Abstract
In Day IX Boccaccio narrows his perspective from general issues of knowledge and ignorance to issues of truth and falsehood, concentrating on the ways in which information is expressed and received. Here he treats topics that were developed by Cicero, not this time in the late philosophical works, but rather in the well-known De inventione (see the introduction to this volume). According to Cicero, rhetoric, which can be of the greatest good to society if it is based on wisdom (sapienta), can be equally harmful to society if it is allied with low cunning. Wisdom, moreover, is useless to society unless it is conveyed effectively. In Day IX Boccaccio produces ten cases in point, and he supports his thematics in the Day’s Introduction and Conclusion. As a whole, the day suggests that in the ambiguous and hazardous interactions of real-world society, truth is relative rather than absolute, and can be useless, indeed irrelevant, unless it is augmented by caution, imagination, and art.
What is truth?’ said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.
—Francis Bacon, “Of Truth”
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Notes
See a more detailed account of this issue in Michaela Paasche Grudin, Chaucer and the Politics of Discourse (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 6–12.
De oratore, II. xliv, a chapter that was one of those available to Boccaccio in Petrarch’s incomplete copy. The deliberate use of self-contradiction, opposed polarities, and stylistic irregularities would become a common practice in the Renaissance, and a target of criticism from the generations that followed. It developed in accord with the doctrine of copious variety, which was also Ciceronian. See Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 171–334.
“And I should not hesitate to maintain that this ‘organic composition’ [the Decameron] is as typical of Italy’s Renaissance literature as it is of its Renaissance art …” Aldo Scaglione, Nature and Love in the Late Middle Age: An Essay on the Cultural Context of the “Decameron” (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963), p. 56.
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© 2012 Michaela Paasche Grudin and Robert Grudin
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Grudin, M.P., Grudin, R. (2012). Truth, Lie, and Eloquence: Day IX. In: Boccaccio’s Decameron and the Ciceronian Renaissance. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137056849_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137056849_10
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