Sixth Story
1. one of those prudes Nothing in what we are told about Catella merits such a description, with the possible exception of her jealous love for her husband, which is exploited by her admirer in a fashion that can only be thought of as callous and despicable. Possibly the most unpleasant story in the whole collection, this account of the cruel rape of a virtuous wife gives the lie to the claim that the Decameron is a feminist work ante litteram. Although the story is being narrated by one of the young ladies, Fiammetta, the viewpoint is decidedly masculine and anti-feminist. It is fair to add that the specious arguments presented in B.’s tale by the rapist to his victim are based upon passages from Livy and Valerius Maximus describing Tarquin’s rape of Lucretia.
2. Ricciardo Minutolo The surname is also that of the dead archbishop in II, 5. Minutolo was the name of a leading Neapolitan patrician family, as also was Sighinolfo, the married name of the lady, Catella, who is the object of Ricciardo’s obsessive affection. Both Ricciardo Minutolo and Filippo Sighinolfi were known to B. during his fourteen-year sojourn in Naples, although Sighinolfi’s wife was not called Catella, but Mattea. It is unlikely that either family would have approved of B.’s fictive account of their marital arrangements.
3. to meet in secret at a bagnio The bagnio (in Italian, bagno), or Turkish bath-house, was a favourite meeting-place for adulterous lovers.
Seventh Story
1. Tedaldo degli Elisei… Aldobrandino Palermini As in the previous tale, the two families involved were among the oldest-established in the city where the novella is set, but the historical records reveal no trace of either a Tedaldo degli Elisei or an Aldobrandino Palermini.
2. the devil’s mouth at the bottom of the abyss It was common for artists to depict the souls of the damned being devoured by demons. In his Inferno, Dante reserves this punishment for the three worst sinners of all, Judas Iscariot, Brutus and Cassius. As traitors to the founders of Church and Empire, each is being gnawed by one of the three slavering mouths of the giant Lucifer at the very centre of Hell.
3. There was once a time… The lengthy tirade that follows, against the depravity of the religious, was to become a model for later writers engaging in anti-clerical invective. The Decameron contains numerous examples of a mocking attitude towards the religious, who along with women were the most popular target for medieval satirists. Bearing in mind the care with which the stories of the Decameron were assembled, it is hardly coincidental that the invective of III, 7 is repeated in a more concise and less abrasive form in VII, 3, the story of Friar Rinaldo.
Eighth Story
1. having seated herself at his feet It was the normal practice for the penitent to adopt some such posture of humility before the father confessor. The confessional was of much later origin, being first introduced in the sixteenth century by a decree of the Council of Trent.
2. no loss of saintliness is involved Writing some 150 years later, Machia-velli, in his comedy Mandragola, places an identical piece of casuistry in the mouth of Fra Timoteo, a father confessor who has been bribed to persuade a chaste married woman, Lucrezia, to commit adultery with a young admirer.
3. the Old Man of the Mountain Hassan-ben-Sabah, the sheik Al Jebal, and founder of a sect of oriental fanatics, active between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, was known as the Old Man of the Mountain because the sect migrated to Mount Lebanon and made it their stronghold. The members of the sect were called Assassins (from hashshashin, ‘hashish smokers’) because they were said to take hashish to induce visions of Paradise before setting out on their murderous expeditions. The Abbot drugs Ferondo with the intention of sending him not to Paradise but to Purgatory. The history of the Assassins was first recounted in western Europe by Marco Polo in the latter part of the thirteenth century in II Milione, a popular text that was transcribed in numerous different versions.
4. This kind of gibberish Nonsensical statements of the kind just recorded are part of B.’s stock-in-trade in depicting the gullibility of certain of his characters or groups of characters. Further examples are found in the tales of Friar Cipolla (VI, 10), Monna Belcolore (VIII, 2), Calandrino and the heliotrope (VIII, 3), and Master Simone (VIII, 9). As a rule, they include a sprinkling of scatological or (in the case of Cipolla’s sermon to the Certald-ese) blasphemous elements.
