Hagiographic Romance and the Wild Life in Boccaccio's Novella of Beritola (Decameron II, 6)

Hagiographic Romance and the WildLife in Boccaccio’s Novella of Beritola(Decameron II, 6)

The novellas of the Second Day of the Decameron, in which protago-nists suffer various reversals at the hands of all powerful Fortune,

include many of the book’s more elaborate, romance-like narratives.1

Some of these, especially the tales of Andreuccio (II, 5) and Alatiel (II,7), have attracted considerable critical attention not only as narrativetours de force, but also because their protagonists’ misadventuresserve to illustrate the ethical tensions inherent in Boccaccio’s concept of Fortune. Much less emphasis has been placed on the novella ofMadama Beritola, which lies between these two. To some extent, thiscan be easily explained: the story of the long suffering and ever virtu-ous Beritola, who loses all contact with her husband and children formany years until at last all are joyfully reunited, does not include thesort of ethical equivocations that pervade the novellas of Andreuccioand Alatiel—Beritola’s chastity is never called into question for in-stance, nor does she have to steal a ring from a dead bishop in order toregain what she has lost. Nonetheless, I would suggest that her experi-ences deserve more attention than they have heretofore received.Beritola’s peculiar episode of wildness, in which we see her feeding apair of fawns with her own milk on a deserted island, has only been su-perficially studied over the years, despite its clear descent from modelsof wildness that permeate the literature of both East and West. Evenstudies of literary wild folk that take the Decameron into account fail tomention Beritola, and I can find no evidence that an adequate attempthas ever been made to investigate the relationship between this episodeand its sources, nor indeed the implications of Boccaccio’s artful inter-penetration of the modes of hagiography and romance in this tale.2

Boccaccio provides a grand historical backdrop for his story, whichbegins in thirteenth century Sicily. Beritola Caracciola is the aristocraticNeapolitan wife of Arrighetto Capece, a Ghibelline vassal of KingManfred of Sicily. When Arrighetto is captured by forces loyal toCharles of Anjou after Manfred’s death at Benevento in 1266, the preg-nant Beritola is compelled to flee Sicily by ship with her young son.While a refugee she gives birth to another son, whom she names LoScacciato (“The Exile”) in recognition of the circumstances of his com-ing into the world. Beritola attempts to return to her home in Napleswith her sons, but on the way the ship is forced to stop at the island of

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Ponza, which Boccaccio would have his reader believe is uninhabited.During this interlude Beritola, still grieving for the loss of her husbandwho she believes might be dead, acquires the habit of retiring to a remote part of the island to mourn in solitude. One day, while she isseparated thus from the others for this daily ritual (“il suo diurnolamento,” 1, 203), pirates make off with Beritola’s ship and all of itscompany, including her sons. Finding herself marooned, Beritola is soovercome with emotion that she is reduced to falling on the beach in afaint, then frantically searching the caves of the island in the vain hopeof finding her sons. However, she soon comes to realize the uselessnessof such behavior:

Ma poi che la sua fatica conobbe vana e vide la notte sopravenire, sperandoe non sappiendo che, di se medesima alquanto divenne sollecita, e dal litopartitasi in quella caverna, dove di piagnere e di dolersi era usa, si ritornò.(1, 204)

Beritola resorts to reason as a means of tempering the folly of irrationalbehavior: if she is unable to help her family, it is wise for her to beginto help herself. However, we cannot fail to note a certain irony: her re-turn to reason must take the form of animal-like behavior. The processof her conversion to a bestial state begins when she goes back to hercave and makes a meal of raw herbs, having no other recourse; signifi-cantly, she is said to “graze” on grass just like an animal (“da fame con-stretta a pascer l’erbe si diede,” 1, 204). Soon thereafter she discoversthat a deer has taken up residence in another cave nearby in order togive birth to her own offspring. When Beritola finds the two newbornfawns in the cave, her stymied maternal instincts come to the fore, sothat she takes great comfort in nursing the baby deer with her ownmilk. Her wildness is entirely defined by her overwhelming need tonurture: instead of being tempted to eat the fawns, she continues toconsume herbs as if she were herself the mother deer, so that she cannurse and sustain the babies. Eventually the fawns make no distinctionbetween her and their natural mother. At this point, Beritola resolves toend her days in a state of nature, perpetually mourning her losses andcaring for her new “family:”

Per che, parendo alla gentil donna avere nel diserto luogo alcuna compa-gnia trovata, l’erbe pascendo e bevendo l’acqua e tante volte piagnendoquante del marito e de’ figliuoli e della sua preterita vita si ricordava, quivia vivere e a morire s’era disposta, non meno dimestica della cavriuola dive-nuta che de’figliuoli (1, 205).

After many months of this existence, Beritola is discovered by theGhibelline lord Currado Malespina and his wife, who stop at Ponzawhile on a pilgrimage. By now Beritola has taken on the appearance ofa true wild woman: she is dark, lean and hairy (“. . . che bruna e magrae pelosa devenuta era,” 1, 206), and wields a club, the folkloristic wild

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Romance and Wild Life in Boccaccio’s Novella of Beritola 517

man’s traditional weapon, to protect her precious deer from Currado’shunting dogs.3 Currado and his wife press her for her story, and withgreat difficulty manage to dissuade her from continuing with her“fiero proponimento” (1, 206), that is, to spend the rest of her life as asort of human beast on the island. Eventually she relents and joins theretinue of Currado’s wife as a lady-in-waiting, but only on the condi-tion that she may bring the doe and the fawns along and continue tocare for them. Thus she returns not only to civilization but to courtlylife, yet insists on retaining a strong link to her former existence on theisland, including even a new name, Cavriuola, the Doe, by which sheis known at court.4 After this episode the plot continues to unfold overmany pages, until at last the scattered family is reunited and Beritolacan once more find fulfillment as a loving mother and wife.

