A Boccaccian Renaissance: Essays on the Early Modern Impact of Giovanni Boccaccio and His Works

by Martin Eisner (Editor), David G. Lummus (Editor)

Overview

A Boccaccian Renaissance brings together essays written by internationally recognized scholars in diverse national traditions to respond to the largely unaddressed question of Boccaccio’s impact on early modern literature and culture in Italy and Europe. Martin Eisner and David Lummus co-edit the first comprehensive examination in English of Boccaccio’s impact on the Renaissance.

The essays investigate what it means to follow a Boccaccian model, in tandem with or in place of ancient authors such as Vergil or Cicero, or modern poets such as Dante or Petrarch. The book probes how deeply the Latin and vernacular works of Boccaccio spoke to the Renaissance humanists of the fifteenth century. It treats not only the literary legacy of Boccaccio’s works but also their paradoxical importance for the history of the Italian language and reception in theater and books of conduct.

While the geographical focus of many of the essays is on Italy, the volume concludes with three studies that open new inroads to understanding his influence on Spanish, French, and English writers across the sixteenth century. The book will appeal strongly to scholars and students of Boccaccio, the Italian and European Renaissance, and Italian literature.

Contributors: Jonathan Combs-Schilling, Rhiannon Daniels, Martin Eisner, Simon Gilson, James Hankins, Timothy Kircher, Victoria Kirkham, David Lummus, Ronald L. Martinez, Ignacio Navarrete, Brian Richardson, Marc Schachter, Michael Sherberg, and Janet Levarie Smarr

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780268105914
Publisher:	University of Notre Dame Press
Publication date:	06/25/2019
Series:	William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante and Medieval Italian Literature , #17
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	350
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Martin Eisner is associate professor of Italian studies at Duke University. He is the author of Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature: Dante, Petrarch, Cavalcanti, and the Authority of the Vernacular.

David Lummus is assistant director of the Center for Italian Studies at the University of Notre Dame and editor of the American Boccaccio Association's Lectura Boccaccii for Day 6 of the Decameron. His publications on Boccaccio and Petrarch have appeared in Speculum and Renaissance Quarterly.

Read an Excerpt

Boccaccio’s story of Griselda launched a veritable international industry of retellings: in prose and in verse, in narrative, ballad, and drama. Already by around 1400, Petrarch had reworked it into Latin in his Seniles 17.3, Christine de Pizan had retold it in French in her Book of the City of Ladies (Part 2, chap.50), and Chaucer had turned it into the “Clerk’s Tale” in his Canterbury Tales. When Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle, and William Haughton wrote their Pleasant Comedie of Patient Grissill in 1599 (performed 1600, published 1603), their source was clearly Chaucer and not Boccaccio, making their play a grandchild of the Decameron.

Scholars continue to debate whether Chaucer, whose Clerk names Petrarch as his source, knew the Decameron. Yet Willard Farnham argued nearly a century ago: “certain phrases of Chaucer's are closer to the Italian than to the Latin. Sometimes the English is so near the Italian and so different from the Latin that the resemblance is striking. In a few cases more or less important details are not in the Latin, and are in both Italian and English.” Another argument on behalf of Chaucer’s knowledge of the Decameron story points to both narrators’ oddly undermining ironies at the tale’s end. But the feature I most want to highlight, that—wittingly or unwittingly—brings Chaucer’s tale closer to Boccaccio’s than to Petrarch’s, is the fact that the story does not stand alone and self-sufficient as an isolated saintly account, but rather is presented as part of and in relationship to a series of other tales within a framework.

Boccaccio’s Griselda story comes at the end of a day devoted to tales of magnanimous behavior, with the narrators seeking expressly to outdo one another by their examples. The final one-up-manship is the magnanimity of a poor peasant girl surpassing that of wealthy kings. Beyond the tenth day, the tale takes up a recurring theme of cross-class marriages. Such marriages are seldom happy, although some of them eventually find harmony. Day 3 tale 9, made famous by Shakespeare, gives us a male aristocrat outraged by the order to marry “a she-doctor” despite the king’s insistence. Conversely, day 7, tale 8 gives us the scorn of an aristocratic wife for her mercantile husband, and the wonderful rant by her mother against “this small-time trader in horse manure” who has had the nerve to speak ill of her daughter. Readers familiar with the Decameron will find other cases of cross-class marriage. Again, the Griselda story comes as the final and most extreme example.

Was Chaucer aware of these thematic connections when he used the tale as part of what has been called the “marriage debate”? Or when he linked it with another story from the Decameron’s tenth day (though admittedly available also from the Filocolo) that asks explicitly which of its characters was the most generous? Most directly and famously, Chaucer’s story of Griselda is set in opposition to the “Wife of Bath’s Tale.” Not only do widow and clerk combat each other’s attitudes, the clerk referring explicitly to the Wife of Bath “and al hire secte” (IV E 171), but each stages within his or her narrative (in the Wife’s case, her prologue as well as her tale) the competition for mastery between husband and wife. The example of Griselda is simply too extreme to be left on its own without some counterweight. As the Clerk responded to the Wife of Bath, so the Merchant, speaking next, laments “There is a long and large difference/ Betwix Grisildis grete pacience/ And of my wif the passyg crueltee” (IV (E) 1223-25).

Dekker, Chettle and Haughton inherited via Chaucer the idea of setting Griselda’s situation against an opposite marriage as part of a marriage debate. The marquis’s cousin, Gwenthian, marries a mere gentleman, named Owen, whom she repeatedly humiliates; this shrewish wife and hapless husband reverse the power relations of Griselda’s marriage. That reversal, however, can only be comic—a tone enhanced by making the couple Welsh. In addition, the Marquis has a sister, named Julia, who, although courted by several gallants, refuses to marry at all after witnessing the play’s two couples.

