Making War on the Widow: Boccaccio’s Il

Corbaccio and Florentine Liberty

Michaela Paasche Grudin

The meaning of Il Corbaccio has been one of the enduring

enigmas in Boccaccio studies –if not in fourteenth-century

Italian literature–and interpretation of the work, however

scholarly and subtle, an exercise in frustration. The basis

for the misogynist interpretation that has dominated

scholarship on the Corbaccio is its surface narrative.

A narrator introduces himself as someone whose unrequited

love for a woman has brought him tears, loneliness, and

yearnings for death. Then, as though sent by celestial

light, Thought reasons with him that it is altogether better

to live and to seek revenge. Announcing that darkness has

been lifted from the eyes of his mind, the narrator joins

friends with whom he philosophizes about fortune, nature,

1

and the divine. These conversations bring sleep and a dream

in which he is transported to a savage, desolate place, also

referred to as a labyrinth. There appears an older man who

has been sent from Purgatory to help. The narrator will

refer to him as “lo spirito” but it is customary in criticism

of the Corbaccio to refer to him also as the Guide. He

announces that he was formerly married to the very woman in

question. He then proceeds, in detailed and angry language,

to arraign women as the vessels of every vice: women are

less clean than the dirtiest pig, they are hypocritical,

avaricious, quarrelsome, suspicious, bad tempered, fickle,

brazen in their lying, vain, and turn to pimps and

prostitution once they have acquired the possessions and

power for which they hunger. General vices then give way to

more specific ones, as the Spirit goes on to describe this

woman and their disastrous marriage in vividly disgusting

terms. By the time the Spirit is done, the narrator is

2

completely convinced of his own error, and vows to revenge

the wrongs he has suffered.

The conventional interpretation– reflected in some of

the earliest titles assigned to the work1–has been that the

work is autobiographical. But it is undermined by nagging

questions: Why would the best known defender of women of

his age suddenly turn on women? Why would Boccaccio, an

outstanding craftsman of fiction, invent a story in which

the Spirit and the narrator have essentially the same

experience? And why should a man of Boccaccio’s formidable

talents assemble such ponderous rhetorical weapons in an

attack on one woman? As the work itself describes them:

1For a discussion of the work’s various titles, including

“Laberinto d’amore,” see the introduction to Giovanni Boccaccio, Il

Corbaccio, ed. Tauno Nurmela (Helsinki, 1968). Nurmela (p. 16)

considers the title Corbaccio to be authentic, appearing in the

majority of mss. 3

queste parole così dette sono le tanaglie con le quali si convengono

rompere e tagliare le dure catene che qui t’hanno tirato; queste

parole così dette sono i ronconi e le scuri colle quali si tagliano i

velenosi sterpi, le spine e’pruni e gli sconvolti bronchi...; queste

parole così dette sono i martelli, i picconi, i bolcioni... (Padoan

279) [these words thus spoken are the pincers with

which it is necessary to break and cut the hard

chains which have dragged you; and these words

thus spoken are the reaping hooks and axes with

which one chops down the poisonous shoots, the

spiny thorns, and the tangled brushwood....These

words thus spoken are the hammers, the pickaxes,

the battering-rams...].2

2 Unless otherwise noted, references are to Giorgio Padoan’s

(1994) edition of the Corbaccio, vol. 5.2: Tutte le opere di Giovanni

Boccaccio. Ed. Vittore Branca. (Milan: Mondadori, 1964-).

Translations are my own. 4

In light of the traditional interpretation, the style of the

work is often so crude as to invite laughter rather than

credibility. Could Boccaccio’s lust have been so dense, so

thick, so complex that it needed all this rhetoric, this

weaponry, to counteract it? All these questions cast such

serious doubt on a literal interpretation as to compel a re-

reading in favor of allegory; and contemporary research into

Florentine history of the fourteenth century makes an

allegorical meaning highly probable. Under cover of

misogyny, the Corbaccio takes part in the long, bitter

conflict between Florence and the papacy that was heightened

by the removal of the papacy to Avignon in 1306 and

culminated by open warfare in 1375.3

3Referred to by Boccaccio in 1371 as “the Babylon of the

West,” (Giovanni Boccaccio, Giovanni Boccaccio: Le Lettere, ed.

Francesco Corazzini (Firenze, 1877), this period of the papacy,

in the words of one scholar, “fouled the image of the leading

clergy in the fourteenth century.” See Lauro Martines, “Raging 5

I. The critical context

I am not the first to find the misogynist

interpretations inadequate. More recent readings see the

Corbaccio as an ironic fiction, or literary joke. Gian Piero

Barricelli’s “Satire of Satire: Boccaccio’s Corbaccio” (1975)

-- regarded by Robert Hollander as having ushered in the

“new age” in Corbaccio criticism,4 – comments that studies of

against Priests in Italian Renaissance Verse,” ch. 10, Society &

Individual in Renaissance Florence, ed. William J. Connell (Berkeley, CA,

2002), pp. 261-62.

4 Robert Hollander, Boccaccio’s Last Fiction (Philadelphia, 1988),

pp. 42, 45-46, n. 2, describes three stages of critical

approaches toward the Corbaccio, placing his present reading of

the work in the third: the first, “from Manni (1742) up to

Billanovich (1947), took the text to be autobiographical and

misogynous; the second, from Billanovich to Barricelli (1975),

asserted that the work was not autobiography but fiction, while 6

the work often betray “uneasiness, even uncertainty,” and

that “the feeling that there may be something more than

meets the eye ultimately leaves every critic and his reader

unsatisfied with the biographical, misogynist, and straight

satirical explanations.” Barricelli offers “the possibility

that all those faults which the critics have done their best

not to overlook may actually have been willed by Boccaccio,

whose true intention has not been detected.” Noting that

“the enigma invites speculation,” Barricelli argues that the

satire of the Corbaccio “is turned against itself and

misogynous literature generally,” and that the work is (as

it continued to take its misogyny seriously;” the third, which

may have been introduced by Barricelli, is “an age in which the

work is held to be an ironic fiction...” Hollander cites others

who oppose the traditional reading of the text, including Angela

M. Iovino (1983), Per Nykrog (1984), and Marina Scordilis

Brownlee (1987).7

his title suggests) “a satire of satire.”5 Though

Barricelli recognizes the heavy presence of Dante in the

Corbaccio, he reads the subject of the narrative at its face

value (as a story about the narrator’s misadventures in

love) and cannot explain the echoes of Dante except in terms

of a “disproportion” that is ultimately satiric.6 The idea

5Gian Piero Barricelli, “Satire of Satire: Boccaccio’s

Corbaccio,” Italian Quarterly 18 (1975), 95-111, esp. 99-102.

Barricelli (p. 107) cites critics before him, including Attilo

Levi , Il Corbaccio e la Divina Commedia (Torino, 1889) and Francis

MacManus, Boccaccio (London, 1947), who drew attention to the

“Dantean background” of the work.

6 “To imitate Dante, then, in both the physical setting and

spiritual movement of the Corbaccio, that is, in a ridiculous tale

in which the protagonist is presented as a complete fool, [is]

meant to establish a hilarious disproportion between the divine

Love of the Commedia and the earthly love for Old Crow”

(Barricelli, p. 105). 8

of the Corbaccio as a kind of literary parody is expanded by

both Anthony K. Cassell and Robert Hollander. Cassell’s “Il

Corbaccio and the Secundus Tradition” (1973) points to the

traditional nature of Boccaccio’s misogyny and argues that

“the writer had collected examples of antifeminist charges

for many years previous to the writing of this treatise.”7

Subsequently, in the 1993 introduction to his translation of

the Corbaccio, Cassell suggests that “the impetus of the

Corbaccio is literary,” and that its genres (dream vision and

anti-feminist satire) “play off each other in a parodic

7 Cassell cites a number of works which, in his words, “all

contain charges of equal vehemence...Matheolus in his Lamentationes

(ca. 1298), Jehan le Fevre in his French adaptation of the same

poem (ca. 1371-1372), the Goliardic De Conjuge non ducenda, Andreas

Capellanus in Book III of the De Amore, Jean de Meung in the

Roman de la Rose, and the anonymous writer of the Proverbia quae

dicuntur super naturam feminarum....” “Il Corbaccio and the Secundus

Tradition,” Comparative Literature 25.3 (Fall, 1973), 352-60. 9

clash.” Seen in this way, the extended and vituperative

misogyny (including the grotesque descriptions of the

Widow’s private parts) ultimately reflects on the Spirit:

he is, according to this reading, an “hysterical cuckold,”

“a parody of Dante’s other-worldly guides,” and “has all the

authority of a stand-up comic.”8 The view of the Corbaccio as

ironic, introduced by Barricelli, is further refined by

Robert Hollander, who like Cassell urges close attention to

the Corbaccio’s artistry, including its structure, its

conventions, and the particulars of its diction.

Hollander notes the emphasis on vengeance (and its

unfittingness in conventional Boethian dream visions)9 in

the work’s opening and traces it through the work, alerting

8The Corbaccio or The Labyrinth of Love, trans. & ed. Anthony K.

Cassell, 2nd ed. (Binghamton, NY, 1993), pp. xii-xvi.

9 Also suggested by Anthony K. Cassell in “An Abandoned

Canvas: Structural and Moral Conflict in the Corbaccio,” Modern

Language Notes 89 (1974), 60-70. 10

his reader that “vendetta is perhaps the key word of the

Corbaccio” and that “our basic interpretation of the work

depends on whether or not we consider the narrator’s desire

for vengeance as being presented as a praiseworthy form of

behavior.” He views the Corbaccio as “a companion piece to

the Decameron” and remarks that “their mutual relation to

the essential strategies of the amatory texts of Ovid is one

of the important and least explored aspects of both

works.”10

II. Problems left hanging

These readings of the work as “a satire of satires,” a

parody, or a literary joke, have made us more aware of the

subtleties of the Corbaccio, and of the literary traditions

which inform it. Hollander’s reading of what he aptly calls

“a difficult little work,” is complex and sensitive. While

disagreeing with Hollander’s final conclusion that the 10 Hollander, Boccaccio’s Last Fiction, pp. 7, 23, 33.

11

Corbaccio is a parody of its assumed form, one can appreciate

the many observations that seem to lead in the right

direction: among these are his documented instances of the

pregnancy of references to Dante; his sense of the Spirit

as perhaps someone as august as Cato the Younger, the great

defender of Roman liberty, his awareness of the

incongruities of style and convention –which he terms a

literary joke–and his attention to the importance of anger

in the Corbaccio.11 All of these have aided me in the present

investigation.

But the currently accepted critical attitude toward

the work as “an ‘in-joke’ of letterati”12 provokes the

“uneasiness” that Barricelli described as characterizing

responses to Corbaccio criticism. It fails to account for

the Corbaccio’s intriguing variety of detail, its anger, and

its often somber tone. Problems are left hanging, including11Hollander, Boccaccio’s Last Fiction, pp. 47, n. 13; 7ff.

12Cassell, trans., Corbaccio, p. xv.12

perhaps most importantly, the Corbaccio’s emphasis on the

power of words (already noted above), and its frequent

reminders to pay attention to the discourse. This comes

from many angles, as when the narrator pauses to consider

the Spirit’s words, or the Spirit projects onto, and

anticipates the narrator. The very specific attention to

the discourse includes the acknowledgment that both its

style and its matter are something out of the ordinary. So,

for example, the narrator comments that both he–and the

Spirit–are making an effort to pay attention to the words,

“Alle cui parole stando io attento quanto poteva...” (Padoan 47); “nella

vista mostrando d’avere assai bene le mie parole raccolte e la intenzione di

quelle” (Padoan 116). Or the Spirit more than once suggests

that both the manner and the mode of the discourse require

intense scrutiny: “Tu forse hai teco medesimo detto o potresti dire: ‘Che

cose sono quelle di che costui parla? Chente il modo, chenti sono i vocaboli?’”

(Padoan 275); he also warns that the discourse is subject to

13

change, “Nuove cose, e assai dalle passate strane, richiede l’ordine del mio

ragionamento” (Padoan 291) [“New things and quite foreign

from those past are required by the order of my discourse”].

And even when the Spirit simply pauses to ask, “Ma che

dich’io?” (Padoan 315) [“But what am I saying?”], the repeated

attention to the words encourages the reader to a more

serious, if not somber reading of the Corbaccio itself.

