Boccaccio's Corpus by Kriesel James C.;

Author:Kriesel, James C.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc.
Published: 2018-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

THE DECAMERON AND PETRARCH

In the overt metaliterary sections of the Decameron, Boccaccio was striving to differentiate his elegiac-inflected poetics and ethics from what he characterized as Dante’s comedic ideas about these subjects. At the same time, Boccaccio was addressing the views of those who criticized erotic literatures or who promoted negative ideas about the body. And Boccaccio knew that at least one humanist, Petrarch, was sometimes critical of the erotic corpus. He was also aware that the early humanists were particularly disparaging of vernacular writing tout court. His desire to counter early humanist views probably explains why Boccaccio compared the Decameron’s poetics to the poetics of Ovidian elegy. By likening his writings to Ovid’s, he was attempting to attribute to his short stories, a new and modern genre, a classical auctoritas. He was by extension also associating the poetics of these and of his previous erotic writings with the poetics of a canonical literary form. Finally, he was drawing both on the properties of elegy and on theological concepts to underscore the orthodoxy of his writings. Boccaccio employed these interrelated rhetorical strategies to appeal to the aesthetic and moral sensibilities of contemporary humanists.

Nowhere in the Decameron does the broader target of his ideological apologia emerge as clearly as in the “Introduction” to Day 4. In this section, Boccaccio was reflecting on Dante as part of a dialogue with Petrarch.106 Though they were explicitly discussing Dante, the two writers also seem to have addressed each other with a great deal of deference. Boccaccio was indebted to Petrarch for ideas about Dante and the body, but he also knew that Petrarch could be critical of erotic literatures and desires. Boccaccio, however, does not implicate Petrarch in his list of erotic poets with Dante, Cino, or Cavalcanti. Nor does he imply that Petrarch shares some of what he characterized as Dante’s potentially ambiguous views of the body. At the same time, Petrarch probably knew that Boccaccio was writing erotic texts and was championing a profound respect for our embodied reality. Consequently, he himself does not imply that Boccaccio was doing anything immoral or sinful. Indeed, Petrarch does not explicitly question Boccaccio’s ideas or authority in his own earlier writings. Still, given the interrelated nature of their works, the fact that each writer failed to mention the other’s name is striking, and probably calculated.

Boccaccio’s and Petrarch’s overt silence regarding each other suggests that both writers were carefully beginning to mark out different ideological territory. Around 1350 they were doing so in explicit contrast to Dante, and they were also attempting to signal emerging differences between their own respective writings and ideas. Petrarch was publicly characterizing himself as an author of Latin classicizing literature and as a promoter of moral virtue. He cast himself either as a writer who had transcended erotic desires or as one who was concerned about the potential moral dangers associated with them. Boccaccio was instead presenting himself as a modern vernacular author of erotic yet orthodox writings, and as a proponent of the goodness of the body and creation.

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