Various efforts have been made over the years to place Beritola’sepisode of wildness in a wider literary context. Italian critics of earliergenerations have called it a poetic or idyllic interlude in an otherwiserather pedestrian romance.5 Some have seen prefigurations of suchtypes as the noble savage or even Robinson Crusoe in the episode,while others have stressed Beritola’s need to recreate a social identityfor herself among the deer.6 Beritola’s elegiac lament on the beach hasbeen compared to that of Ovid’s Ariadne, while her most bizarre act,the nursing of the fawns, has elicited a wide range of interpretations,especially since Beritola has long been defined in terms of her appar-ently extreme predilection for maternal instinct.7 Various opinions,some of them quite divergent, have been expressed: if on the one handsuckling animals might demonstrate that Beritola has temporarily lostall human characteristics, on the other it can be the one act that savesher from complete descent into a bestial state.8 The episode has alsobeen viewed as a sign of Boccaccio’s socially conscious desire to avoidindulgence in a moment of elegiac solitude.9 Vittore Branca, one of thefew scholars to mention possible sources for this scene, suggests a linkwith ancient Dionysiac rites as they are thought to be depicted in afresco in Pompeii, which shows a female satyr nursing a baby goat.10

However, for the most part these studies, which do not treat the topicin depth, have overlooked the possibility of a connection betweenBoccaccio’s depiction of Beritola’s life on Ponza and the enduring im-age of the wild man in medieval literature.

This character type appears especially in two rather divergent gen-res: chivalric romance and saints’ lives. Apart from a single fleeting ref-erence to a possible link between this episode in the Decameron and themedieval romance topos of the insane wild hero which Cesare Segrehas called la follia cavalleresca, I can find no evidence that Beritola’s literary wild origins have been adequately explored.11

In episodes of medieval follia cavalleresca the protagonist, usually aknight and always a man, retreats to the woods in a fit of madness

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brought on by extreme mental anguish. There he leads the life of a sav-age, abandoning all duties and forgetting his very identity, until some-one comes to rescue him. Famous examples that precede Boccacciomay be found in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s mid twelfth-century VitaMerlini (said to provide the prototype of the romance wild man, in theform of Merlin himself), Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain, Partenopeu de Blois,and the Roman de Tristan en prose, wherein both Tristan and Lancelothave their moments of wild exile.12

Chrétien de Troyes’ poem is the first to describe a knight’s descentinto madness and savagery. When Yvain hears that his wife no longerwishes to see him because he has violated her trust, he is overcome byfeelings of guilt and shame. He decides to wander off alone to a placewhere no one will see him or know who he is, for fear that he will goinsane if he stays in the company of other knights (vv. 2774–99). A vainhope, for once he is alone he does indeed go insane, living naked in theforest and eating the raw flesh of the animals that he hunts, until res-cued by a woman who banishes his melancholic fury with a magicbalm and restores him to his place in society (vv. 2800–3019).

This romance topos tends to begin with insanity, or at least the fearof insanity, which then leads to a complete alteration of the character’snormal behavior and appearance, as well as his exile from society.13 Inthe case of the Roman de Tristan, first Tristan and later Lancelot flee tothe woods to avoid being seen and recognized in a state of grief.14 Thisbrings about the protagonists’ complete loss of identity: they do notwant others to witness their condition, so they make an effort to avoidbeing seen; in time their savage appearances make them unrecogniz-able anyhow. In the case of Lancelot, he goes to the wildest places heknows (“es plus sauvages liex qu’il savoit”), so that no one will see himin his condition (Ménard 6, 155). This suggests a link with the lyric poetry of Petrarca, who describes his own efforts to find the wildestplaces, “i più deserti campi,” in which to vent his grief beyond thesight of others.15 As the lover teeters on the edge of madness, his fer-vent wish is to find solitude, to suppress his true identity, to avoid being recognized. The state of wildness may be more or less voluntaryon the part of the protagonist, and more or less explicitly bestial, butthe result is the same: suppression of true identity, solitude and alien-ation from normal civilized life.

In medieval literature and folklore, there are two fundamental kindsof wild folk: the permanent type, primitive beings who are part of thenatural order of things, sometimes endowed with supernatural pow-ers, and the temporary variety such as the grief-stricken romance herowho is only wild for a time.16 The second type, which is of primary in-terest here, has been further subdivided by Penelope Doob into twocategories, which she terms the holy and unholy wild man, the firstseeking sanctity and holiness in isolation, the second expiating various

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sins in a more secular context (73–74). Both of them descend ultimatelyfrom such literary prototypes as Enkidu in the Gilgamesh epic andNebuchadnezzar in the Book of Daniel, and tend to share certain char-acteristics that make them at least appear mad in the eyes of civilizedpeople: the bestial appearance and diet of grass or raw meat, the soli-tary flight into the wilderness which often includes friendship withwild beasts.17 Whatever its variety, wildness was always associated tosome degree with madness or at least diminished capacity to reason:holy wild men appear insane to others even if they are sane to God,and unholy wild men are for the most part said to be completely in-sane, at least during the time of their exile in a state of nature.18

There are two considerable differences between many of the wildmen of the chivalric narratives and Boccaccio’s heroine: Beritola isnever said to be out of her mind, even if she comes close to that condi-tion at the beginning of her ordeal, nor does she feel remorse for anymistake she herself has committed. However, antecedents can befound in the romance tradition for wild men with these characteristics:for instance, in the anonymous thirteenth-century verse romanceRenaut de Montalban, Renaut and his brothers hide from their enemiesfor a long grim winter in the Ardennes forest, where their wretchedstate leaves them with darkened skin and body hair, yet they are calledneither insane nor penitent.19 The protagonist of the anonymous four-teenth-century English poem Sir Orfeo, consumed with grief for hisdead wife Herodis, renounces his kingdom and spends ten years in theforest where he lives on roots, berries and bark, and grows a greatbeard; yet he is likewise not referred to as insane, nor does he haveanything to repent (vv. 210–44). Moreover, in Geoffrey’s poem, Merlinsuffers only from grief at the loss of his brothers and is not a penitent,while the hero of the late twelfth-century anonymous poem Partonopeude Blois is never called insane, even if he suffers overwhelmingly fromremorse because, like Yvain, he has betrayed his lady’s trust.20 In fact,there are a number of intriguing parallels between the experiences ofPartonopeu and Beritola. Although Boccaccio might have been in-spired by Ovid’s Ariadne, who faints on the beach as she watches herlover sail away and leave her stranded (Heroides 10, vv. 1–42), he couldeasily have found the same model in Partonopeu, who is deposited ona strand in the Loire estuary after his beloved Princess Melior has re-jected him and is overcome by grief as he watches the ship recede fromview:

Il chiet estendus al sablon,Trois fois se paume d’un randon:Et puis est piez resailhis,Vencus et vains et estordis,Si regarde vers le batel,Et si le tient a trop isnel. (210, vv. 5194–98)