5. your wife will present you with a son The passage recalls the angel’s words to Zacharias (Luke i, 13): ‘Fear not Zacharias:… thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John.’
6. the Arse-angel Bagriel In the original text, the Archangel Gabriel’s name emerges from Ferondo’s lips as ‘Ragnolo Braghiello’, a piece of linguistic burlesque suggestive of spiders and breeches.
Ninth Story
1. Gilette of Narbonne Narbonne, at the northern tip of the county of Roussillon, is on the Mediterranean coast, halfway between Montpelier and Perpignan. In Shakespeare’s baroque version of B.’s story, All’s Well That Ends Well, Gilette’s name is changed to Helen, and one or two new characters, notably Parolles, are introduced. Shakespeare probably read the tale in Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, a collection of stories from classical and Italian sources. Those taken by Painter from the Decameron, being translated from the French, were twice removed from the original. The bare outlines of B.’s story are traceable to the Sakuntala of the fifth-century Sanskrit poet and dramatist Kalidasa.
2. a fistula The OED defines a fistula as ‘a long, sinuous pipe-like ulcer with a narrow orifice’.
3. the Florentines were waging war against the Sienese Florence and Siena were at war with one another at various times in the thirteenth century. The most famous battle between their respective armies took place in 1260 at Montaperti, where the Florentines suffered a humiliating defeat.
4. Montpelier An important trading centre, Montpelier was the capital of the county of Roussillon.
Tenth Story
1. Gafsa An inland town in Tunisia, known to Italians of B.’s day chiefly for its monastery.
2. the Sahara A literal translation of B.’s text here would read ‘the Theban desert’. In the fourteenth century, the region around Thebes, in Upper Egypt, was noted for the large number of hermits who had settled there.
3. the resurrection of the flesh The profane sexual metaphor had first appeared in The Golden Ass, written in the second century AD by Lucius Apuleius. This paragraph of B.’s text and all subsequent narrative details up to the outbreak of the fire in Gafsa were a notorious stumbling-block to B.’s English translators for over 500 years. Until the end of the nineteenth century, they omitted the story altogether or resorted at this point to either the original Italian or one of the French versions. Pornography, it seemed, was permissible provided it appeared in a language that only a minority of one’s readers could understand. Edward Gibbon had used the same device in his autobiography: ‘My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the decent obscurity of a learned language.’
(Conclusion)
1. the name by which you address me B. intended that ‘Filostrato’ (Philostratos) should convey the meaning of’vanquished by Love’, which is why he had chosen that name as the title of his narrative poem on the ill-fated love of Troilus for Cressida, written some twenty years before. Since the poem was dedicated to a lady called Filomena, it is probable that when, a little earlier, Filostrato speaks of ‘one of your number’, he is referring to the Filomena who appears in the Decameron as one of the group of storytellers.
2. a song about Messer Guiglielmo and the Lady of Vergiú An Italian version of the thirteenth-century French narrative poem La Chastelaine de Vergi.
3. He who moves the stars and heavens The Italian text reads ‘Colui che move il cielo e ogni Stella’, a line that is based on Dante’s ‘L’Amor che move il sole e I’altre stelle’ (‘Love that moves the Sun and the other stars’) from Paradiso, XXXIII, 145. B. has modified Dante’s reference to God’s love so as to allude to the Creator himself. Lauret
ta’s lugubrious song is a fitting prelude to the stories of the Fourth Day, concerning those whose love ended unhappily.
4. in the Milanese fashion The Milanese had a reputation for their materialism and practical common sense. Their interpretation of Lauretta’s song (’a good fat pig [is] better than a comely wench’) would be roughly equivalent to the English ‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.’ It is better, in other words, to have a jealous husband than no husband at all.