Another problem is a persistent pattern of

discourse that portrays the central conflict in terms more

appropriate to institutions, politics, and ideas, than to

erotic frustration. The Spirit’s descriptions of his

disillusionments with the Widow suggest a context, like

fourteenth-century Florence, in which power, religion, and

deceit are profoundly inter-connected. Women are described

as “rapide e famelice lupe” and as descended from “rapaci lupi”

(Padoan 143, 355) [“swift and starving she-wolves,”

“rapacious wolves,”] come to occupy the patrimonies, the

14

estates and riches of their husbands, precisely the

image–“In vesta di pastor lupi rapaci” -- employed by Dante in the

Paradiso to describe the increasingly temporal nature of the

church.13 Though the Spirit thought he had brought into his

home peace and tranquility, he had, in fact, brought “guerra, 13See Paradiso XXVII. 46-57: “Non fu nostra intenzion ch’a destra mano /

d’i nostri successor parte sedesse, / parte da l’altra del popol cristiano; / né che le chiavi

che mi fuor concesse, / divenisser signaculo in vessillo / che contra battezzati

combattesse; / né ch’io fossi figura di sigillo / a privilegi venduti e mendaci, / ond’io

sovente arrosso e disfavillo. / In vesta di pastor lupi rapaci / si veggion di qua sù per

tutti I paschi: o difesa di Dio, perché pur giaci?” [It was not our purpose that

one part of the Christian people should sit on the right of our

successors, and one part on the left; nor that the keys which

were committed to me should become the ensign on a banner for

warfare on the baptized; nor that I should be made a figure on a

seal to sold and lying privileges, whereat I often blush and

flash. Rapacious wolves, in shepherd’s garb, are seen from here

above in all the pastures: O defense of God, wherefore dost thou

yet lie still?”] Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans., Charles S. 15

fuoco e mala ventura” (Padoan 211) [“war, fire and bad luck”].

The Widow’s behavior makes every place in the city, however

full of litigation and quarreling, seem more quiet and

restful than his own house: “e ciascuno luogo della nostra città, qual

che si fosse più di litigi e di quistioni pieno, m’incominciò a parere più riposato

che la mia casa” (Padoan 212).

In a period when liberty was the byword of Florentine

culture and politics,14 the Corbaccio’s descriptions of the

Singleton, 6 vols. (Princeton, 1970), vol. 3, pp. 302-305.

14On the importance of the concept of liberty in fourteenth-

century Florence, see David S. Peterson,“The War of the Eight 16

enchaining, shackling, stifling, and entrapping of human

liberty would be almost self insulting if they were limited

to a diatribe against one woman: the Spirit describes the

woman as someone who has “incatenata la tua libertà” (Padoan 15);

as having “legata la mia libertà” (Padoan 10); as the “sommergitrice

della umana libertà” (Padoan 128). He charges that women“alla

Saints in Memory and Oblivion,” in Society and Individual in Renaissance

Florence, ed. William J. Connell (Berkeley, 2002), pp. 173-214;

Richard C. Trexler, The Spiritual Power: Republican Florence Under Interdict,

Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, ed. Heiko A. Oberman (Leiden,

1974), vol. 9, esp. ch. 1; Gene A. Brucker, Florentine Politics and

Society 1343-1378 (Princeton, 1962), chs. 6 and 7; Marvin B. Becker,

“Florentine Politics and the Diffusion of Heresy in the Trecento:

A Socioeconomic Inquiry,” Speculum 34, 1 (Jan., 1959), 60-75;

Marvin B. Becker, “Florentine ‘Libertas’: Political Independents and

‘Novi Cives,’ 1372-1378,” Traditio 18 (1962), 393-407; Marvin B.

Becker, “Church and State in Florence on the Eve of the

Renaissance (1343-1382),” Speculum 38, 4 (Oct., 1962), 509-527.17

libertà degli uomini tendono lacciuoli” (Padoan 137). 15 At least once

in the Corbaccio, the narrator describes the distress more

directly, in terms of the city as a whole, rather than in

terms of an individual. Near the dream’s conclusion (having

promised the Spirit that he will atone as he has been

instructed), he remarks that “se animo non si muta, la nostra città

avrà un buon tempo poco che cantare altro che delle sue miserie o cattività”

(Padoan 391). [“Without a change of heart, our city for a

good long time will have little to sing about except its

miseries and its slavery”]. Especially in a work that

repeatedly draws attention to contemporary Florence, to our

common native city (“la nostra città”) and to the quarter

(“questa contrada”),16 this institutional aspect of the Corbaccio

deserves closer attention.

15See also Padoan 322, 407.

16For references to Florence, the “contrada,” and our common

native city, see Padoan 37, 43, 84, 226; also 142, 212.18

The presently accepted interpretations of the Corbaccio

also ignore what one might call the work’s humanist

thematics–its disdain for ignorance and gullibility, its

emphasis on reason, study, and communication, and its

frequent references to civic life and human liberty.

Boccaccio was one of the founders of Florentine humanism,

and the Corbaccio may be one of his most ardent expressions

of its values. Most notably, the Corbaccio gives striking

expression to the significance of individual judgment,

recognized by the humanists as the basis of intelligent

communication. Late in the dream vision, finally liberated

to speak his own mind again, the narrator can barely contain

his joy:

“E, avendomi detto me essere libero e potere di me fare a mio

senno, tanto fu la letizia ch’io senti’che, vogliendomeli a’piedi gittare

e grazie renderli di tanto e tale beneficio...” (Padoan 407)

19

[“When he had told me I was free and could rely on

my own judgment, so great was the joy I felt that

I wanted to throw myself at his feet, and give him

thanks for such beneficence”].17

And when he awakens from the dream, the narrator

communicates his own understanding of the dream with

friends, who “nella mia disposizione medesima tutti concorrere” (Padoan

409) [“in my same interpretation all agree”].18 The

17See also the reference, early in the narrative, to the

effects of thought, to every darkness being lifted from the eyes

of his mind: “quasi dagli occhi della mente ogni oscurità levatami, in tanto la vista

di quelli, aguzati, rendé chiara...” (Padoan 21). Regarding human

judgment and speech, a more extended statement in the same vein

occurs in Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium (6.13.5), vol. 9,

Tutte le Opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca (Milano, 1983).

18Nurmela (557) here reads esposizione, which recalls the name

of Boccaccio’s own commentary on Dante, Esposizioni sopra la Comedia, 20

Spirit’s early exhortations to “senno” and “fortezza” (Padoan

53, 58) – and, even more important, the narrator’s

rediscovery of these at the dream vision’s end (Padoan 402,

407)– are qualities that, along with justice, constitute

political, rather than personal, virtues for the early

humanists.19 All these concerns reflect the emergence of

humanism in the late fourteenth century, which, as Lauro

Martines points out, “swiftly exhibited a vigorous interest

public lectures he delivered in Florence from October 1373

through January 1374 that are characterized by systematic

interpretation at the literal, then at the allegorical, level.

Dante himself uses the word in Convivio II.xii.i: “Poi che la litterale

sentenza è sufficientemente dimostrata, è da procedere a la esposizione allegorica e

vera.”

19Rubinstein, Nicolai, “Political Ideas in Sienese Art: The

Frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Taddeo di Bartolo in the

Palazzo Pubblico,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21, 3-4

(1958), pp. 190-192.21

in political and civic affairs;” Martines adds that in the

1360's and 1370's, “under the influence of Florence’s

trouble and subsequent open conflict with the papacy in

central Italy, the ideal was combined for the first time

with the concept of the relation between the liberty of

Florence and the independence of the various Italian

states.”20

Finally, we must account for the work’s envoi which, in

Hollander’s view, reverses “the intention expressed in

almost all of the concluding passages in Boccaccio’s earlier

vernacular work,” an envoi, that is, that asks “his book to

avoid his beloved, not to find and inflame her.”21 Here,

20Lauro Martines, The Social World of the Florentine Humanists: 1390-1460,

(PrincetonUP, 1963), pp. 3-4, and n. 1, citing Eugenio Garin, “I

cancellieri umanisti della repubblica florentina da Coluccio Salutati a Bartolomo

Scale,” Revista storica italiana, LXXI, ii (1959), 192ff.

21Hollander, Boccaccio’s Last Fiction, p. 17.22

Boccaccio is very specific that the book be kept away from a

certain party:

sopra ogni cosa ti guarda di non venire nelle mani delle malvage

femmine, e massimamente di colei che ogni demonio di malvagità

trapassa e che della presente tua fatica è stata cagione (Padoan

413) [above all be careful not to come into the

hands of wicked women, especially of the one who

surpasses every demon in evil].

But why shouldn’t this party see it, if she’s guilty of all

these things? And what can we make of the last words to

his little work, that

ella è da pugnere con più acuto stimolo che tu non porti con teco; il

quale, concedendolo Colui che d’ogni grazia è donatore, tosto a

pugnerla, non temendo, le si faccia incontro (Padoan 413) [she

is to be stung with a sharper goad than you carry

23

with you; if it be granted by the One who is

giver of every grace, this will at once fearlessly

confront and attack her].

This would seem to be referring to an action to be taken

against the surpassingly evil woman outside the text.22 It

suggests that the book is a spoken attack that will be

followed by some form of physical or political action.

III. The Corbaccio as allegory

There is no doubt that the Corbaccio is, at one level, a

work about unrequited love and misogyny. But a plethora of

references that are superficially misogynist shade over and

reveal their more serious intention. An allegorical reading

would be perfectly legitimate in the eyes of Boccaccio

himself, who not only used allegory, but was a chief 22 For other references to an action outside the text, see

Padoan 389, 397. 24

authority on it. In the Genealogiae deorum gentilium, the most

influential statement on literary interpretation to appear

in his time, Boccaccio details the principles of literary

exegesis. As he does so, and while quoting Virgil, Dante,

and Petrarch, he is characteristically impatient with

readers who are not alert to the allegorical method. Is any

reader so confused, he asks, as to imagine that a poet as

philosophical as Virgil (and Dante or Petrarch) would “have

led the shepherd Aristeus into his mother Climen’s presence

in the depth of the earth or brought Aeneas to see his

father in Hades” simply to show off his eloquence? Is there

any reader, he wonders, who would believe that he wrote such

things without intending some deeper meaning beneath the

veil of fiction?23 Similarly, in the Trattatello in laude di Dante,

23See Boccaccio, Genealogie Deorum Gentilium, ed. Vittorio

Zaccaria, in Tutte Le Opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca

(Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1998), vols. 7-8, p. 1420; translation

in Boccaccio on Poetry: Being the Preface and Fourteenth and Fifteenth Books of 25

Boccaccio lashes out at those who suppose that the creations

of poets signify nothing more than their own stories:

E, avvedendosi le poetiche opere non essere vane o semplici favole

o maraviglie, come molti stolti estimano, ma sotto sé dolcissimi

frutti di verità istoriografe o filosofiche avere nascosti…[And

seeing that the works of the poets are not vain

and simple fables or marvels, as the foolish

multitude thinks, but that within them are

concealed the sweet fruits of historical and

philosophical truth].24

Boccaccio’s Genealogiae Deorum Gentilium, ed. Charles G. Osgood

(Indianapolis, 1956), pp. 52-53.

24 Giovanni Boccaccio, Trattatello in laude di Dante, ed. Luigi Sasso

(Milan, 1995), p. 14; Life of Dante, trans. J.G. Nichols (London,

2002), p. 12. All further references to the Trattatello are to this

edition (and to the translation by Nichols above).26

The pervasiveness of the allegorical mode in

Boccaccio’s own oeuvre is remarked by Victoria Kirkham, who

observes that from “his first fiction, Caccia di Diana, he

busied himself ‘hiding’ moral truths for readers to uncover,

just as he would ‘expose’ and expound them in his last

encyclopedia, Genealogiae deorum gentilium. Even at mid-

career...he drew a network of submerged allegory.”25 For

Boccaccio, allegorical intention is the primary condition of

a serious reading, surely in part because political and

religious authority makes it impossible to tell things

literally as they are. His eclogues, many of which concern

contemporary events, are a prime example of his use of

allegory as protective cloak. In the words of Janet Levarie

Smarr, “in these political eclogues, the pastoral realm

ceased to represent a separate world of poetry and became,

as for Dante, Giovanni del Virgilio, and Petrarch, a coded 25Victoria Kirkham, The Sign of Reason in Boccaccio’s Fiction (Florence,

1993), pp. 57-58. 27

version of real places.”26 A letter from Boccaccio to the

Augustinian monk Fra Martino da Signa, accompanying an early

copy of the Buccolicum carmen, explicates their allegory,

including some characters who stand for himself.27 Within

his personal letters as well, Boccaccio regularly moves into

26See Giovanni Boccaccio, Eclogues, trans. Janet Levarie Smarr

(New York, 1987). Composed over more than two decades, and

published for friends as the Bucolicum carmen in 1372, Boccaccio’s

eclogues include at least six whose concerns may overlap with

those of the Corbaccio. (I sense in them (esp. VIII and IX) some of

the same concerns, anger, and imagery found in the Corbaccio.)