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Partonopeu subsequently becomes depressed and closes himself in aroom for a year, becoming so thin and pale that no one can recognizehim (218–19, vv. 5401–04). Although such a condition is common for aknight in the throes of follia cavalleresca, this protagonist is never ex-plicitly called insane, nor does he lose the ability to speak rationally.Wishing to die, he flees to the Ardennes forest in order to kill himselffar from his fellow knights, who have been keeping a protective eye onhim. By the time Melior’s sister Uraque finds him there, she can hardlyrecognize him, “Tant est noircis por les grans deoz/ Et si rest covers de chevoz,” 241, 5959–60); like Beritola, his skin is dark and he has be-come quite hairy. A further parallel with Boccaccio’s heroine may befound in his lucidity, for in marked contrast to Yvain and Tristan,Partonopeu can speak quite well: he tells Uraque to leave him to hisfate, since he wishes to be devoured by wild beasts. He is so weak thathe crawls on all fours and has been reduced to eating “herbetes” (248,6135–38). He resists rescue and return to civilization, just as Beritoladoes, and only relents when Uraque invents a story that Melior hasforgiven him (245, 6067).

The Italian Tristano Panciatichiano, of the early fourteenth century,contains a more amply developed episode of the hero’s madness thanthat of the Roman de Tristan en prose. Here more parallels with Beritola’stale can be identified: while mad with grief over Ysotta’s apparent be-trayal, Tristano saves a shepherd’s dog from a lion and earns thebeast’s devotion, bonding with it in a manner that suggests Beritola’sfriendship with the deer (310). He also becomes hairy as a result of ea-ting grass: “. . . et era diventato tanto magro e pallido che parea una be-stia e era piloso perciò non mangiava altro che erbe” (312). In her studyof Tristano’s wildness, Marie-José Heijkant traces his diet of grass backto both Nebuchadnezzar and Dante’s rima petrosa “Al poco giorno,”and notes that many of Tristano’s wild man traits can also be found inthe older Vita Merlini, including body hair, an animal as a companion(Merlin bonds with a wolf), and the tendency to eat herbs; all of theseare characteristics that we may recognize in Boccaccio’s tale of Beritola,even if her dark skin contrasts with Tristano’s pallid appearance.21

According to Heijkant, figures such as Merlin, Partonopeu, Renaut andTristano all suggest the iconography of the “sylvester homo,” the hairywild man of nature (241). Boccaccio’s own familiarity with this iconog-raphy is apparent in his character Frate Alberto’s disguise as a “uomsalvatico,” which includes body hair, a brace of dogs and a club asweapon.22 There can be little doubt that if Boccaccio wanted his read-ers to recognize Frate Alberto as a standard wild man in disguise, hemeant the club-brandishing and hairy Beritola to be seen as nothingless than Alberto’s wild woman counterpart.

Boccaccio builds his portrait of the wild Beritola out of elements ofthe insane or grief-stricken heroes of medieval romance, at least in

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part. Another essential component may be found in a number of me-dieval saints’ lives, the type of Doob’s holy wild man, and it is herethat a context—albeit in the form of an ironic inversion of the originaltopos—can be identified for Beritola’s suckling of the fawns.

Heijkant notes that herbs are the penitential food of Adam and Eve,Nebuchadnezzar and various anchorites of the hagiographical tradi-tion, such as John Chrysostom who, like Partonopeu, imposes uponhimself the penance of going on all fours and eating grass.23 Eventhough Beritola has no sins to repent, her episode on Ponza suggests asmany parallels with the lives of certain hermit saints as with figures ofromance. Boccaccio draws elements from anchorite stories to completehis portrait of Beritola’s wild exile, including life in a cave, the presenceof deer and the prominent role of lactation. The self-identification of theanchorite with deer is very old and even predates Christianity, appear-ing in Gilgamesh as has been noted, but also in a pair of places in theSanskrit epic Mahabharata. In the latter work, Rsyasrnga (Rishyasringa)is depicted as a solitary religious ascetic who bears a deer horn on hishead, since he was born of a doe which drank from a lake fecundatedby the holy hermit Kasyapa.24 In Book 3 there is an even more signifi-cant episode, in which Madhavı , the daughter of King Yayati, deliber-ately refuses a royal wedding in order to live as a holy ascetic in theforest, and eventually to imitate the ways of a female deer:

But, when all the suitors were announced, the fair-complexioned womanpassed by all of them and chose the forest as her bridegroom. Yayati’sdaughter descended from the chariot, bowed to her relatives, went to theholy forest and practiced austerity. By means of various fasts, observancesand restraints, she made light of herself and lived like a doe. She grazed softgreen sprouts of the color of beryl, fine grasses pungent and sweet, shedrank the choice waters, tasty and pure, cool and unmuddied, of holystreams, she roamed in forests deserted by lions, where deer were king,empty and dense and left alone by fires, alongside fawns, like a hind of thewoods, and so practiced much Law, decked with chastity. (5, 118)

Madhavı has already been offered four times as a bride, her virginitymiraculously restored for each marriage, and has borne four sons (5, 113–117). When she meets her sons in the woods she conjoins herown holiness, accumulated by the ascetic experience, with the sons’recognition of their grandfather Yayati as a means to restore him to hisformer celestial greatness (5, 119).25 This story establishes a model forlater stories of ascetic women who associate with deer in some fashion,as we shall see: they tend to be mothers, not virgins, and moreovertheir wild experiences serve to enhance or fulfill their maternal roles,just as they will for Beritola.

Stories of Asian holy types such as Enkidu and M dhav eventuallycame to influence the Christian anchorite tradition. NumerousChristian hermit saints, both male and female, have experiences with

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deer, and there can be little doubt that Beritola’s exile in the wilds ismeant to evoke them. Saint Macrina the Elder is sometimes depictedwith deer, since they were provided to her by God for sustenancewhile she and her husband lived in a cave to hide from the persecutionof Diocletian.26 In later saints’ lives a more benevolent relationshipwith the deer becomes apparent, since the sustenance provided by thedeer tends to be their milk rather than their meat; and with this themeof lactation the deer begin to take on the role of surrogate mothers tothe saints or to their companions.27 Here we may see the confluence ofthe epic and hagiographic traditions, since certain ancient Europeanheroes such as Telephus and Siegfried are also said to have been suck-led by hinds after being exposed in the forest as infants, as part of thevast folkloric tradition of human babies raised by animals.28