FOURTH DAY
(Introduction)
1. Envy’s fiery and impetuous blast The image of a blast of wind striking the highest summits is borrowed from Dante’s Paradiso (XVII, 133–4): ‘Questo tuo grido farà come vento/Che le piú alte cime piú percuote’ (‘This cry of yours will do as does the wind/Which strikes most powerfully upon the highest summits’). In what follows, B. mounts a spirited and reasoned defence of vernacular narrative prose, which before the appearance of the Decameron had never achieved recognition as a serious poetic genre. It is unnecessary to surmise that the various errors of which B. claims to have been accused by his critics presuppose that the thirty stories he had written so far were already in circulation, although, being a good storyteller, that is the impression he seeks to create. In effect, he is forestalling the criticism of his possible detractors by assembling all of their possible arguments, then demolishing them one by one, in the process employing the tools of the narrator’s craft.
2. which bear no title The phrase used by B., senza titolo, is a technical one. Its explanation is to be found in his commentary on Dante’s Commedia, where at one point he refers to Ovid’s Amores, which ‘some call Liber amorum and others Sine titulo [‘Without title’] because it does not deal with any continuous body of material from which it can be given a title, but proceeds by way of some lines on one subject and some on another, or what we may therefore describe as single pieces’. The appropriateness to the Decameron of such a description is reasonably clear.
3. homely and unassuming style B. is indulging in false modesty. The style of the Decameron is so refined, imposing and elegant that it became a model for all the foremost prose writers of the Italian Renaissance.
4. poverty alone is without envy The Italian, ‘sola la miseria è senza inuidia’, is a direct translation from Valerius Maximus: ‘Sola miseria caret invidia.’
5. not a complete story The tale, of oriental origin, is in fact sufficiently complete for commentators to refer to it as the 101st story of the Decameron. In the English translation of 1702, the editors not only dispensed entirely with the frame, but included this story in place of the account of Alibech’s incarceration of the Devil (III, 10).
6. Filippo Balducci Several members of the Balducci family appear in the historical records as agents of the banking firm the Compagnia dei Bardi, which employed B.’s father.
7. Mount Asinaio B. writes Monte Asinaio, literally Mount Donkeyman, a corruption for humorous effect of Monte Senario, noted for its caves where Florentine hermits traditionally took up residence.
8. goslings A literal translation of the Italian papere, but perhaps the contemporary English slang expression, ‘birds’, would convey the sense more effectively.
9. the leek’s head For the sexual connotations of the leek, see also I, 10.
10. Guido Cavalcanti… Dante Alighieri… Cino da Pistoia All three wrote in the dolce stil novo (‘sweet new style’), a poetic mode that celebrated womanly beauty as the agency for the understanding of deep philosophical truths. Cavalcanti (c. 1259–1300), Dante’s close friend, is the protagonist of Decameron, VI, 9, where his reputed atheism triggers the events of the narrative. Dante (1265–1321) promised in the concluding chapter of the Vita nuova that he would celebrate the beauty of Beatrice in words that had never been said of any other woman, a promise magnificently fulfilled in his great epic, the Divine Comedy. Cino da Pistoia (c. 1265–1336), the last significant poet of the dolce stil, was also one of Italy’s leading academic lawyers. B. is known to have attended his lectures on jurisprudence in the University of Naples.
11. in the words of the Apostle… suffer need See Philippians iv, 12:‘… every where and in all things I am instructed… both to abound and to suffer need.’
First Story
1. Tancredi, Prince of Salerno None of the characters in the story has any historical counterpart. Salerno was one of the earliest Norman fiefdoms in Italy, and B. gives Norman names both to the Prince and to Ghismonda’s lover.
2. the usual age for taking a husband It was normal for girls to be married around the age of fifteen.
3. Neither you nor I can resist the power of Love These, the only words spoken by Guiscardo in the whole of the novella, recall Virgil’s Omnia vincit Amor, ‘Love conquers all’ (Eclogues, X, 69). The phrase is reminiscent, also, of Francesca da Rimini’s claim (Inferno, V, 103) that Love is unforgiving to anyone who is loved: ‘Amor, che a nessun amato Amor perdona.’