Smarr and before her, Edward Hutton, Giovanni Boccaccio: A Biographical

Study (New York, 1910), pp. 120ff., have tended to read the

political material of this group of eclogues as directed at

particular individuals known to Boccaccio. Vittore Branca,

Boccaccio: The Man and His Works (New York, 1976), p. 75, refers to

“the very new politically allusive line of the eclogues.” See

also Hutton, Boccaccio, pp. 120ff.28

this kind of “coded” allegory when the subject matter

concerns political events in Italy.28 But Boccaccio’s

Corbaccio is a more highly charged allegory. His mood is

hotter, less controlled, less literary than in his Virgilian

eclogues. He writes a different kind of allegory for a

more dangerous message, deeply concealing his meaning for

pages in a conventional dream vision and misogynist diatribe

until the fury of the argument betrays itself to the reader.

27 Written in Certaldo on May 5, 1373 (in response Fra

Martino’s questions about the meaning of the allegory). Giovanni

Boccaccio, Le Lettere Edite e Inedite, ed. and trans. Francesco

Corazzini (Firenze, 1877), pp. 261-274.

28 See Hutton, Boccaccio, pp. 160-61, for a prominent instance

of the transition into coded allegory in a letter to Petrarch of

July, 1355.29

IV. The Widow

The first question one would ask in an allegorical

reading of the Corbaccio concerns the identity of the Widow,

who has devastated the Spirit, and now threatens the

narrator. The Corbaccio’s Widow is referred to as evil

(“malvagia”29) and the Spirit observes that her loquacious

29See Padoan 397; also, malvagie and malvagità (Padoan 413): Ma

sopra ogni cosa ti guarda di non venire alle mani delle malvagie femine, e

massimamente di colei che ogni demonio di malvagità trapassa e che della presente tua

facica é stata cagione....” [“But above all guard that you do not come

into the hands of evil women, and especially of the one who

surpasses every demon in evil and who has been the cause of your

present trouble....”]. “Malvagio” is an adjective frequently

applied in this period to clerics; Brucker, Florentine Politics and

Society, p. 303, n. 20, quotes Buonaccorso Pinti: “Malvagi cherici

ch’erano per quello tempo, i quali mai nè prima nè poi vidi buoni.”

30

pretensions to honesty, devotion, sanctity, and love of

family – would make anyone who hears her (especially one who

already knows her) want “fargli venir voglia di recere l’anima” (Padoan

271) [“to retch forth his soul”].30 Retch forth his soul?

This spiritual nausea would seem to make sense only in the

context of something so gross that the soul is, indeed,

affected and at risk. Similarly, the Spirit’s repeated

assertion that he wants the narrator to use words to avenge

the offense he has suffered at the hands of the Widow, for

“la quale ad una ora a te e a lei sarà salutifera” (Padoan 383) [“it will

30 Elsewhere there is also specific reference to the soul’s

illness and the question of its cure: “quanta e quale amaritudine si dee

per guarire l’anima, che è cosa eterna, sostenere” (Padoan 280) [“how much and

what kind of bitterness must one sustain to cure the soul, which

is an eternal thing?”].

31

save both you and her at the same time”] is consistent with

a reading of the woman as the corrupt church.

Boccaccio’s Widow, with her grotesquely exaggerated

traits, represents the papal curia in a period of Florentine

history which saw repeated conflicts, including a full scale

war between the papacy and the commune. Thus Marvin Becker

observes that the “surviving records of the meetings of the

Florentine Signoria from the over-throw of the despotism of

Walter of Brienne in 1343 until the oligarchical reaction to

the rule of the twenty-one guilds in 1382 reveal that of all

the questions faced by the counselors, the one most certain

to provoke bitter and protracted debate was that of the

commune’s relationship with the church.” And Richard

Trexler remarks “that a commune like Florence might not have

been able to institute or revise legislation without the

special permission of another power–to wit, the papacy–

32

conflicts with our most basic assumptions about the nature

of the Italian ‘state system’ of the Late Middle Ages....

Despite characterizations of the period from 1343 to 1379 as

the most democratic in the republic’s history...Florence was

much less independent during this period than has generally

been realized.”31

31Marvin B. Becker, “Church and State in Florence on the Eve

of the Renaissance (1343-1382,” Speculum 38, 4(1962), 509;

Richard C. Trexler, “Florence, By the Grace of the Lord Pope...,”

Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 9 (1972), 118-119.

33

The Corbaccio’s Widow is often in and around churches and

with the friars: the narrator first searches for her in the

church, comments that he cannot recognize her, overhears

chatter that the white wimple and black clothing suit her,

and then is pointed to her indirectly by one woman gossiping

to another: “la terza, che siede in su quella panca, è colei di cui io vi parlo”

(Padoan 93) [“the third one, who sits on that bench, is the

woman of whom I speak to you”].32 The Widow’s activities

32Putting her in the third place is perhaps a reference to the

Avignon critics’ sense of the lowering of stature because of the

papacy’s removal from Rome to Avignon; see Petrarcas ‘Buch Ohne Namen”

und die Päpstliche Kurie: Ein Beitrag zur Geistesgeschichte der Frührenaissance, ed.

Paul Piur (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1925) and an anecdote (p. 225) in

which a pope remarks that away from Rome the popes would become

mere bishops of Cahors. For English translation see Petrarch’s

Book Without a Name: A translation of the Liber Sine Nomine, trans. Zacour

(Toronto, 1973), p. 104.

34

suggest exactly those abuses of church power that early

critics found most distressing: she is unfaithful,

hypocritical, dishonest, deceitful, insatiable, power hungry,

prone to making war, avaricious, conspiratorial, and venal.

Conventional, mundane examples of women’s failings –their

loquacity, deceitfulness, or love of fashion –move almost

imperceptibly to malevolent traits traditionally applicable

to the papacy. Thus the comparison to “rapide e fameliche lupe,

venute ad occupare i patrimoni, i beni e le riccheze de mariti” (Padoan 143)

[“swift and starving she-wolves come to occupy the

patrimonies, the goods and wealth of their husbands”] 33

suggests church seizure of property – one of the prominent

issues of Marsilio of Padua’s Defensor Pacis, a work finished

in exile in 1324, condemned by the Pope in 1326, and

33 For Dante’s use of the image, see above, pp. 9-10 and n.

14.

35

translated into the Florentine vernacular (and circulating in

the city) in 1363.34 Written out of harm’s way at the court of

Ludwig of Bavaria, the Defensor Pacis (as its name indicates)

describes tranquility as the healthy disposition of the

34 See Marsilius of Padua, Defensor Pacis, trans. Alan Gewirth

(Toronto, 1980), 2.25.13 (p. 340): “Their insatiable appetite for

temporal things causing them to be discontented with the things

which the rulers have granted to them, the bishops have made many

seizures of the temporalities of provinces belonging to the

empire, such as the cities of Romagna, Ferrara, Bologna, and many

others....” On church seizure of property, see also Trexler, The

Spiritual Power, pp. 8ff. For Florentine translation, see Defensor pacis

nella tradizione in volgare fiorentino del 1363, ed. Carlo Pincin (Turin,

1966); Ronald Witt’s note on the Florentine translation (‘In the

Footsteps of the Ancients’: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden,

2000), p. 155, n. 101):: “From the marginal comments, it appears

that the primary interest of the text was its confutation of papal

36

state, and its opposite as a diseased one: it denounces the

corrupting influence of the papacy on the social order – on

the individual, the family, property, city, and countryside.

In the Corbaccio, the temporal aims of the church –and

its courting of and collusion with the nobility –are

suggested in the Spirit’s comment that “spesso vada gli scudi, che

per le chiese sono appiccati, anoverando; e della vecchieza di quelli e della

quantità argomenta sé essere nobile, poi tanti cavalieri sono suti tra’ suoi passati

e ancor più” (Padoan 207) [“she often goes counting the shields

that are hung in the churches; and from their age and their

quantity argues that she is of the noblest blood, since there

are so many knights among them, her ancestors, and still

primacy;” and Peterson, “The War of the Eight Saints” (p. 182),

who notes the manuscript’s “numerous marginal arrows pointing to

the passages on tithes and church property.”

37

more”].35 And finally, allusions abound to women and the

Widow fomenting war and chaos: these women, “chente che la cagione

si sia per la quale accese in ira si sono, subitamente a’ veleni, al fuoco, al ferro

corrono” (Padoan 158) [“whatever the reason for which they

have an attack of anger, run immediately for poison, for

fire, and for the sword”]. The Spirit -- shortly after

comments about the marriage to the woman he has been talking

35See Marvin B. Becker, “Florentine Politics and the Diffusion

of Heresy,” p. 63, n. 18: “Bishops and other members of the

ecclesiastical hierarchy were selected, almost exclusively, from

the upper reaches of Florentine and Tuscan society.” Becker cites

Luca Guiseppe Cerrachini, Cronologia sacra de’vescovi e archivescovi

(Florence, 1716), pp. 102ff. See also Becker, “Church and State

in Florence,” p. 512: “Attempts to limit the authority of the

great families over the church were to become a regular feature of

Florentine politics during eras when regimes were democratized by

the admission of new men into the Signoria.”

38

about –“la quale molto più dirittamente drago potrei chiamare” (Padoan

203) [“whom more rightly I might call a dragon”]–describes

the Widow as running through “la casa mia per sua e in quella fiera

tiranna divenuta quantunque assai leggier dote recata v’avesse” (Padoan 206)

[“my house as if it were hers and in it becoming a fierce

tyrant even though she had contributed only a small dowry”].

Though the Spirit had been expecting to bring peace and

tranquility into his house, he recognizes that he has instead

brought “guerra, fuoco e mala ventura” [“war, fire, and bad luck”];

even when riddled with litigation and disputes, every place

in the city is more peaceful than his own house: “e ciascuno

luogo della nostra città, qual che si fosse più di litigi e di quistioni pieno,

m’incominciò a parere più quieto e più riposato che la mia casa” (Padoan

211).

This criticism of the Widow in the Corbaccio is strikingly

similar to Boccaccio’s comments about modern popes in a Latin

39

dedication to the De casibus virorum illustrium, written sometime in

late 1373 (and perhaps as late as October 1374). In this

dedication, Boccaccio provides a vivid description of the

process by which he “bypassed popes, emperors, and kings,”

finally chosing Mainardo de’ Calvalcanti as dedicatee for the

De casibus. He refers to modern popes who are so “unlike the

ancient ones, who with tears and eloquence would move the

strength of the heavens against those who opposed their

devotions.” He accuses them of “making helmets of priestly

mitres, lances of pastoral staffs, and breastplates of sacred

vestments, of perturbing the tranquility and liberty of

innocent people, of hanging out in (military) camps, of

rejoicing in fires, in violence, and in the shedding of

Christian blood, of contradicting the Word of truth, which

says ‘my reign is not of this world,’ and of occupying the

earthly empire.” He describes his horror and his withdrawal,

40

and his conviction that presented to a pope his little book

would become an object of mockery rather than something

rendered precious through its merit.36

This passage in the dedication to the De casibus seems to

illuminate a very puzzling, and apparently highly topical,

reference in the Corbaccio. Well into the work, the Spirit

recounts an imaginary visit to the Widow’s bedroom where,

accompanied by her paramour, the “il secondo Ansalone” [“the

36See Giovanni Boccaccio, “Dedica,” De casibus virorum illustrium, ed.

Pier Giorgio Ricci and Vittoria Zaccharia, pp. 1-6, in Tutte le opere

di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca, vol. 9 (Milan, 1983). For a

discussion of the “redactions” of the De casibus and the dating of

the dedication, see Vittore Zaccaria, “Le due redazioni del ‘De casibus,’

Studi sul Boccaccio 10 (1977-78): 1-26.

41

second Absolom,”]37 she ridicules the narrator and his

writings:

Ahi, cattivello a te! Come t’erano quivi colle parole

graffiati gli usatte e come v’eri per meno che ‘acqua

versata dopo le tre! Le tue Muse, da te amate e

commendate tanto, quivi erano chiamate pazie, e ogni

tua cosa matta bestialità era tenuta. E, oltre a questo,

v’era assai peggio che per te: Aristotile, Tulio, Virgilio e

Tito Livio e molti altri uomini illustri, per quel ch’io creda, 37In this passage (see Padoan 327) the Spirit refers to him as

“quello amante, di cui poco avanti dissi alcuna cosa” [that lover of whom a

little while ago I told you some things]; he is not named); but

see also Padoan 112-113, 318-320 & 365. For the story of Absolom,

a traitor to his father King David, see II. Samuel. 18ff.; this

rebellion of son against father is invoked by Dante, Inferno,

XXVII.134-38.