Many saints’ lives tell of encounters with stags, but there is also aconsiderable subcategory in which hinds, and often enough their milk,are emphasized. Perhaps the best known of these saints is St. Giles(Sant’Egidio, or Aegidius), a hermit who protects the deer that hasbeen feeding him with her milk. When a Gothic hunting party pursuesthe doe, she runs to Giles’ cave for safety, whereupon the hermit iswounded by an arrow intended for the animal.29 This episode, centralto the iconography of this popular saint (he is often shown in paintingswith a hind and an arrow), is particularly close to Beritola’s own situa-tion, since she too must protect her cavriuoli from hunting dogs thatchase them to her cave; ultimately the motif of a deer that runs back to its human caregivers after being injured by a hunter can be traced toan episode in Virgil’s Aeneid.30 A similar scene is described in the life ofthe ninth-century Cornish hermit named Neot, who likewise saves aterrified doe that runs to him to escape from a pack of hunting dogs, although the animal has not been providing him with milk.31 Anotherhermit, the sixth-century German St. Goar, is said to have sustainedothers with the milk of a doe.32 Deer milk even plays a role in the livesof certain saints who do not lead the hermit life, such as St. StephenProtomartyr, who is sometimes shown as an infant being suckled by adoe in paintings of Boccaccio’s time, as well as Saints Proculus andMaximus of Turin, who are said to have miraculously provided deermilk to others on certain occasions.33

For the prevalence of deer in the iconography of the anchorites, oneneed only examine a painting that provides a most lavish illustrationof anchorite life: the Thebaïd, attributed to Gherardo Starnina (ca. 1410,Uffizi Gallery, Florence). Here, in a hilly landscape packed with her-mits that is supposed to represent the desert near Thebes, one maycount no fewer than nine deer. There are a variety of other animals de-picted in the image, but deer are by far the largest single type. One isbeing eaten by a lion, but the others are often shown interacting withthe holy men: two are being ridden by hermits, and in one case, a doeis providing milk to a man in front of his hut.34

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There are far fewer accounts of female anchorites than male in thehagiographic tradition; that of St. Mary of Egypt is the best known, butit has little in common with Boccaccio’s wild woman.35 However, if weregard Beritola’s story as essentially a romance that has absorbed cer-tain hagiographic elements, it is possible to identify at least two otherfemale characters whose circumstances resemble hers. Romances, bothclassical and medieval, sometimes tell of heroines who are cast intowild places by the machinations of ill fortune; and in medieval ro-mances, such characters are occasionally seen to adopt an anchoriticway of life. One such story appears in the first of the two anonymousItalian Cantari di Carduino, both known from a single fifteenth-centurymanuscript. Since then nineteenth century scholars have noted the par-allels between the opening passages of the Carduino and Beritola’s tale:in the former work a woman is forced to flee to the wilderness with herinfant son when her husband is murdered by rivals in King Arthur’scourt.36 For seven years she raises her child in a rude hut, surroundedby animals and consumed by her devotions to Christ and the Virgin;she has in effect morphed from the type of the distressed romanceheroine into an anchorite, in somewhat the same fashion as Beritola.However, this refugee is not described as a wild woman; instead, suchcharacteristics are ascribed to her son Carduino, who is raised to man-hood without knowledge of the ways of the civilized world:

Ch’è grande e grosso e fiero nel visagio,Tutto piloso era quel fantino,Che a vedere parea un uon selvagio. (Rajna 7, octave 16, 2–4)

The anchoritic existence of Carduino and his mother ends soon afterthis in a rather abrupt fashion, when the mother digs up the jewels thatshe has been hiding since her flight and takes her son to live in the city(Rajna 9, octave 21). As in the case of Beritola’s story, the hermit lifehere is only an interlude occurring near the beginning of a more amplydeveloped romance narrative. This account of a single parent forced byadverse circumstances to live with an infant in the wild resembles anarchetype in Book 11 of Virgil’s Aeneid, wherein we find the story of thetyrant Metabus who must flee his angry populace in the company ofhis daughter Camilla, and raise her in a forest for years on the milk ofwild mares (vv. 539–86).

Although the first Cantare del Carduino has been acknowledged as apossible source for Beritola, it does not appear that any scholar hasever recognized a link between Beritola and the story of Genovefa ofBrabant, another mother forced to live as a hermit in the wild. Al -though the earliest versions of Genovefa’s life describe her in saintlyterms, she has always been regarded as legendary by the CatholicChurch.37 The efforts to promote her cult seem to have arisen in thefourteenth century and were originally centered in the Rhineland(Seuffert 14–16). Genovefa was said to be the wife of Siegfried, the

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count palatine of Trier, although the time frame is vague and the his-torical references are unattested, and in any case the tale appears to bea tissue of folkloristic motifs, arranged in a narrative sequence meantto evoke an atmosphere of romance. While Siegfried is away, Genovefaresists the advances of her majordomo, who then falsely accuses her ofadultery. Siegfried returns and orders her and her infant son to be putto death, unaware that those charged to do this have abandoned thepair in the woods instead of killing them. For six years Genovefa andher child live in a cave, nourished by the milk of a deer in the fashionof St. Giles. One day Siegfried, who has found out about the false ac-cusation against his wife but believes her dead, is out hunting andchases the deer to the cave, yet another evocation of a standard hagio-graphic topos, as we have seen. Siegfried and Genovefa are reconciledand the majordomo is put to death. Since it is generally believed thatthis legend was fabricated by an unknown German monk no earlierthan the fourteenth century, and that it did not become widely popularuntil much later, it seems unlikely that Boccaccio was directly influ-enced by it.38 Nonetheless, it is evident that the stories of Genovefa andBeritola both derive from a common storehouse of romance and hagio-graphic motifs. In such narratives the heroine, forced by unjust cir-cumstance into an adventurous life in the wild, finds it expedient tolive a chaste and reverent life in the company of a type of animal thatis most emblematic of the anchorite saints.

Now, having examined all of these antecedents, let us revisitBoccaccio’s tale. It is quite clearly fashioned as a romance, following astandard romance plot pattern that had been established since classicaltimes: characters become separated and isolated by adversity, areforced to undergo adventures in strange places, often involving two ormore sets of characters and multiple episodes including a love story(that of Beritola’s son Giuffredi and Currado’s daughter Spina, which atfirst seems ill-starred), until the inevitable recognition scene and finalreconciliation. The motifs of medieval chivalric romance are evidenthere too: for instance, the name Beritola gives to her other son,Scacciato, recalls the naming of Tristan according to the circumstancesof his birth.39 In the wild, Beritola identifies with an animal, in much thesame fashion as Yvain with his lion, or Merlin with his wolf; she alsoeats herbs, as do Tristano (of the Panciatichiano) and Partonopeu in thethroes of la follia cavalleresca, as well as Sir Orfeo. She wields a weapon,which likewise places her in the company of Yvain and Tristan. Herskin grows dark and her hair becomes prominent, as in the cases ofPartonopeu and Renaut. She seeks solitude as an antidote to grief, as dothe lovers of both the lyric and chivalric romance traditions.

