The Decameron

"Chaucer isn’t the first or the only person in the 14th century to be writing a tale collection, but what he does with the form is radically different. It’s really important to know about Boccaccio when you’re thinking about Chaucer. Boccaccio was an Italian poet, also from a mercantile background like Chaucer, so they’re both very much products of the later Middle Ages where these kinds of people can become poets. He wrote in Tuscan, wrote many poems which were very influential on Chaucer such as the Teseida (which is the basis of ‘The Knight’s Tale’), the Filostrato (which is the basis of Troilus and Criseyde ), and the Decameron (which is a collection of tales). Boccaccio was also writing in his vernacular, Tuscan, a dialect of Italian. So, in some ways, when Chaucer chose to write in English, he was following an international trend: writing in the vernacular. Doing this, you could write texts that were accessible to a greater range of classes, and more accessible to women as well as men, and so on. Rather than writing in Latin or French—which were the more natural languages of education, and which he certainly could have written in—Chaucer chooses to write in English. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He went at least twice to Italy. He probably knew Italian because of his mercantile upbringing, but then when he got court appointments, he was in a position to be chosen to go on these Italian missions, which were to negotiate trade and marriages, things like that. So, he’s not going there for any literary reason. But while he was there, that’s almost certainly where he picked up lots of Italian manuscripts. He was reading Dante (which is hugely influential on the House of Fame in particular), Petrarch (he’s the first person to translate a Petrarchan sonnet into English, in Book One of Troilus and Criseyde ), and he’s probably the only person in England who’s reading Boccaccio at this time. He reads Boccaccio both in the Italian and in French translation. Chaucer’s reading of Boccaccio completely transforms English poetry. It transforms choice of subject matter in all kinds of ways, but also, formally, you can see that the kind of poetic forms that he developed are in some ways influenced by reading Boccaccio. The development of the ten-syllable line was influenced by the Italian poetic line called the endecasillabo , an 11-syllable line which also has stresses in it. It’s a different kind of line, but it was influential, and we can see Chaucer developing his ten-syllable line from Boccaccio. So, reading Boccaccio is formally transformative as well as being very influential on the subject matter. “Chaucer’s reading of Boccaccio completely transforms English poetry” Boccaccio is Chaucer’s main source. He uses Boccaccio more than anyone else in his works, although he never names him or mentions him. There’s a lot of debate about in how much detail Chaucer uses the Decameron . He certainly knew something about it, but I don’t think he sat and read it in the kind of detail that he sat and read Il Filostrato or the Teseida . The Decameron specifically is a story about ten people who meet in Santa Maria Novella, a real church in Florence, in the time of the plague. They decide to escape the plague by going to a lovely country house with their servants, and when they go there, they then tell stories. There’s ten of them for ten days; they tell ten stories a day, so there are 100 stories. The stories tend to be very, very funny. A lot of them are very rude. The key thing which I want to get across is that the tellers are all of the same social class and background. When they meet in Santa Maria Novella, we’re told they’re all beautiful, young. Many of them are related to each other. They’re all of gentle status, so essentially they’re all noble, aristocratic people. There are seven women and three men, which is very interesting—it’s female-dominated. The form is also very carefully structured: ten stories a day. The Canterbury Tales , then, is really interesting in its differences from that model. Because in the Canterbury Tales , we have pilgrims of radically different social class. Instead of having people who are all knightly, we have one knight. We have a merchant, a man of law, a shipman, a sailor, a plowman (though he doesn’t actually get to tell his tale). There are lots and lots of different kinds of clerics, for instance a pardoner, a parson—not all high-status clerics. We have people like the miller; we have ribald people, drunk people. It’s extraordinary that Chaucer puts these very ordinary people into this text and says they’re all going to tell stories. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In Boccaccio’s text, they all meet in a church, a central symbol of Florence. Chaucer’s group meet in an inn just south of the river in Southwark. They don’t meet in St. Paul’s Cathedral. They don’t meet in the centre of London. They meet on the margins, on the threshold. They also meet in a place of commerce, a place of buying and selling—often a place of sexual escapades, of drinking. I mean, it’s a reputable hostel, but it’s not St. Paul’s Cathedral. Looking at the differences between those two texts helps us to see how radical Chaucer is in his focus on hearing everyone’s voice. One example would be ‘The Clerk’s Tale’, which Boccaccio tells and then Petrarch translates, and then Chaucer writes a version of it too We have Boccaccio’s Italian version, Petrarch’s Latin version, and Chaucer’s English version of the Griselda story. He’s actually not getting that directly from the Decameron , so it’s quite an interesting example of the multi-lingual nature of culture at this time. At this time, people were very happy to recycle stories and put a different spin on them. Today, we think a lot about originality. Of course, there are a lot of problems with the very idea of originality. Can we really think up new stories? But people didn’t think about originality in that way in the Middle Ages. No one thought you had to invent your own plot—it was really what you did with it that counted. “In the Middle Ages, no one thought you had to invent your own plot” Let’s take the story of Griselda. The rich ruler of the country, Walter, marries her, and tells her she must obey him in every possible way and never go against him in anything. She promises that she’ll do that, and he proceeds to torture her. Essentially, what he does is that each time she has a child, he tells her he’s going to kill that child. He doesn’t actually kill the child, but she thinks that he has. He removes the children; she thinks they’re both dead over the years, and has to go on pretending everything’s fine. Eventually, he says that he’s going to marry someone else and casts her off. But when his new wife arrives, it’s not his new wife—it’s the children come back. Everything’s supposed to be resolved . . . Griselda collapses, and he tells her he’s been testing her all these years. Boccaccio, Petrarch and Chaucer each tell the story, and essentially, Boccaccio and Chaucer both show a lot of sympathy for the oppressed woman. Petrarch’s take is that this isn’t really about domestic abuse and the abuse of women: this is about God and the soul. The soul should be obedient to God whatever. The problem with that allegory is that it makes God a sadist, tempting you for fun. It’s really problematic and bleak. In Boccaccio, the teller Dioneo says that he wishes she (Griselda) had gone off and had an affair with someone else. He’s speaking against Walter. And Chaucer’s clerk gives us Petrarch’s moral but says it’s not really adequate. He refers to the Wife of Bath, a very strong woman. He gives us a lot of different ways of thinking about this tale, and throughout the tale, the clerk keeps saying that he shouldn’t be testing her. He explicitly says that there is ‘no nede’ to put her in ‘angwyssh and in drede’. Chaucer also makes an innovation in that tale in that he sets it in Lombardy, an area known at the time for its tyranny. Petrarch was sponsored by the Lombard tyrants. So, Chaucer is making a very specific point that this is a tale about tyranny; this is a tale about not only political tyranny but also domestic tyranny. And Chaucer certainly thought that tyranny was a bad thing."

"Giovanni Boccaccio was inspired by the fact that he was writing in the wake of a major epidemic that hit Florence in the 14th century. The premise of the book is that a group of young noblemen and -women, people of great privilege who have been able to flee the plague-ridden city, are telling each other stories to while away their time together in the luxurious villa to which they’ve retreated. The description of the plague in the frame narrative is very vivid and quite horrifying; it sets a dark tone. But the stories that the characters tell each other are bawdy and humorous, with a carnivalesque feel. The Decameron captures the fact that the suspension of normal realities that happens in a tragic situation like a pandemic can, paradoxically, produce a special protected environment for storytelling and its appreciation. Sex is central to almost all of the stories in The Decameron . A lot of them involve playful scenarios. The one that I think of most often is a story where a lascivious monk tricks a young woman into having sex with him. She knows that sex is wrong, but the priest calls the activity that he asks her to do “putting the devil back in hell,” a wonderful euphemism for the act of penetrating her vagina with his penis. She dutifully assists him in the project, putting the devil back in hell whenever he asks. Pandemics seem to introduce into life and literature conditions of unusual license."