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Introduction 1 NOTES Introduction 1 . Here, and everywhere thereafter, the page citations refer to the Italian copy of the Decameron edited by Vittore Branca for Einaudi in 1980. Translations into English are always my own. 2 . Realt à e stile nel Decameron. 3 . Vita di forme e forme di vita nel Decameron . 4 . Many important articles by Branca are collected in Boccaccio medievale (first edition 1956, revised edition 1970). See also Giovanni Boccaccio , and the critical apparatus for the edited volume of the Decameron edited by Einaudi (1980). 5 . See for example his “Funzioni, opposizioni e simmetrie nella giornata VII del Decameron .” 6 . Il privilegio di Dioneo . L’eccezione e la regola nel sistema Decameron . 7 . Among structuralist analyses of the Decameron, one would be remiss in forgetting the contributions of the Russian Viktor Shklovsky and the Bulgarian, naturalized French, critic Tzvetan Todorov. 8 . I hereby adopt the term and rationale used by Dino Cervigni in discuss- ing the elements of the narration that surround and are indispensable to make sense of the Decameron as a whole. Rather than talking of “frame story,” Cervigni suggests that the Proem, the Introduction, the descrip- tion of the Plague, the events that take place between the storytellers, and the ballads between narrative days, constitute an overarching tale without which the Decameron would be unintelligible (“The Decameron ’s All-Encompassing Discourse” 23). 9 . Articles and books by Joan Ferrante (“Narrative Patterns,” 1978), Millicent Marcus ( An Allegory of Form , 1979), Joy Hambuechen Potter (1982), Giuseppe Mazzotta (World at Play, 1986), Janet Smarr ( Boccaccio and Fiammetta , 1986), Teodolinda Barolini (“Le parole son femmine,” 1993), and Victoria Kirkham ( The Sign of Reason , 1993), up to the more recent analyses by Marilyn Migiel ( A Rhetoric of the Decameron, 2003) and Michael Sherberg ( The Governance of Friendship , 2011) attest to this renewed critical attention dedicated to the author and his masterpiece. 10 . This difficulty seems confirmed by the number of multiauthored, edited volumes that in the past 20 years have supplemented monographic studies 198 NOTES on the Decameron both in Italy and in Anglo-American circles. Aside from the recently published volume by Cervigni (2013) cited earlier in the Introduction, one can refer to the edited volumes by Barberi Squarotti ( Prospettive sul Decameron); Bragantini and Forni; Ciabattoni and Forni; Cottino-Jones and Tuttle; Picone ( Autori e lettori del Boccaccio ); Picone and Mesirca; Psaki and Stillinger; and Weaver. 11 . The first to notice a break between the two halves of the Decameron was Ferdinando Neri in the 1930s. For him, the first half of the book is thematically centered on the whimsical nature of chance, while the sec- ond, as I too suggest, revolves around the clever use of one’s words and mind to solve difficult situations (79). Among others who discuss this structural break, see Badini Confalonieri; Cuomo; Fido, “Archittettura”; Freedman; Mazzotta (“The Decameron ”); Papio; Picone (Boccaccio e la codi- ficazione della novella 22–25); Stewart (“La novella di madonna Oretta”); and Van der Voort. 12 . I am fully cognizant that translating the Italian onesto diletto as “hon- est enjoyment” is a misnomer, guilty of that most banal of translation errors, false friendship. Onesto , especially in its medieval connotations, is a complex term that subsumes the public concept of (male) honor and honorable deeds and, as it pertains to women, the related idea of public propriety and virtue, especially as it relates to sexual chastity. As such, the adjective onesto/a , and the related noun onest à , might be better translated as “honorable/virtuous” and “honor/virtue/chastity” respectively (and their opposite disonesto/disonest à as “shameful/shame”). I have chosen, however, to maintain from time to time the false equivalency in the text (where I sometimes replace the noun onest à with “virtuous honesty”) because, for one, it serves as a reminder of the terms as they appear in the Italian original; for two, it subsumes the multifarious valences tied to the Latin honestum and the Italian onest à under an easily recognizable umbrella concept (I elaborate further on these concepts in chapter 3). 13 . The concept of equality among the members of the brigata has been the object of studies by Michael Sherberg (The Governance of Friendship ) and Pier Massimo Forni (“Retorica del reale”). While in general it is true that each queen or king of the brigata shares equal responsibilities, it is also true that Dioneo often undermines the other rulers’ authority. 1 Galeotto: A Prologue by Way of the Proem 1 . Citations are from the Einaudi edition of the Decameron curated by Vittore Branca (1980). I have provided the original Italian of passages where words and meanings that are central to my argumentation appear. Conversely, I have translated all other texts in Italian or languages other than English. 