However, Beritola’s life with the deer puts the episode on a com-pletely different track, that of the tales of the anchorite saints. This canbe seen especially in her attitude toward life in the wild, which she

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learns to regard as something positive and fulfilling. As Segre notes, inthe context of la follia cavalleresca the state of nature subtracts ratherthan adds: it does not fulfill the crazy knight, but rather takes from himeverything that matters, such as his clothes, weapons, ability to speak,and esteemed place in court.40 On the other hand, for the anchorite asfor Beritola, the state of nature ultimately confers essential benefits.Moreover, the deer family with which Beritola bonds is specificallysaid to be a group of cavriuoli, that is, the roe, a species often associatedwith the saints for its putative monogamy.41 Boccaccio cannot place hisheroine in a cave in the woods with a female roe, especially with lacta-tion as a theme, without expecting his reader to see instantly a connec-tion with the iconography of a number of famous saints, as they areshown in both narrative and art.42

But Boccaccio would not be Boccaccio, one of the most creative writ-ers of his age, if he did not transform these genres as he adopts them tohis purposes. In all of the saints’ stories I have seen, the deer are pres-ent as signs of divine providence: they show the saint’s special rela-tionship with God by miraculously appearing just when he or sheneeds them, to provide sustenance in the form of milk (or meat, as inMacrina’s case), or to plow the fields (as in an episode in the life of St. Neot), or just to provide loving companionship in solitude.43 Thesaint’s role in all of this is essentially passive: he or she need only showsteadfast purity and faith, and the deer will simply come walking outof the forest to save the day. Nor does the saint need to make any ex-traordinary effort to protect the animal when she comes running to thecave for protection from a hunter’s dogs: neither Giles, nor Neot, norGenovefa are said to wield clubs or other weapons in the animals’ de-fense. When Beritola picks up a stick, she becomes one with the wildmen of folklore, or with the mad Tristan and Yvain who are continuallyfighting with men or animals.

As is well known, Boccaccio does not provide a serious hagiograph-ical narrative within the Decameron. Quite to the contrary, his inclina-tions are to parody the standard topoi of the saints’ lives, as can be seenin the stories of Ser Ciappelletto (I, 1), Rustico and Alibech (III, 10), andFilippo Balducci (introduction to Day IV).44 These satirical spoofs ofthe hagiographic genre poke malicious fun at a form that traditionallytakes itself quite seriously, especially in its approach to sexual matters.Boccaccio’s use of hagiographic motifs, sporadic throughout the workbut always memorable, creates controversy not only because it isclearly meant to invite charges of impiety, but also because his parodictreatment of it inevitably leads to problems of interpretation. I wouldlike to suggest that Beritola’s episode on Ponza is no less a parody ofthe old saints’ lives, despite its seemingly reverent tone and its place ina novella that is styled as a romance, than the three more obvious par-odies mentioned above. In Beritola’s tale the parody is far less overtly

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stated, but it is there nonetheless, deriving its essence especially fromthe depiction of Beritola as a wild woman who suckles a pair of deer.Her remarkable role as the one who nurses the doe’s offspring, insteadof drinking the doe’s milk herself, provides an essentially parodic re-versal of reader expectations as they were established in the old an-chorite stories and paintings, just as the stories of Ciappelletto, Rusticoand Filippo Balducci are meant to reverse and confound those samereader expectations.

In the Camposanto of Pisa there is a fresco known as The Triumph ofDeath, thought to have been painted in the mid 1330s, which has longhad an association with the Decameron because it depicts a group ofyoung aristocrats conversing and playing music in a garden setting, asin the case of the Boccaccio’s brigata. Moreover, it has been attributedby some to Bonamico di Martino, detto Buffalmacco, a painter who ap-pears as a character in five of Boccaccio’s novellas (VIII, 3, 6, 9; IX, 3,5).45 The message of the painting, that earthly pleasure and luxury aremeaningless if one thinks on death and the dissolution of the body, isgiven special resonance by the scene of anchorites in the wildernesswhich the painter includes in the fresco’s upper left corner, diagonallyopposite the brigata in the garden: the viewer is clearly being urged tofollow the anchorites’ example and turn away from useless vanities. Asin the case of Starnina’s Thebaïd, we are shown anchorites following alife of rustic devotion in a landscape that includes animals, especiallydeer; and again, we see that one of the deer is allowing herself to bemilked by a hermit. In her lengthy study of this painting, LuciaBattaglia Ricci has sought to demonstrate that Boccaccio must haveknown this work, since the Decameron appears to provide a reactionagainst the values of the “cultura della penitenza” that are depictedtherein.46 If the fresco places Death (shown as a flying female figurewith a scythe) in ideological opposition to the brigata cortese in its gar-den setting, Boccaccio too creates a contrast between the garden andthe death brought by the plague, kept at bay by the garden walls.However, in Ricci’s view Boccaccio is consciously providing a “ribalta-mento parodico” of the penitential life evoked in the fresco (Ricci 174),in keeping with the parodies of hagiographic life that appear in thenovellas of Ciappelletto, Alibech and Filippo Balducci. Seen in theseterms, Beritola’s episode becomes yet another of these parodies, as itsimultaneously evokes and yet inverts the standard image of the an-chorite saint milking a deer in the desert.