42

tuoi amici e domestici,38 erano come fango da loro e

scherniti e anullati, e peggio che montoni maremmani

sprezati e aviliti; e, in contrario, se medesimo essaltando

con parole da fare per istomaccaggine le pietre saltare

del muro e fuggirsi, soli sé essere dicevano l’orore e la

gloria di questo mondo.... (Padoan 331) [Alas,

poor wretch, how their words shredded your

boots, and rated you less than dirty water

thrown out after the third bell [nine

o’clock]. Your Muses, so loved and

praised by you, were then called madness,38Padoan notes the variant familiari, and comments: “Gli autori qui

nominati (a rappresentare rispettivamente il più alto grado della filosofia, della retorica,

della poesia e della storiografia) sono infatti tra i più frequentati dal Boccaccio” [The

authors here named (and representing the highest level,

respectively, of philosophy, rhetoric, poetry, and history) are in

fact among those most frequented by Boccaccio] (p. 589: 332, 6).

43

and everything about you treated as insane

stupidity. And besides this, there were

worse things about you: Aristotle, Cicero,

Virgil, Titus Livy, and many other honored

men whom I believe to be your friends and

intimates, were treated like mud by them,

scorned and degraded, despised and loathed

more than Maremma mutton. And on the

contrary, exalting themselves with words

that could make the stones jump off the

walls

and flee with nausea, they said that they

alone were the honor and glory of this

world].

44

This passage must be referring to some prior disparagement of

Boccaccio’s work, and, in view of the references to “Aristotile,

Tulio, Virgilio e Titus Livio e molti altri uomini illustri,” possibly of the De

casibus itself, in which all of these authors are mentioned.

If so, the De casibus dedication, with its reference to the

likelihood of its being ridiculed by popes, would give us a

strong hint that the Corbaccio’s Widow and her paramour

represent the corrupt papacy and a pope himself, or one of

his intimates. This possible identification of the Widow and

her lover as the papacy and the pope is strengthened by a

detail in a prior scene, where the Spirit describes the Widow

as reading numerous French romances (Padoan 316). All of

the popes from 1309 to 1377 were French.

V. The Spirit

45

Given the allegorical identity of the Widow, that of the

Spirit may be readily inferred. For the personality,

situation, political perspective, moral authority, and

rhetoric of this fiery figure, Boccaccio is surely drawing on

his own literary hero, Dante Alighieri. Dante’s venomous

attitude towards papal authority was already legendary. It

was, after all, Dante who was waylaid by Boniface VIII and

his Black Guelph supporters in 1301, dispossessed of his

property, condemned to death in absentia and forced into

lifelong exile.39 It was Dante who took revenge by turning 39For a description of the unfolding political situation in

Florence in the last years of the thirteenth century, see Stephen

Bemrose, A New Life of Dante (Exeter, 200), particularly Ch. 4, “Guilds

and Government: Dante the Politician (1295-1300)” and Ch. 5:

“Boniface VIII and the Black Coup: 1300-1302,” pp. 37-63; also

Giorgio Petrocchi, Vita di Dante (Rome 1990; first pub. 1983), pp. 65-

69 and pp. 77-103. Boniface VIII’s policy of restraining free

46

the long knives of his eloquence against the papacy in the

Comedia and by refuting the pope’s temporal authority in the

Monarchia. It was Dante who, in his invectives, used the

force of biblical metaphor, allegory and prophecy against his

trade produced a rift in the Guelfic party between the Neri

(Blacks) who supported him, and the Bianchi (Whites) who opposed

his actions. Originally a Guelf, by 1300 Dante joined the White

Guelfs, the anti-papal Guelf faction. In June, 1300, he was

elected to serve as a Prior in the Signoria. In September, 1301,

he was part of a delegation, with two others, to represent

Florence in an embassy to Rome. Boniface released the two others,

but commanded Dante to remain with him, fearing his eloquence

might turn Florence away from his direction. By the time Dante

was released from Rome, Florence was in the hands of the Neri, his

estates and his goods had been confiscated, and he was no longer

persona grata in his native city. He would never return. He died in

Ravenna in 1321.

47

clerical enemies – exactly as Boccaccio’s Spirit rails

against his Widow. Granted, the allegorical resemblance is

not complete. Boccaccio makes the Spirit admit of one vice

while alive – “lo ‘nsaziabile ardore ch’io ebbi de’ danari” [“the

insatiable desire I had for money”] – that does not conform

to Dante’s biography.40 Here Boccaccio would seem to be

diverging temporarily from precise biographical details in an

40 The Spirit offers two reasons for having been sent to

Purgatory: ".....lo ’nsaziabile ardore ch’ io ebbi de’ danari, mentre io vissi; e

l’altra è la sconvenevole pazienzia colla quale io comportai le scelerate e disoneste

maniere di colei della qual tu vorresti d’avere veduta essere digiuno” (Padoan 64)

[“...the insatiable desire I had for money while I was alive, and

the other the improper patience with which I allowed the wicked

and dishonest ways of that woman whom you wish you had never

seen"].

48

effort to make the character of the Spirit more typical of

Florentine culture that he is so anxious to reform.41

Boccaccio, like Dante before him, was among the earliest

of a line of distinguished Florentine scholar/diplomats that

41 See Nick Havely, Dante and the Franciscans: Poverty and the Papacy in

the ‘Commedia’ (Cambridge, UP, 2004) p. 44: “Throughout the cantica

greed is located both in cities such as Florence, Siena and

Bologna and at the highest level of the Church; and Peter Armour

has pointed out that ‘[o]f the twenty or so punishments in the

Inferno, ten deal in some way with wealth-related sins and the

corrupting effects of money in society.’” Like Dante (in the

Convivio and Comedia, but elsewhere as well), Boccaccio returns

repeatedly to Florentine avarice. The Trattatello in Laude di Dante

comments on the avarice of merchants; in the Decameron, Boccaccio

mentions the decline in excellent and praiseworthy customs, driven

away by Florence’s avarice, the result of its growing prosperity.

See Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron (v. 2), ed. Vittore Branca

49

would stretch all the way down to Machiavelli. The lives of

Dante and Boccaccio show significant similarities: both were

pressed into service by the commune of Florence as legates to

the papacy, and both were finally disillusioned by that

interaction. Dante, as a number of scholars (including most

recently Robert Hollander) have noted, is remarkably present

to Boccaccio as he writes. There are literally scores of

verbal allusions to Dante’s works in the Corbaccio: “no

literary source – perhaps not all the other literary sources

put together – had as great or as consistent an effect on

Boccaccio as the works of Dante.” There is at least one

(Torino, 1980), VI.9 (p. 754) and Branca’s note: “L’avarizio e la

sfrenata cupidigia sono costantemente indicate nel D. Come le cause della decadenza e

della rovina della società contemporanea(cfr. Per es. Intr., 8 e 25; I 8;

III 5; VI 3; VIII 1; S 8,112: e cfr. Esposizioni, VII all. 58;

Consolatoria, passim; e V. Branca, B. medievale, pp. 160 sgg.).”

50

reference to Dante’s work on every page of the Corbaccio.42

Although Dante’s name is never mentioned, the Corbaccio

assembles a formidable array of Dantean authority.

When the Spirit presents himself to the narrator – in a

passage fairly bristling with references to the Inferno43–he

pauses at some length to comment on his red robe, which the

latter has already noticed. It is particularly notable, with

ample evidence in the visual art of Renaissance Florence,

that the red robe was one of the chief ways the city had of

honoring its citizens. Posthumous portraits of Dante,

wearing red, can be found at the Spanish Chapel at Santa

Maria Novella (1365-67), in the Bargello’s Cappella di Santa

42 Hollander, Boccaccio’s Last Fiction, pp. 41-42.

43 Noted extensively by Barricelli and others, and more

recently documented in Hollander’s Boccaccio’s Last Fiction, App. I, pp.

59-71.

51

Maria Maddalena, and at the Santa Maria del Fiore (Duomo), to

name but a few.44 The Spirit is careful to point out that,

while he may be wearing such a robe in Purgatory, he did not,

in fact, wear one in Florence where, as he says, it would be

reserved “for those elevated above others by some honor.”45

Boccaccio, like all other later portrayers of Dante, clothed

44An exception in Florence is a fresco in Santa Maria Novella,

where Dante, in white, appears to be a figure among the blessed.

In the Trattatello Boccaccio describes him simply as “d’onestissimi panni

sempre vestito, in quello abito che era alla sua maturità convenevole” (Trattatello, ed.

Sasso, p. 43).

45See Padoan 63: “...sappi che questo mio vestimento, il quale t’ha, poscia

che che

’l vedesti, fatto maravigliare, per ciò che mai per avventura simile, quando io era tra voi,

nol mi vedesti, e che solamente vi pare che a coloro che ad alcuno onore sono elevati, più

che ad altrui, si convenga d’usare....”

52

him here in the honorific red. Red was also the official

color for Florentine insignia in the fourteenth century.

The second of the charges the Spirit brings, namely, “la

sconvenevole pazienzia colla quale io comportai le scelerate e disoneste maniere di colei

della qual tu vorresti d’avere veduta essere digiuno” (Padoan 64) [“the

improper patience with which I allowed the wicked and

dishonest ways of that woman whom you wish you had never

seen”], hardly seems a sin worthy of purgatory. The Spirit’s

sin of patience must refer to a patience toward something so

monstrous and wicked as to make it a sin; as the 1373 or 1374

revision of the De casibus clearly shows us, Boccaccio

increasingly came to consider lethargy as a civic vice.46 It

it notable, too, that in the course of the dream vision, this

46 See Vittorio Zaccaria’s introduction to the De casibus in Tutte

le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca, vol. 9 (Milan, 1983),

pp. xxxvi-lii.

53

“improper patience” will be transformed into its complete

opposite: a virtually irrepressible rage.47 Indeed, this

anger, with its implications of righteous indignation, is

what most profoundly connects the Spirit of the Corbaccio with

47Recent scholarship on the Corbaccio has been particularly

troubled by the Spirit’s concentration on revenge, and his

pressing it successfully on the narrator. Thus Hollander

(Boccaccio’s Last Fiction, pp. 2, 18) details the “elaborate and balanced

organizing principles of the work,” and observes that “the

Corbaccio is not a work that is out of control, as so many have

thought.” “It is a work,” he concludes, “about a man who is out

of control.” Cassell (Corbaccio, 1993 ed., pp. xvi-xvii) takes

this yet another step, arguing that the Guide’s anger is a kind

of “grotesque form of comedy,” and that “the effect is laughter,

not credibility.” Cassell sees the Spirit as “a parody of Dante’s

otherworldly guides,” and judges that “the hysterical cuckold has

all the authority of a stand-up comic.” “Boccaccio’s substitution

54

Dante. Both his early biographers speak of this trait and

both describe it, in Aristotelian terms, as the noblest

vice, characteristic of the best people.48 Boccaccio

describes Dante’s spirit as lofty and disdainful, and his

scorn laudable in a magnanimous person. He cites the example

of his refusal, the one time it was offered, of the terms of

a pardon –calling them fitting for depraved, infamous men,

of this character for the noble didactic figure of the traditional

dream vision parodically unmasks the fictiveness and falseness of

the authoritarian voice brought to sublime transcendence by his

famous poet predecessor.”

48Trattatello, ed. Sasso, pp. 59-60: “animo alto e disdegnoso molto;”

“Oh isdegno laudevole di magnanimo.” See also Leonardo Bruni Aretino,

“Life of Dante,”in The Earliest Lives of Dante, trans. James Robinson

Smith (New York, 1963), p. 89. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, with

English trans. H. Rackham (London, 1926), esp. III.viii.10;

IV.iii.22; IV.v.13-14.

55

and not for others.49 Boccaccio pauses in the Trattatello to

explain the political situation in Tuscany that would account

for Dante’s vehemence, and to apologize for those details of

Dante’s life that stain the reputation of such a great man,

the chief of these being his excessive anger and

vengefulness. He recounts the history of Dante’s association

with the Guelf, or pro-papal, party: his Guelf ancestors were

twice exiled by the Ghibellines, Dante himself held the reins

of government for the Guelfs, and it was they– not the

Ghibellines–who banished him. These events brought on a

change in allegiance, and a reputation for a fierce loyalty

49Trattatello, ed. Sasso, p. 60: “...la qual cosa parendogli convenirsi e

usarsi in qualunque e depressi e infami uomini, e non in altri; per che, oltre al suo

maggiore disiderio, preelesse di stare in esilio, anzi che per cotal via tornare in casa

sua.” On the same subject see Epistola XI, in Letters of Dante, ed.

Paget Toynbee (Oxford, 1920), pp. 158-59.

