Abstract
Day X, and the brief valedictory section that follows it, are not conclusions in the everyday sense of the word. Instead of tying up loose ends, Day X presents vitally new material, new issues, and new avenues for dialoguing with Boccaccio’s literary backgrounds. Its message, so clearly divergent from that of Days I–IX, comes as a surprise. It suggests that, in its light, we should reevaluate the moral import of the Decameron as a whole.
Le tre disposizion che ’l ciel non vole,
incontenenza, malizia e la matta
bestialitade? e come incontenenza
men Dio offende e men biasimo accatta?
[Three dispositions which Heaven wills not: incontinence, malice, and mad bestiality? and how incontinence less offends God and incurs less blame?]
—Inferno, Canto XI, 81–841
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Notes
Giuseppe Mazzotta, The World at Play in Boccaccio’s Decameron (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 122.
Cicero studied in Athens with his friend Titus Pomponius Atticus and his brother Quintus in 79 BC. See Andrew Dyck, A Commentary on Cicero, De Legibus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), p. 27.
See Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 54–57.
Millicent Joy Marcus, An Allegory of Form: Literary Self-Consciousness in the “Decameron” (Saratoga, Ca.: Anma Libri, 1979), pp. 102–108, draws attention to Dioneo’s reference to VII. 1, concluding that it signals the reader to be open to diverse interpretations of the Griselda story. We will take this a step farther by suggesting that Boccaccio, in referring to Monna Tessa and her fantasima, is comparing Tessa’s creative revolt against an unjust marriage with Griselda’s passive acceptance of injustice.
David Wallace, Boccaccio: Decameron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 105;
Warren Ginsburg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). Speaking of De casibus, Ginsburg remarks that in the 1350s “Boccaccio undertook various important diplomatic missions for Florence; no doubt this service prompted him to think of his work as a new way to incorporate literature into the civil discourse of the commune” (p. 196).
Petrarch’s Latin version of the Griselda story takes radical liberties with its source, turning Griselda into a wielder of powerful eloquence, elevating her husband’s moral stature and completely dispensing with the ironic alternative suggested by Dioneo. See Emilie P. Kadish, “Petrarch’s Griselda: An English Translation,” Mediaevalia 3 (1987), 1–24. We might add that Petrarch’s version is plucked from its context in the overall development of the Decameron.
As noted by Branca, Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, 2 vols, ed. Vittore Branca (Turin: Einaudi, 1992), pp. 1237, 1243. On Mannelli’s marginalia,
see Kenneth P. Clarke, “Reading/Writing Griselda: A Fourteenth-Century Response,” in On Allegory, ed. Mary Carr, K. P. Clarke, and Marco Nievergelt (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), pp. 183–208.
“In letters to the people of Bologna and Perugia, Salutati linked the liberty that Florence enjoyed, and that he encouraged them to embrace, to the republicanism of ancient Rome. Without mincing words, he denied the legitimacy of papal rule because monarchy could never reflect the will of the people and could only be imposed on those deprived of liberty.” John M. Najemy, A History of Florence 1200–1575 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. 152. Marvin Becker observes that the “surviving records of the meetings of the Florentine Signoria from the over-throw of the despotism of Walter Brienne in 1343 until the oligarchical reaction to the rule of the twenty-one guilds in 1382 reveal that of all the questions faced by the counselors, the one most certain to provoke bitter and protracted debate was that of the commune’s relationship with the church.” And Richard Trexler remarks “that a commune like Florence might not have been able to institute or revise legislation without the specific permission of another power—to wit, the papacy—conflicts with our most basic assumptions about the nature of the Italian ‘state system’ of the Late Middle Ages … Despite characterizations of the period from 1343 to 1379 as the most democratic in the republic’s history … Florence was much less independent during this period than has generally been realized.”
Marvin Becker, “Church and State in Florence on the Eve of the Renaissance (1343–1382),” Speculum 38.4 (October 1962): 509–27, esp. 509;
Richard C. Trexler, “Florence, by the Grace of the Lord Pope …” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 9 (1972): 118–19.
On this see Janet Smarr, “Ovid and Boccaccio: A Note on Self-Defense,” Mediaevalia XIII (1987): 247–55.
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© 2012 Michaela Paasche Grudin and Robert Grudin
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Grudin, M.P., Grudin, R. (2012). The Ciceronian Synthesis: Day X and Author’s Conclusion. In: Boccaccio’s Decameron and the Ciceronian Renaissance. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137056849_11
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