Boccaccio’s inversion of the original topos makes a mockery of thecentral point of the stories of anchorites saved by deer: that God willprovide for those who passively wait and pray. Beritola never prays,she acts; moreover, the soul that she must save is not eternal, but thatof the here and now: it is her own psychological state while she is alive.In the preface, the narrator Emilia tells us that this story will illustrate

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the vagaries of fortune (1, 200–201), but Beritola turns out to be any-thing but a plaything of happenstance, even if she appears so at the be-ginning of the narrative. After she is marooned, she increasingly showsa tendency to vanquish her sense of hopelessness and desperation byfirmly resolving to help herself. At first, feeling that she is “povera esola e abbandonata,” she nearly gives way to behavior reminiscent ofthe follia cavalleresca, fainting and searching the island for her lost chil-dren (1, 203–204). However, she soon abandons such useless pursuitsand begins to think of her needs (“di se medesima alquanto divennesollecita” 1, 204), and thereafter makes a steady series of rationalchoices on her own behalf. After a terrible night alone in the cave, shefinds a breakfast of herbs and assesses her situation, still consumedwith sadness (“. . . piangendo a varii pensieri della sua futura vita sidiede,” 1, 204). At this moment fortune intervenes, with a plot devel-opment that would have been instantly recognizable by any medievalreader of the stories of desperate anchorites: a female roe deer appears,entering and exiting the cave next to Beritola’s. As in the case of her-mits such as Giles or Genovefa, this provides the solution to her prob-lem, but it is not the solution we have come to expect, for her needs arenot the same as those of the hermits. She enters the cave:

. . . e videvi due cavriuoli forse il d medesimo nati, li quali le parevano lapiú dolce cosa del mondo e la piú vezzosa; e non essendolesi ancora delnuovo parto rasciutto il latte del petto, quegli teneramente prese e al pettogli si pose. Li quali, non rifiutando il servigio, cos lei poppavano come lamadre avrebber fatto; e d’allora innanzi dalla madre a lei niuna distinzionfecero. (1, 204–205)

As critics have long affirmed, her response is indeed maternal; how-ever, it is also to some extent therapeutic, since it illustrates her pro-found need to help herself. She does not need to eat deer meat nordrink deer milk, as in the stories that precede hers: instead she must as-suage her grief at having lost her family, and gain a new identity forherself in the state of nature. The fawns can no longer distinguish herfrom their own mother, since by feeding beasts with her own body, she has, in effect, become a beast. Like the anchorites, she lives a life ofdevotion, but it is devotion to her new family and to the memory ofher “preterita vita” (1, 205), not to God or the saints, who are nevermentioned here. The wild woman identity is a deliberate stratagem onher part, whose very incongruousness is emphasized: she is now “lagentil donna divenuta fiera,” the aristocratic woman who has becomea beast (1, 205), and who has moreover shown herself to be perfectlywilling to suckle animals in an age when women of the nobility werenever even expected to breastfeed their own children, but instead relyon wet nurses. She is even content with her diet of herbs, unlike manyof her literary predecessors, both saints and knights, who live thus

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either because they are insane or as an act of penance; in this regard,she resembles more the joyful deer-woman Madhava, or perhaps thedeer described by the classical author Aelian, who are frugal in theireating habits and easily contented with what they have before them,disdaining to wander far in search of food.47

Beritola only allows herself to be rescued from this life on conditionthat she continue to be allowed to “look after herself,” and even main-tain her identity as a wild woman. She tells Currado’s wife that she willonly go to places where she is not known (and therefore not subject tothe threat of further political intrigues); moreover she insists that shemust be allowed to keep her deer family, that is, her wild, “therapeutic”identity, symbolized most plainly by the name Cavriuola by which sheis henceforth known. As in the case of Yvain, who becomes identifiedwith the lion that he befriends, the wild experience has bestowed uponBeritola the name of an emblematic wild beast, which she is happy toembrace because it has given her life new meaning, as well as curedher woes.48 The identity of the monogamous roe deer, the favorite com-panion of the hermit saints, is to be conjoined with her appearance asa devoted widow, maintained by her “abito vedovile” and her role as achaste and obedient member of Currado’s household (1, 207).

Boccaccio does not write a saint’s life here, nor a tale of a knightgone mad for love or loss. Nor indeed does he write a true hagio-graphic romance at any time in his career, at least if we strictly followthe definitions of the subgenre provided by Hippolyte Delehaye, forwhom the hagiographic romance should constitute the depiction of“the life and spirit of a saint honoured by the Church by means of a se-ries of happenings that are partly real and partly imaginary,” or byBrigitte Cazelles, who describes thirteenth-century vernacular saints’lives that “imitate the language and manner of courtly literature.”49

Instead, in the episode of Beritola on Ponza Boccaccio quite deliber-ately builds a new sort of narrative within his diverse and eclectic col-lection of novellas, allowing for the interpenetration of what AlistairFowler would call two distinct modal extensions—the common bitsand parts of both hagiography and chivalric romance (Fowler 106–08).This commingling of literary modes, this often ironic juxtaposition ofthe motifs, language, tone and settings of two contrasting genres, iswhat I intend by my use of the term hagiographic romance: here, as inso many other places, the author makes maximum use of that mostversatile of literary vehicles, the Italian novella, to forge somethingnew out of a detritus of disparate topoi. In this way, Boccaccio can cre-ate the unique story of a resourceful, heroic, even slightly saintly indi-vidual who learns how to cope with, and ultimately derive maximumbenefit from, the most fearsome adversity.

CHRISTOPHER NISSENNorthern Illinois University

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NOTES1 On the persistence and nature of romance features in the Decameron, see

Baratto 129, Guglielmi 33, Segre 1987, 54–55, Wetzel 274–275, and Zatti 80–81.2 For references to the Decameron in studies of literary wildness, see

Bernheimer 52, 55, 57, Bartra 118 and Heijkant 242. For source studies ofDecameron II, 6, see Cappelletti 35–37 and Lee 34–36, as well as Branca’s notesin his edition of the Decameron 1, 200–206 (all citations here are from this edi-tion). Most of the sources mentioned in these studies deal primarily withBoccaccio’s historical references, and only a few, such as the Cantari delCarduino cited below, refer to Beritola’s experiences in the wild; as Branca indicates, “. . . tutti i riscontri sono vaghi e poco convincenti” (Boccaccio 1, 200 n 2).

3 Wild men are typically depicted with clubs as weapons in numerous im-ages; see Bernheimer 26, as well as many of his illustrations, for example thosenumbered 13–16, 29–30, 42, 45, 47. See also Heijkant 231. For the medieval wildwoman, who is usually endowed with supernatural and/or erotic attributesbut is not generally said to carry weapons, see Bernheimer 33–40, 129–34,150–51, and Bartra 101–02.