56

to the Ghibellines, so fierce that his reputation in Bologna

included the story that any woman or small child criticizing

the Ghibellines moved him to such wrath that he would have

thrown stones had the speaker not fallen silent. And Dante

lived with this animosity, Boccaccio writes, until he died.50

If the Widow is the corrupt papacy, and the Spirit,

Dante, there come into focus a number of otherwise baffling

circumstantial statements, apparently so minor as to seem

totally unnecessary, and yet so specific as to demand

explanation. Thus, for example, the narrator tells the

Spirit that he asked for details about the lady, and then

50 Trattatello, ed. Sasso, p. 62: “...ogni feminella, ogni piccol fanciullo

ragionante di parte e dannante la ghibellina, l’avrebbe a tanta insania mosso, che a

gittare le pietre l’avrebbe condotto, non avendo taciuto. E con questa animosità si visse

infino alla morte.”

57

adds that the lady’s home is not where you left her: 51 Dante

was at the papal court in 1301, when it was still in Rome;

at the time of the Corbaccio, the papacy had for many years

been established at Avignon (1306-1376). The issue of the

lady’s residence surfaces again when the Spirit, having been

asked by the narrator about the labyrinth, expresses surprise

at the question, because, as he puts it, ”ch’ io sappia che tu, non

una volta ma molte già dimorato ci sii, quantunque forse non con quella graveza

che ora ci dimori” (Padoan 77) [“I know that you not only once,

but many times have already resided here, though not perhaps

with the difficulty with which you reside here at present”].

Again, reading the Widow as the corrupt papacy, the

narrator/Boccaccio has indeed–by almost any dating, early or

late, of the Corbaccio–visited the papal curia before, not

only once, but on many occasions as an ambassador for the

51 See Padoan 87.

58

city of Florence. In the midst of describing the repulsive

smoke, smells, and noises emanating from the woman’s most

private parts, the Spirit adds that he lived there longer

than he wanted to.52 One of the defining moments in Dante’s

whole career was his confinement by the pope (Boniface VIII)

at the end of his September 1301 mission (when the two other

Florentines with whom he arrived were sent back home), an

action that prevented him from returning to Florence to help

his party, and perhaps save his patrimony. And what surely

seems to be a remarkable allusion to the difference in the

careers of Dante and Boccaccio, with implications, as well,

for the dating of the Corbaccio, is found in the Spirit’s

comment about the Widow:

52 See Padoan 295.

59

Forse t’avrebbe potuto fare de’ priori: che oggi cotanto da’ tuoi

cittadini si disidera. Ma io non so vedere il come, ramentandomi che

nel vostro Campidolio non è da’ vostri senatori orecchia porta a’

rapaci lupi dello alto legnaggio el del nobile, del quale ella è discesa

(Padoan 355) [Maybe she could have made you a prior,

something now so desired by your fellow citizens;

but I cannot see how, as I recall that in your

Capitol your senators’ ears are not bent to those

rapacious wolves of high and noble lineage from

which she is descended].

The Spirit’s remark about the unlikeliness of the narrator’s

receiving this favor from the Widow indicates some

contemporary situation–like Boccaccio’s Florence in the late

60

60s and the 70s53–in which the city is generally anti-papal,

and a pope less likely to influence the appointment of a

prior.

Finally, following the arc of the allegory across the

dream vision, we can argue that Boccaccio’s description of

the narrator as having been deeply infatuated with the Widow,

and for a time grossly deceived as to her nature – though

significantly, never having become her intimate – refers

allegorically to the character and course of his own

relationship with the papacy or papal party. This

relationship may well have come to seem in retrospect to have

been tainted with excessive ambitions or expectations which

53For a discussion of the Guelfs in the early 1370s, and the

observation that “Guelf ideology was no longer a vital factor in

Florentine diplomacy, or indeed in Italian politics, after 1370,”

see Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society, pp. 243ff.

61

were never consummated, just as the Spirit’s (Dante’s) had

been tainted with excessive sufferance.

VI. Ovid’s Crow

This stance toward the work explains beautifully the

hitherto mysterious title, Il Corbaccio.54 “Corbaccio,” sometimes a

pejorative signifying a large crow or coarse individual, has

been taken by many readers to refer to the wicked Widow. But

it much more likely refers to the tale of the Ovidian crow

who tells the truth in the face of denial and severe

punishment. The tale, a well-known one in Ovid’s

54 A review of the scholarship on the meaning of “corbaccio,”

and evidence for Padoan’s identification of the Widow as the crow,

can be found in Anthony K. Cassell, “The Crow of the Fable and the

Corbaccio: A Suggestion for the Title,” Modern Language Notes 85, 1

(Jan., 1970), 83-91.

62

Metamorphoses, was part of a long and rich tradition with

which Boccaccio was familiar.55 In Ovid, Phoebus’ bird, the

raven, is witness to the fair Coronis’ adultery, and though

warned by the crow, who has already been turned black for

55Scholars who have hovered around the general idea of the

Corbaccio and Ovid’s crow (and/or raven) include Jean Bourciez,

who adds an Ovid passage to three traditional explanations for

Boccaccio’s title, and argues that what he calls its ambiguity may

be intentional (“Sur l’enigme du Corbaccio,” Revue des langues romanes 72

(1958), 330-370); Lauren Scancarelli Seem, a Princeton graduate

student, is cited by Hollander as having drawn his attention “to

the possible resonance of Ovid’s presentation of the cause of the

raven’s being turned from white to black in Metamorphoses 2.531-632

(Boccaccio’s Last Fiction, pp. 54-55, n. 75); and Paul Watson, who

proposes that an illuminated crow at margin of the incipit of the

Corbaccio (in a Florentine ms. dated 1450) suggests that the

illuminator “equates a corbo with the narrator of the Corbaccio, an

63

truthtelling, hurries to tell Phoebus what he has seen.

Phoebus responds to the raven’s news by killing Coronis, but

not before she tells him she is pregnant with their child.

Overcome with grief, Phoebus repents his wrath, snatches the

unborn child from the mother’s womb, and punishes the raven

–“who’d hoped to be thanked for revealing the truth”– by

turning him black. Ovid’s story concentrates on Phoebus’

anger and seems to suggest that in a world where authority is

distempered, truth is dangerous.56

identification encouraged by the syntactic looseness of the

title ...whose concluding phrase “detto il corbaccio” can refer either

to the book, “Libro”, or to its equally masculine author “Giovanni

Bocchacci” (“An Immodest Proposal Concerning the Corbaccio,” Studi sul

Boccaccio 16 (1987-88), 320.

56 See Book 2, 542-65 in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Books I-5, Ed., with

Intro. and Commentary, William S. Anderson (Norman, Oklahoma,

1997); and Ovid Metamorphosis: A New Verse Translation, David Raeburn

64

Boccaccio makes reference to the truthtelling bird in

two of his political eclogues, using Ovid’s crow (cornix) and

raven (corvus) interchangeably. In the more extended

reference to this tradition in Eclogue VIII, the main figure,

Phytias, laments that he did not heed the song of the

“chattering crow” (“garrula cornix”): he failed to learn from

the bird and was led by “cruel desire” (“dira cupido”) from a

place of safety into “fields most perilous” (“dubios...campos”).

In Eclogue IX, crows are more briefly described, “flying

through the air, alas! / sound with their beaks omens of

truth to come (“corvi per inane volantes,/heu! rostris ventura sonant presagia

veri”).57 If corbaccio means truthteller, you would not need a

crow, a truthteller, to voice misogyny’s obvious and

(Penguin Books, 2004), p. 78.

57 Giovanni Boccaccio, Eclogues, trans. Smarr, pp. 82-83, 96-

97.

65

platitudinous criticism. (Who in the fourteenth century is

going to punish anyone for misogyny?) But if you are

pointing to politics (which in fourteenth-century Italy

includes church and state), then you are really pointing to

a truth that cannot be said directly and that requires

revelation by a truthteller.

One of the most suggestive details in the Corbaccio is the

Spirit’s explicit charge that the narrator has acted

improperly, that in exalting the woman he would have “mentito

per la gola”[“would have lied through his teeth”], and “tesi

lacciuoli alle menti di molti che, come tu fosti, sono credule” (Padoan 386)

[“laid traps for the minds of many who are as credulous as

you were”], and that he must now avenge the offense she has

done him, for it will save them both.58 The Spirit advises

58 See also Padoan 383). The idea of salvation both for the

narrator and the Widow is voiced, as well, much earlier in the

66

him that he now make his words cause her to see herself and

expose her to others,59 especially since it was he who once

praised her. He must, in other words, do what the Spirit has

done for the narrator. Stripping away the allegorical cover,

we find Boccaccio stating that, like Dante, he has recognized

the church’s hypocrisy and now finds revenge (and salvation)

through words that may cure others’ gullibility. His book

is itself Il Corbaccio, the truthteller.

vision: see Padoan 117: “in servigio della tua medesima salute, e forse dell’altrui

[“for the sake of your own salvation and perhaps that of

another..”]. For “mentir per la gola” (“lying though the throat”), see

also Padoan 111.

59See Padoan 385: “E perciò questa ingannatrice, come a glorificarla eri

disposto, così ad avilirla e a parvificarla ti disponi...”[“For this reason, prepare

yourself to vilify and belittle this false woman just as you were

prepared to exalt her..”].

67

The Spirit’s advice that the narrator revenge the Widow

by exposing her conforms with the early humanist sense of the

power of language, especially as it concerns the church: one

thinks especially of Marsilio of Padua’s characterization of

church corruption as a sophism that he will “unmask.”60

Notably, Dante, Marsilio, and Petrarch condemned lying and

the exploitation of public gullibility, and equated

truthtelling with the defense of liberty. They viewed

political and intellectual corruption in medical terms, as a

disease, to be cured by public exposure through the use of

language embodying reason and individual judgment. Their

criticism of the church has in common the sense that the

church can be saved only by being purged of her temporal and

carnal condition, and that exposure is at once revenge and

salvation.

Dante’s Comedia is a prolonged act of exposure and

revenge. Marsilio, citing Augustine and the Gospels on 60 See Defensor Pacis, trans. Gewirth, l.1.3-8 (pp. 4-7).

68

poverty in the second discourse, accuses the Pope and his

bishops of being “sinners,” and challenges them to “strive to

imitate Christ and the apostles by completely renouncing

secular rulership and the ownership of temporal goods.61 In

the Liber Sine Nomine Petrarch recognizes “the power of the pen

to combat the illness: “Would that my pen were equal to the

matter....Certainly, I would lack neither the vigour nor the

passion. I would tell no fables, even though they might seem

more like fables than the truth. I would describe monsters

which I have seen and heard, which have infected my eyes and

ears...I would tell of the whole world overturned and

mangled....” 62

In the one reference we have to Avignon as the “Babylon

of the West” in Boccaccio’s correspondence--in a letter of

1371 to Jacopo Pizzinghe--describing the poet Zanobi da

Strada (d. 1361), Boccaccio who has already expressed doubt 61Defensor Pacis, trans. Gewirth, 2.26.19 (p. 362).

62Petrarch’s Book, trans. Zacour, pp. 62-63.69

that Zanobi deserved to be a poet laureate, adds that Zanobi,

almost as though repenting the honor, “was drawn by the

desire for gold to live in the Babylon of the west” and was

then “mute” about the conditions there.63 On the subject of

the papal curia, Petrarch and Boccaccio specifically draw

attention to the humanist idea that “qui tacet consentit” [“he who

is silent consents”]: Petrarch asks one of his

correspondents, “Where do my words lead, you may ask? I

wrote, not because you have to hear about it, but because I

cannot remain silent.”64 And Boccaccio, while maintaining

his allegorical cover, opens the Corbaccio with a reference to

his inability to remain silent: “Qualunque persona, tacendo, i benefici

ricevuti nasconde senza aver di ciò cagione convenevole, secondo il mio giudicio

63 Lettere, ed. Corazzini, p. 196: “...quasi eum decoris assumpti

poeniteret, tractus auri cupidine in Babylonem occiduam abiit, et obmutuit.” There

would seem to be an implicit contrast to the attitudes of Dante

and Petrarch described in the same letter.

64 Petrarch’s Book, trans. Zacour, p. 71.70

assai manifestamente dimostra sé essere ingrato e mal conoscente di quegli”

(Padoan 2) [“Whoever is silent without good cause, hiding

benefits he has received, most clearly, in my judgement,

shows himself thankless and lacking appreciation of them”].

