de' Carisendi (10.4), messer Ansaldo and madonna Dianora (10.5), Tito and Gisippo (10.8), and the Saladin and messer Torello (10.9). In the stories of Natan, Gentile, Ansaldo, and Tito the lordly virtue of liberalità acquires the higher connotation of moral generosity even to the level of true magnanimity. In the story of Ansaldo, in particular, madonna Dianora has imprudently tried to get rid of an unwanted lover, Ansaldo, by promising to yield to him if he can pass the impossible test of producing a flowering garden in January, which Ansaldo unexpectedly achieves with the help of a necromancer. When, after consulting with her husband Gilberto, Dianora comes to Ansaldo ready to fulfill his wish, he sends her back, untouched, to her husband. But note the subtly ironic touch of social realism in the differentiation between the two men. Ansaldo is un nobile e gran barone, a noble knight who sets out to outdo in liberality and cortesia his rival Gilberto, who, being only un gran ricco uomo, a very rich commoner, is both

motivated by a sense of fair play and concerned about the necromancer's power of revenge. All the stories of this last day of the Decameron stage splendid displays of courtly generosity, in richly variant forms.

Even there, however, Boccaccio looks at the most conspicuous tests of aristocratic patterns of behavior through the eyes of a burgher's son. In the story of Griselda (10.10) the Marquis of Saluzzo is determined to marry a humble woman to make sure he has a perfectly obedient wife. Griselda patiently endures a series of cruel tests. In the last, the marquis pretends he has taken a noble-born new wife and asks Griselda what she thinks of her. Griselda praises the new wife but advises the marquis not to test her in the same way, for the daughter of a count could not have the strength of a humbly-born woman. So Griselda becomes the noble heroine of the Aristotelian fortitude that Cicero had defined as “the virtue of one who can advisedly accept and endure all tests and hardships, and that is made of a great heart, loyalty, patience, and perseverance.”^[58] In Boccaccio's own words of comment, it is a peasant woman who gives a lesson in humanity and reason to an absurdly proud and cruel great lord. Although critics have been reluctant to identify sources for this stunning novella, Chrétien's Enide also comes naturally to mind as the exemplary victim of a knight's somewhat high-handed will to test wifely obedience and submission (though noble, she had also been forced by poverty to dress in tattered rags when first seen by Erec).

My main point here is that the Decameron shows side by side, in a state of inner tension, the two contradictory ethics of the knightly class and the merchant class. Aside from its more abstract, or spiritualized, version that we have witnessed in the story of Dianora and other stories of the Tenth Day, the key virtue of “liberality” is still extolled in its more pecuniary connotations of feudal memory in the stories of the rich and generous abbots of Cluny (1.7, 10.2). In this traditional knightly form it is also the virtue that has reduced Federigo degli Alberighi to poverty (5.9). When, however, Federigo's courtly behavior won him the love of the wealthy madonna Giovanna and they finally married, Boccaccio tells us that, having attained his goal, Federigo changed his ways and started behaving more wisely, no longer as a knight but as a merchant, hence a prudent and efficient manager of his patrimony, “miglior massaio fatto.” He thus exemplified that mercantile ethic that would make Leon Battista Alberti speak of “questa santa masserizia” in Della famiglia (1441), his treatise in dialogue form on family economy. Massaro was a common Italian term for financial responsibility and accountability: in fourteenth-century Mantua, for example, the commune's chief

fiscal officer was called massaro. In a feudal society, if the sources of income turned out to be inadequate to run the noble house as was fitting and “honorable,” the nobleman hoped to make up his deficits with new grants from the sovereign, military conquests, or downright plunder. But as a spendthrift nobleman converted to the virtues of good patrimonial management, Federigo degli Alberighi shows the juxtaposition of the two codes in the Florentine society of merchants who lived side by side with the decayed nobility. In that society, no grant could be expected from monarchic or feudal sources.

Boccaccio was familiar with both the mentality of the merchants, among whom he had been nurtured, and that of the nobility, whom he had observed at the court of Naples. He was among the first to present a critical view of the chivalric ethos from an economic vantage point. It is not surprising that economic concerns were also conspicuously present in the literature of chivalry, fraught as it was with sharp allusions to wealth and the ways to attain it. Wealth was to be gained not by work but by benefices, grants, or conquests, and then spent freely. Unlike the bourgeois ethos, the chivalric ethos ignored any principle of saving, investment, and capital accumulation. From any list of a nobleman's honorable ways of acquiring riches, thrift was always notably absent. Indeed, the nobleman was marked by conspicuous “liberality,” since the noble way of both living and dying was expensive. It is symptomatic that heraldic treatises gave much space to descriptions of lavish funerals with thousands of Masses to follow for the benefit of the departed noble soul. In a way, rich merchants ended up imitating the nobles more after death than in life, since they could make peace with God and their consciences by bequeathing their wealth, or large portions of it, as the nobles were wont to do, to good causes like churches and charities.

I noted above (chap. 2) Cicero's coupling of decorum and honestum, the outwardly honorable and inner virtue. By extension, in the high ranks of the nobility, from the Middle Ages all the way to the French Revolution, and especially in the French ancien régime, what was “honest,” meaning “honorable,” was also fitting and becoming—not only in moral terms but in the derivative area of economic ethic, too. The lord or master spent, on principle, according to his rank, social status, and hierarchic obligations, not according to his income—of which he had no idea, since it was the responsibility of his intendant, and it was beneath his dignity and status to concern himself with such non-aristocratic matters. Hence it might well be “honest” for him to overspend and, as a “liberal” lord, behave in what the bourgeois code of financial responsibility would regard as outright dishonesty.^[59]

Likewise, in a feudal environment it was not dishonorable, indeed it was a way to avoid embarrassment and dishonor, for a member of the warrior class—or a high ecclesiastic to the extent that he too had adopted the warrior's ways—to circumvent the pressures of creditors through the use of physical force or by simply ignoring their claims. A massive experiment in this method of resolving budgetary impasses resulted in the widespread bankruptcies of the large financial concerns in the 1340s, with ensuing depression, famine, and plague. The Decameron's first story cleverly illustrates the point: the banker Musciatto Franzesi had to hire a disreputable character like ser Ciappelletto in order to collect what could still be salvaged from the defaulting noble debtors of Burgundy. The story must have rung a familiar bell with Boccaccio's merchant readers, who, amused though they might be, could not laugh too loud.

Despite the triumph of the burgher class in the city states of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, the aristocratic mentality and ethos continued to affect the behavior of ruling classes through the eighteenth century. Even Diderot's enlightened Encyclopédie clearly showed how the aesthetic sense, which controlled expenditures on private buildings, remained relative to social rank or posture. Architectural style was strictly subjected to the criterion of fitting the building to its social, hence cultural function.^[60] Elias (The Court Society 67) recalls the story of the Duke of Richelieu who intended to give his son a lesson in lordly prodigality rather than bourgeois frugality. He gave him a full purse for a day on the town, and when the boy returned with a portion unspent, the duke disdainfully tossed it out of the window. Such attitudes were typical of noblemen everywhere: in 1590 the Florentine Orazio della Rena observed that in refeudalized Ferrara all gentlemen “live off their rents and have no respect for those who do not spend to the limit; they regard commerce and trade, even wholesale, as shameful and unworthy of a gentleman; they consider themselves much superior to the gentlemen of mercantile cities [read: Florence or even Venice], they gladly spend all their income and more, so that they are always in debt up to their ears.”^[61] The frugality that was preached to commoners and burghers contrasted with the conspicuous consumption and outright prodigality that were deemed a necessary sign of noble behavior.