Second Story
1. Venice The only story in the Decameron set in Venice is interlaced with uncomplimentary remarks about the city and its inhabitants. It is a place ‘where the scum of the earth can always find a welcome’ (p. 303). Monna Lisetta, ‘being a Venetian’, is ‘capable of talking the hind leg off a donkey’ (p. 304). Friar Alberto is tricked into believing that he will make good his escape, ‘which goes to show how far you can trust a Venetian’ (p. 311). B.’s low opinion of Venice and the Venetians is doubtless coloured by the rivalry between Florence and one of her most powerful competitors on the European commercial scene.
2. the most blessed woman on earth The phrase invites comparison with the words addressed to the Virgin Mary by the Angel Gabriel in Luke i, 28: ‘blessed art thou amongst women.’ The following paragraph makes it clear that the first part of the story may be read as an irreverent, not to say blasphemous, re-enactment of the Annunciation.
3. the Rialto district The business centre of Venice.
Third Story
1. Candia Now known as Iráklion (Heraklion), Candia was the largest city on the island of Crete. The island was sold to Venice in 1204, and Candia was the Venetian form of the Arabic ‘Khandaq’ (‘Moat’), by which name the city was known to its former Saracen rulers. The Florentine banking house of Peruzzi had a trading post in Candia’s thriving commercial quarter.
Fourth Story
1. there are many… verbal report The belief that Love is kindled only by the eyes was central to the poetry of the dolce stil novo. It has been suggested (by Branca for instance) that Elissa’s refutation of the theory in this passage carries polemical undertones, perhaps signalling B.’s attempt to distance himself from the poets of the dolce stil. But other stories in the Decameron, notably the tale of Cimon (V, 1), point to an opposite conclusion.
2. William the Second King of Sicily from 1166 to 1189, William II (‘William the Good’) had no children, but he was in fact the nephew of Ruggieri and Costanza (Constance), the latter of whom succeeded him on the Sicilian throne. Needless to add, the impetuous young hero of B.’s story, Gerbino, is an invention of his own. So, too, is the King of Granada, to whom the object of Gerbino’s passionate love, Gostanza, is promised in marriage. The kingdom of Granada was not established until the early thirteenth century.
3. Barbary Usually a term referring to the Saracen countries along the north coast of Africa, Barbary is here used in a more limited sense for the part of Africa closest to Sicily. It was only the King of Tunis who was a tributary to the King of Sicily.
4. sent him his glove The presentation of a glove in token of a word of honour was a custom of Germanic origin. Later in the story, B. seems to be mocking the practice when Gerbino tells Gostanza’s guardians that since there are no falcons around, the glove is superfluous.
Fifth Story
1. a pot of basil B.’s story of Lisabetta and the pot of basil has no clear antecedents. It is the direct source of Keats’s celebrated poem on the same subject, Isabella, or the Pot of Basil.
2
. San Gimignano A town in Tuscany, roughly midway between Florence and Siena, famous for its numerous tall towers, originally seventy-two in number but now reduced to fourteen, which were built by leading families both as defensive bastions and as ostentatious monuments to their wealth and importance. Merchants from San Gimignano who set up business in Messina included certain members of the powerful Ardinghelli family, who, like Lisabetta’s brothers in B.’s story but presumably for different reasons, in the middle of the thirteenth century transferred their business from Messina to Naples.
3. Salernitan basil Salerno is not especially famous for its basil. The Italian text (‘bassilico salemetano’) is possibly corrupt at this point, and B. may well have intended to refer to the basil of Benevento (‘basilico beneventino’), which was prized elsewhere for its strong aroma and vigorous growth. On the other hand it has been suggested by Antonio Mazzarino that B. may have intended to write silermontano, with reference to an aromatic plant having a tall stem of which the Latin name is siser montanum. Mazzarino also made the intriguing discovery that an Arabic treatise on plants, current in B’s day, lists eleven kinds of basil, including one called al-adjamddjami, a word based on the Arabic term for a skull or cranium.
Sixth Story
1. some red and others white Roses, symbolic of pure love and of regeneration and the resurrection of the dead, lend to this touching narrative of love and death a recurrent leitmotif.