VII. The discursive context

The Corbaccio is framed as a misogynist tract in part

because it was written in a theological tradition and in a

literary atmosphere in which criticism and correction of the

church was already suffused with marital, sexual, and medical

imagery. The work’s most immediate context for this and

other imagery includes the Hebrew Prophets and Revelation,

the anti-papal discourse of Dante’s Comedia and letters,

Marsilio of Padua’s Defensor Pacis, and Petrarch’s images of the

papacy as Babylon in his satiric Liber sine Nomine. What follows

will briefly examine this tradition insofar as it is relevant

to the Corbaccio, and do so with relatively broad brush

71

strokes. In a work as rich in allusion as is the Corbaccio,

many specific elements of the allegory may never be

recovered; and some, only briefly touched on here, merit

future attention.65

65 Herbert Grundmann, “Die Papstprophetien des Mittelalters,” Archiv fr

Kulturgeschichte 19, 1 (1925), 77-140, esp. pp. 117-121, refers briefly

to the encoded language of the Franciscan papal prophecies, and to

a passage in Petrarch’s Apologia contra cuiusdam anonymi Galli calumnias

(1367), in which he adopts this language, describing the French

“as flies, mosquitoes, and ants, in contrast to the Italian

phoenix” (“in der die Franzosen als Fliegen, Mücken, Ameisen bezeichnet werden

gegenüber dem Phönix Italien...”p. 118, n. 1). The dove, too, carries

meaning in this prophetic tradition, signifying, according to

Grundmann, the most strict, spiritual branch of the Franciscan

order: “Denn die Taube ist in diesen Prophetien and in verwandten Produkten stets der

Franziskanerorden, besonders sein strenger, spiritualer Zweig” (p. 118). As

insects and birds (including the dove) abound in the Corbaccio,

further study of this tradition may help elucidate the historical 72

The discourse of the Hebrew prophets abounds with

criticism of religious authority that is clothed in the same

kind of misogynist animus that we find deep in the Corbaccio,

and in each instance the speaker seeks to expose the evil

behavior to public notice. Thus the Spirit in the Prophecy

of Ezechiel instructs Ezechiel, “son of man, make known to

Jerusalem her abominations” (16:2). And Ezechiel then

allegorizes Jerusalem at length as a beautiful young woman

whom the Lord has chosen for his own, but who betrays him

with adultery and whoredom: Jerusalem is a “harlot,” who has

prostituted herself to every passerby. He asks, “Is thy

fornication small?” And he answers: Jerusalem has made

herself a “brothel house in every street.”66 In the

significance of specific passages, including among others, the

passage that follows the encomium to the Virgin Mary and refers to

the women who have tried to imitate her as being “più rade che le fenici”

(Padoan 184) [“rarer than phoenixes”].

66 See the Prophecy of Ezechiel, 16:2; also 16:15-30.73

Lamentations of Jeremias, as well, Jerusalem “hath grievously

sinned...all that honoured her, have despised her, because

they have seen her shame;” “her filthiness is on her feet;”

“Jerusalem is as a menstruous woman among them”

(Lamentations of Jeremias: 1:8-9, 17). In the Apocalypse of

St. John the Apostle (17:1-2), Babylon is “the great harlot

who sits upon many waters; with whom the kings of the earth

have committed fornication.” As in the Prophecy of Ezechiel

and the Lamentations of Jeremias, exposure is the avenue of

revenge: “Render to her as she hath rendered to you: and

double unto her double…” (Apocalypse 18: 6).67

The Corbaccio shares the diction and the intensity of this

discourse: woman is the most foul of all creatures,68 but she

is also imperious: finding themselves and their surroundings

67See the Prophecy of Ezechiel 16: 37-42 and Lamentations of

Jeremias 2: 1-22.

68See Padoan 134: “Niuno altro animale è meno netto di lei; non il

porco....” 74

adorned like a queen’s, they seek dominion.69 Women’s lust is

“focosa e insaziabile” (Padoan 149) [“fiery and insatiable”]; when

they are finally satisfied with their material possessions,

all their interest turns “alle ruffiane e agli amanti” (Padoan 148)

[“to panders and to lovers”]. Indeed, the punitive attitude

of the Corbaccio toward the Widow seems almost a direct echo of

Revelation 18.7: “As much as she has glorified herself and

lived in delicacies, so much torment and sorrow give ye to

her. Because she says in her heart, I sit a queen and am no

widow, and shall see no sorrow.”

69See Padoan 140: “Le quali, poi che le loro persone e le loro camere, non

altramenti che le reine abino...con ogni studio la loro signoria s’ingegnano d’occupare.”75

The terms that Boccaccio uses to denote the woman are

precisely those that Dante uses in the Comedia to describe the

papacy. In the Corbaccio she is a lady, (“donna”), a woman

(“femmina”), and a widow, but also a whore, hanging out with a

lover (whom Boccaccio calls the “il secondo Ansalone”70). Joan

Ferrante, who has expertly made her way through this

terminology in the Comedia, points out that “When Dante speaks

of the bride of Christ in the Comedy, he usually means the

whole assembly of the faithful, laity and clergy; the church

bureaucracy by itself is a whore.”71 She shows the degree to

which Dante uses familial imagery-- and especially terms that

denote marital abuse. An example of the church as the abused

and lovely lady –“la bella donna” – is found in the eighth circle

of Hell where, in a case of mistaken identity, Dante catches

the anger that is, in fact, aimed at Boniface. The spirit of 70 See pp. 28-31, and n. 37 above.

71Joan Ferrante, The Political Vision of the Divine Comedy (Princeton,

1984), p. 110.76

a predecessor, Nicholas III (1277-1280), bursts out: “are you

already standing there, Bonifazio? By several years the writ

has lied to me. Are you so quickly sated with those gains for

which you did not fear to take by guile the beautiful Lady

[“la bella donna”], and then to do her outrage?”72 Because the

former pope Celestine is still alive, Boniface is not a

legitimate husband, but a lover, and a fornicator.73

72“‘...se’ tu già costì ritto, Bonifazio? / Di parecchi anni mi mentì lo scritto. / Se’

tu sì tosto di quell’ aver sazio / per lo qual non temesti tòrre a ’nganno / la bella donna, e

poi di farne strazio?’’ Dante, Comedy, Inferno XIX. 53-57, trans.

Singleton, vol. 1, pp. 196-97.

73L’Ottimo, a contemporary commentary on the Comedia, draws the

readers’ attention to Dante’s use of Revelation 17:5 – “And upon

her forehead was a name written, Mystery, Babylon the Great, the

Mother of Harlots and Abomination of the Earth” – to describe the

Roman curia, adding that the author had experience of it at the

time of Boniface VIII, when he went there as ambassador for his

commune (L’Ottimo on Purgatorio XXXII.148, vol. 2, pp. 576-577): 77

Additional examples of what Ferrante calls Dante’s emphasis on

marital abuses include the popes prostituting the church for

gold and silver, and pimping for the church, making it a whore

for kings.74

Indeed, in the creation of his allegory, Boccaccio seems

to be taking elements of each of Dante’s characterizations of

“Vogliono alcuni predire questa puttana, per la Corte di Roma, adattando quello che poco

appresso dice in Apolcalypsis, quivi: ‘Cadde quella Babilonia grande: è fatta abitazione di

demoni e guardiana d’ogni immondo spirito, e d’ogni sozzo uccello e odibile, perocchè

della ira e fornicazione sua beverono tutte le genti, e tutti I re della terra, che con lei

fornicarono.’ E di questo fece l’Autore sperienza al tempo di Bonifazio papa VIII, quando

v’andò per ambascidore del suo Comune; chè sa con che occhi elli guatò, e quale era il suo

drudo Bonifazio, e non legittimo spose, secondo l’opinione di molti. Dio sa il vero. L’Autore

pur lo tocca così qui, e capitolo XIX Inferni.” L’Ottimo Commento della Divina Commedia,

testo inedito d’un contemporaraneo di Dante, ed. Alessandro Torri, 3 vols.

(Capurro: Pisa, 1827).

74See Inferno 19:3-4: “...e voi rapaci, / per oro e per argento avolterate...;”

and 19:106-108.78

the church --as lovely lady, as whore, and as widow. The

general similarity of terms becomes dramatically specific in a

letter that both Dante and Boccaccio had in their hands: Dante

as author, and Boccaccio, as Paget Toynbee reports, as scribe.

Dante’s letter addressed to the Italian cardinals in May or

June, 1314, is extant in the Laurentian MS Cod. xxix. 8, and

along with two others is in Boccaccio’s handwriting75 (probably

copied about 1348). Dante writes during the period of the

Avignon papacy and laments the present condition of Rome (and

by implication the papacy), comparing it to the corruption of

the old priesthood and the ruin of Jerusalem. He opens with a

quote from Lamentations of Jeremias: 1:1: “How doth the city

sit solitary that was full of people! She is become as a

widow that was great among the nations!” In the course of the

letter, Dante returns to this image twice, once with a lengthy

explanation: “the present condition of the city of Rome, a

sight to move the pity even of Hannibal, not to say others, 75 Letters of Dante, ed. Toynbee, p. 121.

79

bereft as she now is of the one and the other of her

luminaries, and sitting solitary and widowed, as is written

above.”76 Of course the widow–who is in Dante an object of

sympathy and regret –is in Boccaccio’s Corbaccio an object of

scorn, more like Dante’s image of the church bureaucracy as

whore. The Spirit in the Corbaccio refers to the narrator’s

condition as an illness: it is a “nocenzia putrida e villana” (Padoan

277) [“putrid horrid malignancy”], a “pestilenziosa infermità”

(Padoan 280) [pestilent illness] that will necessarily be

purged only with harsh remedies: the Spirit tells the

narrator that “una fetida parola nello intelletto sdegnoso adopera in una

piccola ora, che mille piacevoli e oneste persuasioni, per l’orecchie versate nel sordo

cuore, non faranno in gran tempo” (Padoan 277) [“a stinking word in a

small hour has more effect on a disdainful mind than a

thousand pleasant and decent persuasions poured into the deaf 76The letter’s opening from Lamentations l.l: “‘Quomodo sola sedet

civitas, plena populo! Facta est quasi vidua domina gentium....’” See Letters of Dante,

ed. Toynbee:, pp. 121- 46.80

heart through the ears will have over a large period of

time”]. Boccaccio’s imagery (and his sense of the cure)

recalls the Defensor Pacis, where Marsilio, trained as a medical

doctor, employs a discourse that teems with images of illness:

thus Marsilio describes the Roman curia as “diseased” and

“contagious;” it hides a “malignancy,” and is a “pernicious

pestilence.”77 Marsilio was particularly concerned to describe

the credulousness and gullibility of the people – “the habit

of listening to and believing falsehoods.”78 He proposes “to

drive away this pestilence from my brethren, the Christian

believers, first by teaching, and then by external action so

far as I may be able.”79 His aim is to “unmask” this

“sophism,” which, as he puts it, wears “the guise of the

honorable and beneficial” and “is utterly pernicious to the

77 Defensor Pacis, trans. Gewirth, pp. 4-5, 91, and 96; these

are only a few of the medical images that pervade the work.

78Defensor Pacis, trans. Gewirth, 2.1.1 (pp. 98-99).

79 Defensor Pacis, trans. Gerwirth: 1.18.13 (pp. 96-97).81

human race.”80 Marsilio also draws on biblical imagery,

including the apocalyptic in Revelation, to describe the reach

and the effect of the papacy on the well-being of the

citizenry: they “have been goaded on and are still being

goaded on to all these misfortunes by ‘that great dragon, that

old serpent,’ who is deservedly called ‘the devil and Satan,’

because with all his guile he ‘deceiveth’ and strives to

deceive ‘the whole world.’”81 In the Corbaccio, the Spirit

expresses surprise that the narrator should go searching under

“i mantelli delle vedove” [“mantles of widows”] or rather, he

corrects himself, “de’ diavoli” [“of devils”]; and, referring to

the woman, he says, “la quale molto più dirittamente drago potrei chiamare”

(Padoan 200, 203) [“whom one might more accurately call a

dragon”]. And, of course, in the envoi the woman “ogni demonio di

80Defensor Pacis, trans. Gewirth: 1.1.3-8 (pp. 4-7).

81Defensor Pacis, trans. Gewirth, 2.26.19 (p. 363), quoting from

Revelation 12:9.82

malvagità trapassa” (Padoan 413) [“surpasses every demon in

evil”].

A similar form of satiric discourse including biblical

and classical figures can be found in Petrarch’s already

mentioned Liber Sine Nomine, a collection of nineteen secret

letters, mostly written (though not always sent) c. 1351-

1357, that constitute a vehement indictment of the papal

court, now in Avignon. “Though truth has always been hated,

Petrarch declares in the preface, “it is now a capital

crime.”82 His sense of the danger posed to his friends is very

real: “I have quite purposely concealed their names, for if

their identities were to come out into the open they would be

injured if still alive or hated dead.”83 He also delayed

82“Cum semper odiosa fuerit, nunc capitalis es ueritas , ” Paul Piur, Petrarcas

‘Buch Ohne Namen, p. 63; Petrarch’s Book Without a Name, trans. Zacour,

p. 27.