2 . For the Decameron ’s numerology as it pertains to Dante and medieval thought, see Cardini 78–79. NOTES 199 3 . For Dante’ presence in the Decameron see Bettinzoli; Hollander, Boccaccio’s Dante and the Shaping Force of Satire ; and Padoan, “Il Boccaccio fedele.” With regard to Dantean influences in the Proem and Introduction, see Franco Fido’s “Dante, personaggio mancato del Decameron ”; as well as Hollander, Boccaccio’s Two Venuses 103–106; and Kirkham, The Sign of Reason 7–10. 4 . Of this opinion were, in the 1970s, two of Boccaccio’s most distinguished scholars, Giuseppe Mazzotta (“The Decameron ” 68–69) and, following his lead, Robert Hollander, whose argument ends with the admonish- ment: “Reader, beware, here is a book that has the power to move you to lust” ( Boccaccio’s Two Venuses 106). 5 . Battaglia Ricci takes Millard Meiss’ opinion (in Painting in Florence ) that the fresco dates to the post-1348, Black Death period as her point of departure (though Meiss later revised his dating of the fresco in “Notable Disturbances”). Citing the evidence adduced by art critics Joseph Polzer, Luciano Bellosi, and Antonino Caleca, she shows that the fresco was completed between 1335 and 1342, thus prior to the composition of the Decameron (Battaglia Ricci 12–13). 6 . The Dominican friar Jacopo Passavanti was director of construction for the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence in 1340–1341, before becoming its prior around 1350. The spirited homilies he delivered dur- ing Lent of 1354 preach penance and sacrifice for one’s salvation and are collected in the only book attributed to him, Lo specchio di vera penitenza . 7 . I have used the translation of the Esposizioni by Michael Papio. I have added, after the canto and paragraph number, a reference to the page in Papio’s translation where the passage occurs. 8 . The da Polenta hosted Dante in 1318, after the Inferno was published (first documented existence in 1317). Thus, his representation of Paolo and Francesca was not revocable, even if the da Polenta had corrected him about the accuracy of the historical facts. While Boccaccio’s version of the events could be closer to the historical truth, I argue here for his undermining of Dante’s auctoritas . Given Dante’s fame when Boccaccio delivers the Esposizioni to the Florentine public, and the widespread belief among some of his (Boccaccio’s) contemporaries that Dante’s book was divinely inspired, by arguing for an error in Dante’s story, Boccaccio’s reading is clearly subversive. 9 . For similar positive assessments of the Arthurian tradition, see Barbiellini Amidei’s recent contribution (“Echi arturiani nel Boccaccio”), as well as Luciano Rossi’s “Paratesto” 37. 10 . Marco Veglia shares, at least partially, this reading of Battaglia Ricci’s analysis. For him, however, “the unspoken assumption of the scholar lies in the belief that, in Dante, responsibility for the error lies in the book as Galeotto not in Paolo and Francesca. Boccaccio was therefore trying to rescue the world of the courts signaling in the title his parodic, nay polemic, intentions toward Dante” (102, emphasis in original). I examine 200 NOTES Veglia’s analysis later in the chapter, for it provides a middle ground between Boccaccio’s and Dante’s worldviews. 11 . For an overall view of the influence of Ovid on Boccaccio’s Proem, see also Hollander, Boccaccio’s Two Venuses 112–116; Rossi, “Paratesto”; and Smarr, “Ovid and Boccaccio.” 12 . These are the exact dynamics, as we shall see in chapter 7, that Boccaccio attributes to the beginnings of the love between Florio and Biancifiore in his earlier work the Filocolo , providing evidence that the author under- stood the dangers that books about love, read without well-developed intellectual and spiritual education, could cause for their readers. 13 . For an alternative reading, see Millicent Marcus’ view that the Decameron ’s mention of galeotto functions as a warning to protect “his public from the consequences of guilty knowledge,” and is therefore the “anti-Galeotto, filled with harmless delights for that public which limits its responses to the confines of the written page” (“Seduction by Silence” 13). 14 . On the tradition of go-betweens in medieval literature, see Gretchen Mieszkowski’s Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus , where the author discusses the numerous characters who take on this function both in forceful sexual conquest of women and in the less frequent desire of lovers for the consensual fulfillment of their relationship. 15 . Richard Kuhns argues for the latter valence. Claiming that Galeotto means “pimp,” and thus the Decameron and his author act as “Prince of Pimps” (22), he suggests that this particular pimp acknowledges both the function of erotic vitality in cognition and the subversive intentions of texts that are meant to upset the worldview of his time, especially as it pertains to religion and women’s roles (108–109).
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