Historicizing Maternity in Boccaccio’s Ninfale fiesolano and Decameron Kristen Renner Swann Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2012 2012 Kristen Renner Swann All rights reserved ABSTRACT Historicizing Maternity in Boccaccio’s Ninfale fiesolano and Decameron Kristen Renner Swann This dissertation explores the representation of maternity in two of Boccaccio’s works, the early idyllic poem, the Ninfale fiesolano, and the author’s later magnum opus, the Decameron, through readings in the social history of women and the family and medieval medical literature of obstetrics and gynecology. I create a dense historical context from which to examine the depiction of generative processes, maternity, and mother-child interactions in these works, allowing us to better understand the relationship between Boccaccio’s treatment of these subjects and the author’s larger stance on women and gender. In Chapter One, I explore Boccaccio’s uncommon interest in the events between conception and birth in the Ninfale fiesolano; I demonstrate the conformity of the Ninfale’s literary depictions of conception, pregnancy, and childbirth to the medical literature of obstetrics and gynecology and social practices in the late Middle Ages. In the second chapter, I explore how the Ninfale, traditionally seen as an idyllic, mythological poem, reflects the practices and ideologies of the normative form of family structure in fourteenth-century Tuscany, the patrilineage. I first show how the poem’s pervasive discourse on resemblance exposes, and undercuts, the importance of the paternal line; I then consider how Mensola’s joyful maternity – her beautifully rendered interactions with baby Pruneo - contains an implicit critique of the role and function of maternity in patrilineal society. With Chapter Three, I turn to Boccaccio’s prose works; I explore how Boccaccio incorporates specific and historicized beliefs about generative physiology - the biological pre-conditions for maternity - into commonplaces of the misogynistic tradition in the Corbaccio and Decameron V.10. Chapters Four and Five focus specifically on the Decameron. In the fourth chapter, I consider how Boccaccio uses a distinctly gendered language of generation in Decameron III.8, V.7, X.4, and, most spectacularly, X.10 to underscore the marginality of women to family and line. In the fifth, and final, chapter, I explore the profound cultural embeddedness of Boccaccio’s treatment of maternity by placing the Decameron’s depictions of motherhood - whether unwanted, farcical, or affective - within the greater social context of Renaissance natalism. Throughout this project, I consider how representations of maternity and generative processes in Boccaccio’s texts comment on the realities of motherhood - and womanhood - in the patrilineal society of fourteenth-century Tuscany. Table Of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1: 10 Conception, Pregnancy, Childbirth: Maternity in a Nymph’s Tale (Ninfale fiesolano) Chapter 2: 67 Ideological and Social Reflections of the Patrilineage in the Ninfale fiesolano Chapter 3: 130 “Per ciò che a questo siam nate”: Boccaccio and Generative Physiology (The Corbaccio and Decameron V.10) Chapter 4: 168 Generation, Parturition, and the Maternal Body: Boccaccio and the Language of Reproduction (Decameron III.8; V.7; X.4; and X.10) Chapter 5: 234 L’odor materno: The Decameron and Fourteenth-Century Motherhood Conclusion 297 Bibliography 300 i Acknowledgments I would like to express my gratitude to the people who guided, helped, and supported me throughout the writing of this dissertation. First and foremost, I would like to thank my sponsor Teodolinda Barolini whose insight, critical guidance, and support were integral to the formation and completion of my project. This dissertation was written in the lonely reaches of Maine, far from Columbia; the knowledge that I had Teo Barolini as my interlocutor sustained my work and inspired every word I wrote. I am honored and blessed to have had her as my sponsor. I would also like to thank my committee members Carmela Franklin, Patricia Grieve, and Margaret King for their insights and suggestions as to how I might rework this project in the future. I left the defense energized to take this project further. Lastly, I would like to thank my second reader, Jane Tylus, for her careful critical readings of my work both before and during the defense. I am grateful to the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of New Hampshire for inviting me to present a portion of my work at the Departmental research forum. The opportunity to receive feedback from my colleagues at an early stage in the dissertation process was invaluable. Lastly, I would like to express my gratitude to my husband, Kyle, for his support, advice, and love throughout this process, as well as his cheerful willingness to discuss late medieval motherhood. This dissertation is dedicated to him and to my children, Clyde and Callen, whose appearance first interested me in the subject. ii 1 