83 Petrarch’s Book, trans. Zacour, pp. 12-13, provides a brief

history of this collection of letters. They nearly “fell into 83

publication until after his death, and protected his friends

by eliminating from the manuscript all contemporary names.84

Boccaccio, who was informed of the project by Petrarch,85 was

part of a small group of Florentine friends and admirers

(including Francesco Nelli, Lapo da Castiglionchio, Zanobi da obscurity,” and it “became possible to maintain that Petrarch was

not its author– that he could not have been guilty of such

scandalous stuff– and that the entire collection was the work of a

heretic imposter. As recently as the nineteenth century, “Giuseppe

Fracassetti, who did more than any other scholar to rescue

Petrarch’s correspondence from obscurity,” had reservations about

the Liber Sine Nomine, considering it “unworthy of a Catholic and a

Franciscan tertiary.” It was finally translated into French in

1885, and into Italian in 1895.

84 Petrarch’s Book, trans. Zacour, p. 28.

85 Petrarch’s Book, p. 11, Zacour cites a letter to Boccaccio

(Familiares XII, 10) that, in addition to saying that it would be

pointless to pursue another project on Babylon, refers to “this

labyrinth” (English in Letters on Familiar Matters: Rerum familiarium libri IX-84

Strada, and Forese Donati)86 for whom these letters were

intended. In the Liber Sine Nomine, Petrarch, like Dante, draws

on the Hebrew prophets and Revelation to describe the

harlotry, adultery, deceit, and incestuousness of the curia.

Petrarch expects to be protected by his own death, and his XVI, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo (Baltimore, 1982), p. 157: “Only when

I find an exit from this labyrinth shall I begin living and feel

well.” See also Boccaccio’s own reference to the Babylon of the

West (“Babylonem occiduam”) in a letter of 1371 to the “cavaliero,”

Jacopo da Pizzinghe; Lettere, ed. Corazzini, p. 196. E.R.

Chamberlin, The Bad Popes (New York, 1969), p. 130, suggests that

Petrarch coined the phrase.

86Ronald G. Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads (Durham, 1983), pp. 57-

58, comments that “sometime in the years immediately preceding the

Black Death a small group of Florentines, drawn together by their

common love of Latin literature and their admiration for Petrarch,

began to meet informally to discuss these interests.” Over the

years this “inner circle of Florentine intellectuals” would also

include Luigi Marsili, Filippo Villani, and Coluccio Salutati. See85

descriptions of the conditions are venomous; except for names,

he hides very little. The curia has become a “Babylon on the

Rhone,” and (drawing amply on Revelation) a “whore ‘with whom

the kings of the earth have committed fornication.’”87 Like

Marsilio’s, Petrarch’s denunciations of the papacy are

pervaded by images of lying, credulity, and illness; he

refers to “the lying tongues...the parchments devoid of truth

turned by their dangling seals into nets to entangle a

credulous host of Christians.” The curia is “corrupt and

pp. 62-63 below.

87 Petrarch’s Book, trans. Zacour, p. 112. Petrarch’s

denunciations of Babylon include a brief explication for Francesco

Nelli of Revelation 18:2: “Babylon the Great is fallen, is fallen,

and is become the habitation of devils.” He asks, “For is a man

who is damned, a man of desperate wickedness, any better than a

devil? Truly you have become the habitation – the kingdom, rather –

of devils who, though in human form, reign in you with their

devilish arts.” 86

abominable,” “a spreading plague,” “a wound” though at the

outset “capable of treatment... finally grown putrid.” 88

Petrarch is surely the inspiration for Boccaccio’s

extended use of the image of the labyrinth, which some

Corbaccio manuscripts include, or use in an alternative title,

L’aberinto d’amore. One of Petrarch’s secret letters anticipates

his correspondent’s surprise at hearing of a fifth labyrinth

when other authors only know of four: “those in Egypt, Lemnos,

Crete and Clusium in Italy, but they say nothing of the

labyrinth of the Rhone, the most confusing and by far the

worst of all....the dreadful prison, the aimless wandering in

the dwelling place of shadows.” A later letter praises the

same correspondent for “seeming to have examined the secret

things of that sewer from top to bottom, and to have

thoroughly inspected all the hidden corners of its

labyrinth...You learned the truth with much disgust.” “And

among all the innumerable miseries of that place,” writes 88 Petrarch’s Book, trans. Zacour, pp. 59, 91, 62, 106.

87

Petrarch, “there is this final trick: that everything is

smeared with birdlime, and is covered with hoods and nets, so

that just when you think you have escaped you find yourself

more tightly held and bound....this is Babylon, that powerful

chaos of things....” He advises a friend who has decided to

leave Avignon: “do not abandon your course, once chosen, no

matter how hard it is, no matter how arduous and

difficult....”89 The labyrinth is also a court of love, a

89Petrarch’s Book, trans. Zacour: pp. 72, 108, 75, and 94.

Petrarch had used the image of the labyrinth, albeit more briefly

and positively, earlier in his career; see Sonnet 211: “...ove

soavemente il cor s’invesca. / Mille trecento ventisette, a punto / su l’ora prima, il dí sesto

d’aprile, / nel laberinto intrai, né veggio ond’esca.” [“...Where, bird-limed,

gently my heart’s been ensnared./In thirteen hundred twenty-seven,

just at/The first hour–April sixth the day–into/The labyrinth I

stepped; I see no gate”]. See Petrarch’s Songbooks: Rerum Vulgarium

Fragmenta, A Verse translation by James Wyatt Cook, Italian text by

Gianfranco Contini, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 88

place of lascivious passions in which his correspondent can

not help but dally: “Why do you dally there? Or is it more

than dalliance, and you are in fact being held, forced to

remain against your will?” Petrarch warns his correspondent

that “every blessing is lost there, freedom before all else,”

and quips that “the iniquities of Babylon” contradict Vergil’s

line, “Old age is frigid in love:” “How hot are the old in

love–how they rush to it! ...How they burn with passion....”

“I omit,” he adds, “the debauchery, the ravishment, the

incest, the adultery which are now the pastimes of priestly

lewdness, I say nothing of the husbands of the violated....”90

In the Corbaccio, in response to the narrator’s questions

about “questo luogo,” the Spirit offers the various names it is

called, remarking that “ciascuno il chiama bene: alcuni il chiamano ‘il

laberinto d’Amore’, altri ‘la valle incantata’, e assai ‘il porcile di Venere’, e molti ‘la

valle de’ sospiri e della miseria’” (Padoan 57) [“each one names it well:

Binghamton, New York, 1995, pp. 9-10.

90Petrarch’s Book, trans. Zacour, pp. 109, 108, 113-117.89

some call it ‘the labyrinth of Love’; others ‘the enchanted

valley’, and a few the pigsty of Venus’, and many ‘the valley

of sighs and misery’”]. The labyrinth suggests a dangerous

state of mind: a wilderness where men become beasts, a place

of spiritual confusion, out of which the narrator can see no

pathway.91 It is a prison, a place where freedom is the first

thing that is lost.92 And like Petrarch’s, Boccaccio’s

labyrinth is a trap, a place where birdcatchers ensnare their

game: only thinly veiling the allegory, the Spirit describes

the Widow as leaving the house cloaked, and entering the

church, not to hear the service, “but to lay her traps,” and

says that she has made of this church “an ambush such as

birdcatchers do to catch doves, and because no one sees the

91“E assai bene ora conosco, senza più aperta dimostrazione, che faccia li uomini

divenire fiere e che voglia dire la salvaticheza del luogo e gli altri nomi da te mostratimi

della valle, e il non vedere in essa né via né via né sentiero” (Padoan 78).

92See Padoan 58, 186.90

snake hidden in the grass, she often catches the big ones.”93

In reply to the narrator’s comment that he now sees his way

out of the labyrinth, the Spirit urges him to leave promptly,

and that he must be careful “to look to the illumined path”

before him and by which the Spirit will go, and to avoid

straying from it, because if he were caught by the thorns

filling the place it would take an effort beyond his to

extricate him another time.94

93“...ma per tirare l’aiuolo...di quella ha fatto uno escato, come per pigliare i

colombi fanno gli uccellatori; e per ciò che ciascuno non vede la serpe che sta sotto l’erba

nascosa, spesso vi piglia de’ grossi” (Padoan 311).

94 “...ma guarda del sentiero luminoso, che davanti ti vedi e per lo quale io

anderò, tu non uscissi punto; per ciò che, se i bronchi de’ quali vedi il luogo pieno ti

pigliassero, nuova fatica ti bisognerebbe a trartene, oltre a questa, alla quale io venni”

(Padoan 403). See also Padoan 398, where the Spirit asks him to

“diriza gli occhi verso oriente e riguarda alla nuova luce che pare levarsi...[direct the

eyes toward the east at the new light which seems to be rising],

with its strong biblical echo in The Book of Ezechiel: 2-6: “The 91

VIII. The historical occasion

What political and civic events could have provoked a

statement as ferocious –and as liberating–as the Corbaccio? It

would of course be immensely convenient if the work could be

independently dated. It is not mentioned in contemporary

documents, but it does contain a passage that has long been

considered significant. The Spirit names, as the first cause

of reproach to the narrator, his age: “la tua età: la quale, se le tempie

già bianche e la canuta barba non m’ingannano, tu dovresti avere li costumi del

mondo, fuor delle fascie già sono degli anni quaranta...” (Padoan 119)

[“...your age, if your temples already white and your

grizzled beard do not deceive me, you should know the ways of

the world; already some forty years out of swaddling

clothes....”]. Were the work simply a piece of misogynist

Spirit lifted me up, and brought me to the east gate of the house

of the Lord, which looks toward the rising of the sun;” see also

43:15). 92

autobiography, one could, as many commentators have done,95 add

forty to 1313, Boccaccio’s birth year, and come up with 1353

(close after the composition of the Decameron) or a few years

later. However, if Boccaccio is writing an allegory, this

solution would be unlikely. He would not want to reveal his 95Cassell takes up this issue in detail and draws the

conclusion that “it is difficult to conclude...that the numbers in

question are an indication of the date of composition” (The Corbaccio,

1975 ed., note 87, p. 98). Giorgio Padoan, “Sulla datazione del

Corbaccio,” Lettere italiane 15 (1963), 1-27, argues for a date around

1365 or 1366, as does Vittore Branca, in his “Profilo biografico,”

in Boccaccio: Tutte le opere (Verona, 1967), vol. 1, p. 140; Tauno

Nurmela, ed., Il Corbaccio, Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae vol. 146

(1968), pp. 18-21, argues for an earlier date in the mid 1350's.

Robert Hollander, who favors the earlier date, includes a

discussion of the whole problem of dating in Bocccacio’s Last Fiction, pp.

26-33; also, for what Hollander calls “a partial census of some

critical views,” including its dating, see his Appendix 3, pp. 76-

77.93

exact age, and the Spirit would be using the number forty to

show that the narrator should by now have had more sense than

to fall in love: “La qual cosa se con estimazione avessi riguardata,

conosciuto avresti che dalle femine nelle amorose battaglie gli uomini giovani, non

quelli che verso la vecchieza calano, sono richiesti” (Padoan 121) [“If you

had looked at this thing reasonably, you would have recognized

that in battles of love women require young men, not those who

are sinking into old age”].96 From an allegorical point of

view, the age assigned to the narrator in round numbers is

thus perfect for making a love affair unseemly, but not so

advanced as to make one unrealistically grotesque; by the same

token, the passage cannot safely be used to date the work.97

96See also Padoan 124.

97 For the view that the Corbaccio was much revised and that a

critical edition exists in name only, see Monica Donaggio, “Problemi

Filologici del “Corbaccio”: Indagine sui Codici della Famiglia a,” Studi sul Boccaccio 21

(1993), 3-123, esp. pp. 3-7. Also see Antonio Scolari, “Rilettura del

codice Mannelli (a proposto di una recente edizione del Corbaccio),” Studi di filologia 94

Nothing precludes a dating in the mid 1370s, a period in which

Boccaccio was also delivering commentaries on Dante’s Comedia

for the city of Florence98 and when, in the form of a Latin

dedication for the De casibus already mentioned, we have

powerful verification of Boccaccio’s own disillusionment with

the papacy.

There was no shortage of historical provocations in the

mid 1370s. The concept of ‘liberty’ is frequently extolled in

the Corbaccio, and of course for both Dante and Boccaccio the

italiana: bulletino dell’Accademia della Crusca, vol. 54 (1996), pp. 193-220.

98Boccaccio was appointed by the city of Florence to give

public lectures on Dante’s Comedia. These began on October 23,

1373 and extended into sometime in 1375, when illness prevented him

from completing the lectures. Boccaccio died on December 21, 1375.

Manuscript evidence suggests he reached Canto 17 of the Inferno. The

commentary on the Comedia, with Boccaccio’s extensive notes, was

published as the Esposizioni sopra la Comedia.