4 Capriolo (or cavriolo) refers specifically to the roe deer, the smallest of thespecies native to Europe; however, because of the resemblance of the word tocapra, it has been mistranslated as “goat” in some renderings of the Decameroninto English. See for instance Singleton’s note on his edition of Payne’s trans-lation, wherein he refers to Beritola as “the goat lady” (834), and Aldington114–15. As a result, various critics have persisted in associating Beritola withgoats; see Gathercole 95, Deligiorgis 35, Ferrante 590 and McGrady 193. For azoological description of the capriolo and a list of its frequent appearances inmedieval Italian literature, both as male and female, see Mouchet 103–04. HereMouchet also notes that the roe does not appear in medieval bestiaries, at leastnot as an animal distinct from the generic term cervus; however this assertionis contradicted by the description of the caprea (roe doe) that appears inPhysiologus 22. Mouchet claims that the animals of the Decameron, including theroe, have only a functional presence in the narrative and are thus generally de-prived of “interpretazione allegorico-morale” (17).

5 The critical theories of Benedetto Croce once led Italian commentators tostress the poetic aspects of this episode; see for instance Momigliano’s notes inhis edition of the Decameron (115–16), and Grabher, who refers to “il prodigiodi un amor materno che eguaglia bestie e creature umane in un commoventecandore di poesia” (164–65). Flora speaks of the tale’s “aura di favola antica”and “società tra la creatura umana e le fiere” (1, 374). Baratto claims that thisstory conjoins “il solitario idillio elegiaco-paesistico” with “l’istinto materno”(161). Marcus also calls Beritola’s allegiance to the deer family an “idyllic in-terlude,” and sees therein a rejection of civilization and notions of social caste(33–34). For Ferrante, Beritola’s act is typical of protagonists of Day II whohave suffered loss and thus need to give something of themselves (590). Bardistresses the loss of social identity for this and other protagonists of Day II (26),whereas for Cottino-Jones, Beritola’s animal-like existence represents a stage

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of extreme isolation in a circular process of separation and reintegration intosociety (52–54). Raja describes Beritola’s Ponza as a place “in cui la protagoni-sta si ‘mimetizza’ nella vita silvana, come testimonierà il suo soprannome ‘laCavriuola’ ” (102); in effect, Beritola suppresses her true identity by means ofnatural “camouflage.” However, none of these critics notes a link between thischaracter and other wild figures of medieval literature.

6 On this topic see Getto 236, and Baratto 161.7 For the link to Ariadne in Ovid’s Heroides 10, see Getto 236 and Baratto

161. Totaro, who identifies Beritola as the first mother to appear in theDecameron, notes that her very individuality is defined by her role as a wetnurse to animals (37).

8 Manetti asserts that Beritola, driven by an animal instinct, “si inselvatichi-sce al punto da perdere quasi ogni caratteristica propriamente umana” (65).Muscetta, on the other hand, finds that she is sustained by her maternal in-stinct, even as she risks becoming “avvilita a uno stato animalesco” (199). ForMouchet, Beritola’s experience is to be associated with surreal episodes ofmetamorphosis from animals to humans or vice versa in certain other works ofBoccaccio (13, 103–04).

9 Getto emphasizes Beritola’s “rara gentilezza femminile e materna” andher desire to create “una socialità nuova e singolare” with the deer, in an effortto avoid elegiac solitude (237).

10 Boccaccio 205 n2. For a description of the fresco in the Villa of Mysteries,which identifies the nursing animal as a capretto, see Maiuri 171. Maiuri saysthis image reflects a link to classical scenes of furious Maenads suckling fawnsand young wolves: “vita umana e ferina espressa nella dolce e casta sensualitàdi un atto materno” (171). For the Maenads as wild women see Bartra 23–25.

11 For la follia cavalleresca, see Segre 1990, 91–93. To my knowledge, onlyMigiel stresses Beritola’s connection to this topos: “In Decameron 2, 6, MadamaBeritola becomes animal-like, as indicated by her new name, Cavriuola(‘Madam Doe’). Reduced to eating herbaceous vegetation, Madam Doe evokestraditional representations of the madman” (67).

12 For Merlin as the prototype of the “sylvester homo,” see Heijkant 241. Forlists of wild men in romance, see Segre 1990, 91 and Heijkant 241.

13 For a comparison between the Tristan of the prose Tristan, who is trulysaid to become insane, and that of the Folie Tristan poems, in which the charac-ter merely feigns insanity, see Curtis 1986, 10–14.

14 See Curtis 1985, 3, 871 for Tristan’s initial mad scene, after he has come toimagine Iseut has betrayed him. See Ménard for the continuation of the narra-tive, which includes a description of Tristan as a wild man who eats raw meatand is so changed that he is unrecognizable (1, 168), as well as the account ofLancelot’s madness (6, 155).

15 Petrarca Canzoniere 35, v. 1.16 For types of wild men, see Bernheimer 16–19 and 21–22, Williamson

193–94 and Bartra 89–90. On the role of the wild man myth in various culturessee also White 151–54.

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17 Doob 138, and Daniel 4, 32–33. For Enkidu as a wild man, see Gilgamesh68, Williams 1925, 12–18, and Bartra 55–56.

18 Doob 73. For insanity as a characteristic of wild men, see Bernheimer 12and Bartra 81.

19 See Renaut 87, vv. 3457–3470 for a description of the brothers’ wild life.20 See Geoffrey of Monmouth 54–57 for the account of Merlin’s grief and de-

scent into madness. Doob analyzes the holy and unholy aspects of Merlin’scondition (154–55). For Merlin, see also Bartra 63–74. For a study ofPartonopeu’s wildness, see Curtis 1986, 14–15.

21 Heijkant 231, 242. For Merlin and the wolf, see Geoffrey of Monmouth58–59, and Doob 154.

22 Decameron IV, 2; 1, 502–03. On Frate Alberto’s wild man features, seeBernheimer 52.

23 Heijkant 231. For accounts of Chrysostom’s wildness, see Williams 1925,10–12 and 1935, 19–21, 35–37; Heijkant 240–41, and Bartra 73–75.

24 Mahabharata 3, 110; 2, 433. On Rishyasringa and the wild aspects of Hinduascetics see Williams 1925, 25–30. In Gilgamesh, Enkidu is said to have beenborn covered with hair, and to feed with gazelles on grass (68).

25 On Madhavı, see Williams 1925, 27n, and Dumézil 316–30.26 For saints associated with deer see Pfleiderer 71–72 and Roeder 199–200.

