In evoking the literary resonances of gender, Boccaccio also demonstrated that the Decameron should be categorized first and foremost as an elegiac work. Boccaccio carefully arranged the order of the Proemio to underscore the elegiac properties of the Decameron’s stories. Each of Boccaccio’s allusions to elegy, whether medieval or classical, appears in the opening lines of the Decameron. In foregrounding remarks about elegy, Boccaccio altered the content of the categories of the medieval accessus to introduce the stories with concepts related to genre. Boccaccio’s Proemio follows the order typical of an accessus by addressing titulus, nomen and intentio auctoris, materia and modus tractandi, utilitas, and cui parti philosophiae supponitur (title, name and intention of the author, the text’s matter and mode of treating, its utility, and the category of philosophy to which it belongs). After the title (Decameron: galeotto), the narrator discusses author and author’s intention (Boccaccio, who compassionately helps women); subject-matter/didactic procedure (one-hundred short stories, that comprise fables, parables, and histories, about pleasant and harsh examples of love as well as about the effects of fortune); and finally his stories’ utility and their relationship to ethics: “le già dette donne, che queste leggeranno, parimente diletto delle sollazzevoli cose in quelle mostrate e utile consiglio potranno pigliare, in quanto potranno cognoscere quello che sia da fuggire e che sia similmente da seguitare” (in reading these, the ladies just mentioned will, perhaps, derive from the delightful things that happen in these tales both pleasure and useful counsel, inasmuch as they will recognize what should be avoided and what should be sought after) (Dec. Pr., 13–14). Boccaccio alluded to classical elegiac commonplaces in the title (Galeotto) and author (Heroides) sections, which only occasionally addressed issues related to genre. Boccaccio arranged the accessus so that the allusions to elegy would precede and frame discussions of the Decameron’s other generic categories. The narrator subsequently explains that the Decameron is comprised of one-hundred novelle, “o favole o parabole o istorie” (either fables, or parables, or histories) (Dec. Pr., 13). Boccaccio thereby introduced the properties of the Decameron by reference to various types of genres.
The order of allusions in the accessus also underscores the different properties of each of Boccaccio’s elegiac texts. In fact, the allusions to the Elegia and Ovid’s poems highlight how Boccaccio was altering and expanding the medieval genre. In the Elegia, the protagonist was a woman who addressed female readers. Fiammetta complains about her former lover, and prays that God might quell her feelings (Elegia Pr., 4). In the Decameron, the male narrator addresses women. He explains that he too initially suffered from heartsickness, but hastens to add that now he is cured (Dec. Pr., 6). The differences between the two texts signal that neither the theme of lovesickness nor female narrators are determinate properties of elegy. The Decameron-narrator further deemphasizes the importance of lamentation in elegy by noting that he has recovered from his heartbreak. The Proemio demonstrates that the genre of elegy does not only encompass tales about lovesickness, but that it also features fables, parables, and histories about various types of love (Dec. Pr., 14). The opening remarks also suggest that elegiac authors do not, as Fiammetta did, only recount tear-inducing stories, but that they also tell delightful and instructive narratives (Dec. Pr., 14). Boccaccio was thus highlighting the properties of medieval elegy that were familiar to readers to underscore how he was modulating the genre so that it resembled its classical antecedent. Moreover, by expanding the properties of elegy in this way, Boccaccio was imitating the authorial career of Ovid himself. The Roman poet too had first experimented with the thematics of lamentation in the Heroides, and then went on to write other types of erotic elegies.
Boccaccio concludes his introduction to the Decameron’s genre by referring to one property typical of comedy, namely its standard thematic trajectory from wretchedness to happiness. In the “Introduction” to Day 1, Boccaccio recalls this determinate property of comedy when the narrator notes that the Decameron will begin sadly and end happily (Dec. 1 Intr., 2 and 6). The thematics of comedy are discussed as part of a defense about why the Decameron must begin with a gruesome description of the plague (Dec. 1 Intr., 2–7). These remarks also distinguish the Decameron from one comedy in particular, Dante’s Comedy. Boccaccio evokes Dante’s poem when the narrator describes the crisis caused by the plague, which recalls Dante-pilgrim’s crisis in Inferno 1. Each author-character is thirty-five years old when their respective crises occur. The pilgrim stumbled into a wood at the proverbial mid-point of a human’s life, which was conventionally considered to last about 70 years (Inf. 1.1–3; and compare Ps 89:10). The Decameron-narrator announces that the brigata met in 1348 during a social crisis caused by the plague, which would have occurred at the midpoint of Boccaccio-author’s own life, thirty-five years after his birth (Dec. 1 Intr., 8). (Boccaccio was born in 1313.) The narrator compares the Decameron’s sad exordium to a “montagna aspra e erta” (harsh and bitter mountain) that must be ascended, and its happy conclusion to a beautiful plain (Dec. 1 Intr., 4). Comprehensively, the phrases recall the “selva...aspra” (bitter wood) that frightens the pilgrim, the “dilettoso monte” (delightful mountain) that he could not climb, and Mount Purgatory more generally (Inf. 1.5 and 77).
Boccaccio’s echoes of the Comedy serve several ideological purposes. In relation to symbolism, the allusions underscore the particularly carnal nature of the Decameron’s poetics. Boccaccio helps readers appreciate his poetics by repeatedly drawing attention to the body. The narrator refers to his birth and the (fictitious) date of the Decameron by calculating from the Incarnation, the moment when Christ assumed a human body: “Dico adunque che già erano gli anni della fruttifera incarnazione del Figliuolo di Dio al numero pervenuti di milletrecentoquarantotto, quando nella egregia città di Fiorenza,…, pervenne la mortifera pestilenza” (Let me say then that thirteen hundred and forty-eight years had already passed after the fruitful Incarnation of the Son of God when into the distinguished city of Florence…there came a deadly pestilence) (Dec. 1 Intr., 8). The narrator adds that “corpi superiori” (superior bodies) may have brought the plague to Florence (Dec. 1 Intr., 8). He also describes how the plague mutilates every part of the human body, from the nose to the genitals, from the arms to the legs (Dec. 1 Intr., 9–18). In addition to the physical, the social effects of the plague are described, but again they are illustrated by reference to the body. The plague made family members abandon each other and therefore caused a scandalous situation. Women, if constrained by necessity, would “ogni parte del corpo aprire” (open every part of the body) to male servants (Dec. 1 Intr., 29). The narrator concludes that the bodies of the dead were not properly buried in Christian cemeteries, which were so full that bodies were piled upon bodies in ditches (Dec. 1 Intr., 42). Readers would probably have appreciated the metaliterary importance of bodies in the “Introduction” because bodies covered by the sores of the plague would have repeatedly evoked the image of a manuscript, white or yellowing parchment covered with black ink.
(excerpted from chapter 4)