Introduction Over the years, much critical ink has been spilled over Boccaccio’s approach to women’s issues; critics have debated the nascent proto-feminism of the Decameron or Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, and sought to understand the later openly anti-feminist Corbaccio. Yet one aspect of women’s lives has been largely ignored by Boccaccian scholars: motherhood. This project aims to deepen our understanding of Boccaccio’s stance on gender by focusing on the representation of maternity - understood as the biological processes of conception, gestation, and birth, as well as more socially- determined mother-child interactions - in two of the author’s works, the Ninfale fiesolano and the Decameron. In this project, I use history as a lens to see motherhood in Boccaccio’s texts. Through readings in social history of women and the family, the medical literature of obstetrics and gynecology, and the material culture of reproduction in fourteenth-century Tuscany, I consider how Boccaccio’s representation of generative processes and maternity in the Ninfale and Decameron exposes, or complicates, discourses about women and the family in the patrilineal society of fourteenth-century Tuscany. In seeking to connect the representation of maternity in the Ninfale fiesolano or the Decameron to the realities of fourteenth-century women, I am navigating largely uncharted critical waters with respect to both focus and methodology. There have been no full-length studies of maternity – in either its biological or social aspect - in Boccaccio’s works of which I am aware; comments on pregnancy or mothers are typically folded into 2 critical studies of the ‘family’ in Boccaccio.1 When critics do address pregnancy or motherhood in Boccaccio’s work, they tend to rely either on biographical readings (as in Muscetta’s claim that Griselda is an ideal re-creation of Boccaccio’s mother) or offer deracinated, essentialist evaluations of maternity that, while telling the reader much about the critic’s own view of motherhood, do little to shed light on that of Boccaccio or his contemporaries.2 Critics have long noted the poetic prominence of familial, or domestic, cares in the Ninfale fiesolano and the “new figure” of Mensola as mother.3 Historically, however, they have failed to put this new focus into any sort of context, content, instead, with simply having drawn attention to it. The Ninfale’s critical reception, in the main, has 1 See, for example, Thomas G. Bergin, “Boccaccio and the Family,” Rivista di studi italiani I, 1 (1983): 15- 30, where the critic examines depictions of the family in Boccaccio’s entire corpus and speculates about the importance of family in the author’s personal life, in order to draw conclusions about Boccaccio’s conception of ‘family’. Giuseppe Chiecchi’s monograph, Giovanni Boccaccio e il romanzo familiare (Venice: Marsilio, 1994), also explores the theme of ‘family’ in Boccaccio’s works, focusing on an Ovidian model for conflictual relationships with fathers, and relying on biography to explain what the critic terms the “topos” of the family in Boccaccio’s works. 2 For Griselda as an evocation of Boccaccio’s unknown mother, see Carlo Muscetta, Giovanni Boccaccio (Bari: Laterza, 1974), 298, cited in Bergin, Boccaccio, 324, 361n73. For biographical readings, see Bergin, “Boccaccio and the Family,” 15-18, and Chiecchi, Giovanni Boccaccio e il romanzo familiare. 3 See Sapegno, Storia Letteraria d’Italia- il trecento (Padova: Nuova Libreria Editrice, 1981 [1933]), 326- 37; Balduino, “Sul Ninfale fiesolano,” 259-62; Giuseppe Chiecchi, Giovanni Boccaccio e il romanzo familiare (Marsilio, 1994), 105-121; Francesco Bruni, Boccaccio: l’invenzione della letteratura mezzana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 229. Bergin considers the Ninfale “the most ‘familial’ of Boccaccio’s works.” See Thomas Bergin, Boccaccio (New York: Viking Press, 1981), 187. Sapegno rightly noted the novelty of the figure of Mensola: “Questa figura di Mensola, così nuova, così diversa…..offre alla poesia del Boccaccio anche un altro motivo nuovo: la maternità” (Storia letteraria d’Italia – il trecento, 328). According to Sapegno, the originality of the Ninfale lies precisely in this attention to maternity, which represents a widening of Boccaccio’s poetic horizons. (Storia letteraria d’Italia, 329.) Hollander is singular in not paying much mind to Mensola’s maternity at all; he considers the argument of the work to be sexual pleasure, the emblem of which is Africo’s phallus. See Boccaccio’s Two Venuses (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 69. Pier Massimo Forni is the only critic I have encountered who imports Freudian psychoanalysis to make Africo’s fear and terror at Mensola’s “mancato ritorno” (her broken promise to meet him) that of a child’s fear that a mother who goes out of sight may not return again, an innovative, if not, to my eye, convincing take on Mensola’s “maternity”. See Forni, “Introduction” to Giovanni Boccaccio, Ninfale fiesolano, ed.