A few years later, this time collaborating with Thomas Middleton, Dekker again tried making a male Griselda, in The Honest Whore, Part 1 (written perhaps in 1603, published 1604). As Dekker is the only playwright involved in both plays, I am assuming that he was interested in reworking this problem. Candido, the “monstrous patient man” (1.4.7-8) retains his calm despite a series of attempts by his wife and others to provoke him. Indeed, one of the events is exactly the same in both plays, though enacted in Patient Grissil and merely narrated in The Honest Whore: the wife shames her husband in front of important guests by appearing ill-dressed and refusing to prepare a meal for them. Candido’s story, I suggest, needs to be seen not only in its relation to the two other plots within that play (which I will not say much about here) but also in relation to the attempt in Patient Grissil to examine the gendered nature of patience.

(excerpted from chapter 12)

Table of Contents

Introduction: “Finding the Renaissance Boccaccio” by Martin Eisner and David Lummus

Part 1. Boccaccio and Renaissance Humanism

1. “Boccaccio and the Political Thought of Renaissance Humanism” by James Hankins

2. “Boccaccio’s Humanist Brigata: Reading the Decameron in the Quattrocento” by Timothy Kircher

Part 2. Framing the Renaissance Boccaccio

3. “Poets Prefer Company: Boccaccio’s Portraits and the Three Crowns of Florence” by Victoria Kirkham

4. “Under the Cover of a Green-Hued Book: Boccaccio’s Pastoral Project” by Jonathan Combs-Schilling

5. “Squarzafico’s Vita di Boccaccio and Early Modern Print Culture: A New Model for the Study of Biography” by Rhiannon Daniels

6. “Vernacularizing the Latin Boccaccio In Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Italy: Notes on Niccolò Liburnio’s Delli Monti, Selve, Boschi and Giuseppe Betussi’s Genealogia De Gli Dei” by Simon Gilson

Part 3. Boccaccio in Renaissance Italy

7. “Along the Path of Disaster: The Decameron and Bembo's Prose” by Michael Sherberg

8. “‘For instruction and benefit’: The Renaissance Boccaccio as Model of Language and Life” by Brian Richardson

9. “De nuptiis comoediae et novellae: Italian Comedy Receives Boccaccio’s Decameron (1486-1533)” by Ronald L. Martinez

Part 4. Boccaccio in Renaissance Europe

10. “Language, Nation, Translation: When Boccaccio’s Unnatural Prose Becomes ‘le commun langaige Francoys’” by Marc Schachter

11. “Boccaccio in the Spanish Renaissance: Juan de Flores’s Grimalte y Gradisa” by Ignacio Navarrete

12. “Regendering Griselda on the London Stage” by Janet Levarie Smarr

Editorial Reviews

This is a collection of strong essays by leading experts in the field that break new ground in our understanding of the diverse reworkings of Boccaccio’s works in the Renaissance and beyond, both in Italy and in Europe. These contributions are independently rigorous and original works. The book will be useful to readers in a variety of fields in studies of medieval and Renaissance Italian and European traditions and beyond. I agree wholeheartedly with the editors that the chapters ‘leave signs of how much work still needs to be done and from what perspective that work must begin.'" —Kristina M. Olson, George Mason University

"Giovanni Boccaccio’s presence as it radiates through time and space is captured and distilled in this elegantly conceived volume. Martin Eisner and David Lummus have gathered and framed twelve distinguished essays on the 'Renaissance Boccaccio'; together they offer a compelling reexamination of the impact of this most generous of Italy’s tre corone." —Teodolinda Barolini, Lorenzo Da Ponte Professor of Italian, Columbia University

“The book enhances in a number of ways our knowledge of Boccaccio’s legacy in the Renaissance, particularly in the area of the history of the book, but also Boccaccio’s significance as a political thinker, his obsession with the pastoral, his role in the birth of Renaissance comedy, and new aspects of his influence in France, Spain, and England. The scholarship is very sound, as most contributors are acknowledged leaders in their fields.” —Martin McLaughlin, University of Oxford

"A Boccaccian Renaissance opens a window on various aspects of Boccaccio studies and provides insights into literary and cultural trends across centuries, countries, and languages, which will certainly be of great interest to scholars of the early modern period." —Sixteenth Century Journal

From the Publisher

"Giovanni Boccaccio’s presence as it radiates through time and space is captured and distilled in this elegantly-conceived volume. Martin Eisner and David Lummus have gathered and framed twelve distinguished essays on the 'Renaissance Boccaccio'; together they offer a compelling reexamination of the impact of this most generous of Italy’s tre corone."

Teodolinda Barolini

The book enhances in a number of ways our knowledge of Boccaccio’s legacy in the Renaissance, particularly in the area of the history of the book, but also Boccaccio’s significance as a political thinker, his obsession with the pastoral, his role in the birth of Renaissance comedy, and new aspects of his influence in France, Spain, and England. The scholarship is very sound, as most contributors are acknowledged leaders in their fields.

Martin McLaughlin

This is a collection of strong essays by leading experts in the field that break new ground in our understanding of the diverse reworkings of Boccaccio’s works in the Renaissance and beyond, both in Italy and in Europe. These contributions are independently rigorous and original works. The book will be useful to readers in a variety of fields in studies of medieval and Renaissance Italian and European traditions and beyond. I agree wholeheartedly with the editors that the chapters ‘leave signs of how much work still needs to be done and from what perspective that work must begin.'"

Kristina M. Olson