Pfleiderer includes no fewer than sixteen saints with deer connections, al-though many of the deer are stags and most of the saints are not wild hermits.For Macrina’s iconography with deer, see Pfleiderer 72 and Roeder 305.Macrina’s story of wild exile is told in Acta Sanctorum Januarii I (vol. 1 of mod-ern facsimile reprint), 952–53.

27 In A Dictionary of Symbols, Chevalier and Gheerbrant note that the hind isbasically a feminine symbol, whose image “is that of the virginal persistinginto the maternal” (506–07), a somewhat oxymoronic observation that none -the less can encompass the experiences of Madhavı and Beritola, both motherswho are content to lead celibate lives.

28 For the heroes suckled by deer see Rank 20, 43–45. For the common motif of heroes suckled by various other animals see Rank 19, 28–29, 32, 34–36,43, 57.

29 Acta Sanctorum Septembris tomus I (vol. 38) 301.30 Virgil Aeneid 7, vv. 475–510. For the iconography of Giles see Pfleiderer 72,

and Kaftal columns 452–58, including several reproductions of 14th centurypaintings showing Giles with his deer. Among the scholars who have studiedthe sources for Beritola, only Branca seems to have noted a link with St. Giles,which he mentions without elaboration (Boccaccio 1, 200 n 2).

31 Acta Sanctorum Julii VII (vol. 31), 324.32 Acta Sanctorum Julii II (vol. 26), 334.33 For two Florentine paintings (14th–15th centuries) showing Stephen being

thus suckled see Kaftal columns 952, 954. Maximus’ deer episode is describedin Acta Sanctorum Junii V (vol. 23) 51. For Proculus with a doe see the illustra-tions provided by Kaftal in columns 857–58.

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34 For a reproduction and description of this painting, which has also beenattributed to Fra Angelico, see Toynbee 22–23.

35 For Maria as a hermit in the desert see Cavalca 283–84, 293–98, andCazelles 264–65.

36 Rajna 3–5 (Cantari del Carduino I, octaves 5–9). For the link to Beritola, seeRajna vii–viii, and Cappelletti 36.

37 Genovefa only appears in the Acta Sanctorum as a putative saint, in a briefdescription that emphasizes her diet of herbs and life in a cave, but does notmention the deer (Acta Sanctorum Aprilis I (vol. 9), 57. Seuffert too confirms thatGenofeva sustained herself “mit Kräutern” (4). For the origins and early textsof the Genovefa legend, as well as synopses of her experiences, see Seuffert4–27, and Golz 1–5.

38 Seuffert concludes that the legend must have been created between 1325and about 1425, probably in the chapel of Frauenkirchen near Laach (27). Thisjudgment, published in 1877, has not been challenged since.

39 For Branca’s note on this romance convention, see Boccaccio 202 n 8.40 Segre 1990, 92. Hurley sees the quest of the romance hero, who first must

emerge from obscurity, as an inversion of the holy man’s flight from society,but she does not take into account the many knights who also seek anonymousrefuge in nature (66).

41 On the iconographic value of the roe deer as a symbol of monogamy inpaintings of saints, see Friedmann 206. For the identification of the deer thataccompany Giles, Genovefa and Maximus of Turin as roes see Pfleiderer 133(under Reh). The animals in Starnina’s painting all appear to be roes, which arecharacterized by small simple antlers with minimal branches, and a whiterump patch.

42 It has been demonstrated that the presence of roe deer in various scenesof the Decameron frame story suggests a link with the iconography of Venus,and thus an entirely different association from that of the anchorites (Kern516–18, 522; and also Raja 39–40). However, it is important to note that thecavriuoli of the frame story appear in gardens, i.e. in the typical locus amoenusof medieval love literature and Venus imagery, as Kern notes. Beritola is not ina garden, but rather in a wild deserted place, characterized as selva by Raja(102); thus it resembles the forests to which insane knights or penitent an-chorites typically retire. For the presence of roe deer in the Decameron gardens,see 1, 326–27 and 453 (Introduction and Conclusion to Day III), and 2, 1031(Introduction to Day IX). In the most authoritative of the ancient bestiaries,Physiologus, the roe is said to represent the wisdom of God; moreover, it is re-ferred to only in the feminine form (caprea), which suggests its role in bothsaints’ lives and the story of Beritola (Physiologus 22).

43 For the episode of the deer which are sent by Providence to substitute themissing oxen of St. Neot and his monks at harvest time, see Acta Sanctorum JuliiVII (vol. 31), 324.

44 On Boccaccio’s tendency to parody hagiographical or penitential litera-ture, see Ricci 83–96. For other studies of this aspect of the Decameron, see

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Mazzotta’s characterization of the tale of Ciappelletto as “a parody of the hagio-graphic mode, of the confessional mode, and of the religious sermon” (61), aswell as Storey, “Parodic Structure in Alibech.” For the influence of hagiographyon the Decameron, see also de’ Negri “The Legendary Style of the Decameron.” Onthe characteristics of the saint’s life as it was adopted by writers of medievalnovellas, see Dembowski Traits essentiels des récits hagiographiques.

45 The difficulties in attributing and dating this painting are discussed byRicci, 59–61. For its traditional association with the Decameron, see Ricci 12–13.

46 For the possibility that Boccaccio knew of this fresco before writing theDecameron and was influenced by it, see Ricci 163–78.

47 Aelian 6.13. Although Doob (72) and Heijkant (241) indicate that the dietof herbs is a typical penitential aspect of the unholy wild man going back toNebuchadnezzar, the experiences of such unrepentant types as Madhavı,Geoffrey’s Merlin, Sir Orfeo and Beritola would seem to mitigate this notion.To this list we may also add the unrepentant Merlin of the thirteenth-centuryromance Silence by Heldris de Cornualle, who happily lives on herbs as a wildman under the tutelage of the personification of Nurture, until Silence offershim meat as a means of trapping him (vv. 5987–6010).

48 Although we are not told in Chrétien’s poem whether or not the lion con-tinues to live with Yvain after his return to society, in the fashion of Beritola’sdeer, this outcome is indeed emphasized in the conclusion of the later Englishpoem Ywain and Gawain (107, vv. 4023–26). On the scene of the hero’s wildmadness in this work, see Doob 147–50.

49 Delehaye 5, and Cazelles 33. On the tendency to create secularized saintsor sanctified romance heroes in late medieval literature, see Hurley “Saints’Legends and Romance Again,” and Cazelles 30–38.

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Hagiographic Romance and the Wild Life in Boccaccio's Novella of Beritola (Decameron II, 6)

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