95

idea of Florentine liberty was equated with breaking free from

papal rule.99 Dante in the beginning had been in a minority

when he rebelled against the papacy.100 In 1285, a Florentine

had counseled: “It behooves the commune of Florence to obey

the Roman church, [for] persons and properties of the Florentines are

99 In this they were not alone. Marvin B. Becker observes that

“the records of the advisory councils to the Florentine Signoria

indicate that the urban patriciate was fearful of the threat that

papal power posed to the independence of their beloved city.

Zealous of protecting the liberty of the republic, the ruling

classes came to regard the inquisition and the ecclesiastical

courts with profound suspicioun and overt hostility.” “Frequently,

counselors admonished the Priorate to follow a course of action

that would permit the city to continue ‘in libertate’ and in no case

were they to do fealty ‘to any lord, lay or ecclesiastic’... The

apprehension of these men increased as a result of Albornoz’s

successful campaign to recapture the Patrimony” (“Florentine

Politics and the Diffusion of Heresy,” p. 70, and n. 59).96

within the grasp of the lord pope and Roman Church. And thus one ought to

be not a little bit hesitant about contravening the precepts

of the pope.”101 But during Boccaccio’s mature years, the

Republic of Florence struggled repeatedly to gain its

independence from the dangers and depredations of papal

authority. At least eight papal interdicts “were imposed on

Florence during the first three quarters of the fourteenth

century.”102 “When laid upon a city or community,” writes

100The Corbaccio introduces the Spirit as “uno uomo senza alcuna

compagnia” (Padoan 34). Hollander, Boccaccio’s Last Fiction, p. 47, n.

13, has observed that this is the same way Dante describes Cato

the Younger in Purgatorio I, 30-36; see pp. 7-8 above.

101 These words (emphasis mine) appear in G. Salvemini, Studi

Storici (Florence,1901), p. 71f. and are cited more recently by

Richard C. Trexler, The Spiritual Power, pp. 20-21.

102 Trexler, The Spiritual Power, pp. 21-23. Trexler cites the

work of Robert Davidsohn, Storia di Firenze, 8 vols. (Florence, 1956-

68); interdicts were registered in 1304, 1323, 1328, 1331, 1336, 97

Richard Trexler, “this censure amounted to a spiritual

quarantine: priests disappeared from the ritual life of the

city, and churches were closed...The interdict of the

fourteenth century imposed upon a merchant center was often

accompanied by a prohibition forbidding outsiders from trading

with citizens of the interdicted town....” 103 Giovanni

Sercambi’s description of an interdict in the 1370s indicates

the economic and social immediacy of the punishment inflicted

on Florence on a fairly regular basis: “And, moreover, [the

Pope] said it was licit to rob any Florentine merchant without

[incurring] God’s displeasure...And so in many places they

were robbed. And, moreover, Florentine cloth and other wares

1341, 1361, and 1373.

103 Trexler, The Spiritual Power, pp. 1-5. For the volatile nature

of this period and its literary implications, see also David

Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and

Italy (Stanford UP, 1997), esp. “Endgame: Florentine Polity

Disintegrates, 1373-78,” pp. 22ff.98

made in Florence were also interdicted, like the men...And

this is what one gains by going against God and the Church!”104

Boccaccio was active in the commune of Florence, and

like Dante, his most important employment was as orator and

diplomat.105 Among Boccaccio’s noteworthy assignments as

104 Le Croniche di Giovanni Sercambio Lucchese, ed. S. Bongi, cited by

Iris Origo, The Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini (2nd ed., London,

1992), pp. 51-52, and n. 18.

105In 1350 he made diplomatic missions for the commune of

Florence to Romagna, very likely concerning what Vittore Branca

calls “the overflow of the Visconti beyond the Apennines,” and to

Ravenna, where “in the name of the company of Or San Michele,” he

presented Dante’s daughter with ten gold florins. Early in 1351,

Boccaccio was appointed first Camarlengo, or treasurer, of the

Camera del Comune, then Camarlengo and delegate of the Signoria,

all positions of considerable distinction. As delegate for the

Signoria he negotiated with the Neapolitan court’s agent, Jacopo di99

Florentine diplomat were those to the papal court: to

Innocent VI in Avignon in 1354, and to Urban V in 1365, and

1367 (or 1368), first in Avignon, then probably in Rome.106 It

is evident from the official documents relating to these

embassies that Boccaccio was also closely involved in the Donato Acciaiuoli, the release of all Neapolitan claims to

neighboring Prato. Florence’s annexation of Prato, in Branca’s

words, “marked the definitive victory of Florence over the Angevin

claims in Tuscany.” The winter of the following year finds him with

the Count of Tyrol, Louis of Bavaria, proposing potential measures

to be taken against the Visconti. See Branca, Boccaccio, pp. 86-90.

106 Hutton, Boccaccio, p. 217, n. 1, proposes the more likely

date of the latter mission as follows: “It is generally said that

he went again to the Pope in November, 1367...But Boccaccio could

not have gone to see the Pope in Avignon in November, 1367, for the

Pontiff set out for Italy on April 30, as we have seen. In

December, 1368, as we shall see, Pope Urban in Rome wrote to the

Signoria di Firenze in praise of Boccaccio. It seems certain,

then, that Boccaccio went on embassy to Rome in November, 1368.” 100

drafting of letters and documents preceding and relating to

each mission.107 Each of these missions is described as

“difficult,” “delicate,” or “complicated.”108 In 1354

Boccaccio’s role was to discover Innocent VI’s intentions

See also Grundmann, “Die Papstprohetien des Mittelalters,” pp. 17-18, who

also places Urban in Rome by the summer of 1367 and his return to

Avignon in September 1370, where he died in December of the same

year.

107Branca, Boccaccio, p. 87, describes Boccaccio as being

“involved in the play of foreign politics,” in part, “because of

the esteem and fame which he had won as an orator and as drafter of

official letters....”

108 Letters of introduction for the missions describe him as a

prudent man, the Commune’s orator and ambassador (“viro prudenti domino

Johanni Boccaccii civi et ambaxiatori nostro solepmni;” “idem orator eosdem Priores et

Vexilliferum et Commune;” and “dicti Communis oratorem” ( Lettere, ed.

Corazzini, pp. 395, 397, and 400). Discussion of these missions

(and the complexity of their politics) can be found in Hutton’s 101

concerning Charles IV’s descent into Italy. Was this – as

the Florentines suspected – an indication of a larger scheme

to increase the reach of papal power in Italy? Boccaccio’s

letter of instruction from the Signoria gives some indication

of the sensitive if not impossible nature of this mission.

Not only was he to discover whether the Emperor was coming to

Italy with the pope’s consent, and to reassure the pope of

Boccaccio, chs. 11 and 14 and Branca, Boccaccio, chs. 7 and 9. The

circumstances necessitating the August, 1365 mission are described

by Hutton, Boccaccio, p.208, as follows: “The Pope, however, was far

from satisfied with Florence. He found her to have been lukewarm in

the service of the Church when Romagna and the March rebelled,

which, if true, was not surprising, for he had played fast and

loose with her liberty, and now accused her of neglecting his

interests and of attempting to detach other cities from his cause.

These among other accusations; in return he threatened no longer to

grant her his goodwill.” See also Branca, Boccaccio, pp. 150-51.

102

Florence’s loyalty to the Holy See, but he was also to obtain

a promise that the pope would “exert himself to save the honor

and independence of the republic.” Finally, if the pope

“pretended that he knew nothing of the advent of Charles, but

asked the intentions of Florence in case he should enter

Italy, Boccaccio was instructed to say that he was only sent

to ask the intentions of His Holiness. In any case he was to

return as quickly as possible.” Hutton suggests that the

pope’s response “seems to have been far from clear, that

Boccaccio returned, but a few months later Dietifeci di

Michele was sent as ambassador to Avignon with almost the same

instructions and with the same object in view.”109

Considering that Boccaccio was so prized by the city

for these critical embassies, it is notable that there is a

more than ten year gap between the first in 1354 and the next

in 1365. Vittore Branca observes that Boccaccio’s “economic 109Hutton, Boccaccio, pp. 165-67.

103

and civil situation had been in continuous ascent between 1350

and 1358, thanks to the ever-increasing favor he enjoyed with

the group directing Florentine politics.”110 But then, as in

Dante’s time, the factiousness of Black Guelfs, the party most

closely associated with papal power, may well account for the

change in Boccaccio’s standing in Florence. In 1358, in spite

of the opposition of the Signoria, the Black Guelfs passed a

law diminishing the liberties of anyone who opposed the ruling

faction. Reaction against this law inspired the plan for a

coup d’état in which several of Boccaccio’s friends were to

participate. When the plan was discovered, two of the

conspirators were hanged; one was Niccolo di Bartolo del

Buono, the person to whom Dante dedicated the Comedia.

Others, including Pino de’ Rossi (Boccaccio’s “dear friend and

fellow spirit”111) and Andrea dell’ Ischia, fled and were then

exiled. Boccaccio left Florence presumably in response to 110Branca, Boccaccio, p. 120.

111 See Becker, “Florentine ‘Libertas,’” p. 394. 104

this disaster. In Branca’s words, “he retired to his

ancestral town, and for several years looked upon Florence –

to which, however, he often returned– with scorn and

suspicion....”112

But by 1365 Boccaccio was back in the thick of things.

That year, in an atmosphere of growing distrust between the

papacy and Florence,113 Boccaccio’s “business was to convince

the Pope that the Florentines were ‘the most faithful and most

112Branca , Boccaccio, pp. 120-122, adds that “various others

among the conspirators must have been acquaintances of his or at

least neighbors, because almost all of them lived across the river,

in Oltrarno, and many right in Santa Felicità, the usual quarter of

families of Valdelsana origin.” Hutton, Boccaccio, p. 209, notes the

ten years since 1354 in which Boccaccio “had not been asked to

undertake diplomatic business,” and wonders “whether or not that

neglect had been due to his failure or to his intercourse with Pino

de’ Rossi, who in 1360 was implicated in a conspiracy against the

Guelfs....” 105

devout servants of Holy Church.’”114 There is disagreement

concerning the success of Boccaccio’s meeting with Urban V in

1365, Hutton concluding that “the Pope was hard to persuade

and to convince,” and that Boccaccio’s mission was not

particularly successful, while Branca surmises that “the

Florentine ambassador must have fulfilled his mission by

earning the goodwill and the praises of the Pope, for two

years later the Signoria sent him on another mission to the

same Pontiff...” 115 But two years later, in 1367-68, the

issues between the commune of Florence and the Holy See were

still unresolved. Information about the embassy of 1367 (or

113For a discussion of the relations between Florence and the

papacy in these years, and the comment that Florence “magnified the

possibility of conflict with the papacy” in its “conscious and

articulate concern for ‘Tuscan liberties,’”(p. 269), see Brucker,

Florentine Politics and Society, pp. 265ff.

114 Hutton, Boccaccio, pp. 208-210; Branca, Boccaccio, p. 151.

115Hutton, Boccaccio, p. 212; Branca, Boccaccio, p. 152.106

1368) is sketchy: “All we know about the affair,” writes

Hutton, “is that on December 1, 1368, Urban wrote to the

Signoria of Florence that he understood from their ambassador

Giovanni Boccaccio that they desired to assist him in

reforming the affairs of Italy, and that Boccaccio, whom he

praises, bears his reply viva voce.”116 Gene Brucker notes “the

profound disagreements on foreign affairs within the ruling

group” of Florence and that alliance with the papacy was

central to these disagreements.117 Whatever happened on

116Hutton, Boccaccio, p. 218, and n.1. Branca’s description of

this embassy is replete with “probably,” “perhaps,” “he must

have...,” but there are some concrete details, including a letter

written to Boccaccio by Coluccio Salutati, “who thanked him warmly

for having written to him from Rome” (Boccaccio, pp.162f.).

117Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society, p. 240. In the late 1360s

Florence had on three occasions – “when an alliance seemed

imperative for defense or survival”– entered into alliances with

the church, and that these were “never popular.” For a brief 107

Boccaccio’s 1367/68 mission to the Holy See, by the early

1370s the relations between the commune and the papacy were

threatening to break down altogether.

The pontificate of Gregory XI (1370-78) brought matters

to a head. Anxious to return the curia to Rome, Gregory

mounted a massive campaign to soften up potentially

troublesome cities in central and northern Italy. He sent

diplomatic embassies and letters to Florence and other Tuscan

towns assuring them that his attack on Perugia did not

endanger their “Tuscan liberties,” while at the same time

lobbying Guelf loyalists to discourage strong Florentine

response. He infiltrated authority structures in and near

Florence and threatened the Florentines, pressing them for

“ecclesiastical liberties” that would affirm his influence in

the city. When, in 1374, Florence was struck by plague and

famine, he refused their requests for grain. In June, 1375,

summation of the reasons for Florentine disaffection with the

papacy in this period, see Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society, p. 243.108

news reached the city that the pope had secretly made a treaty

with the Milanese ruler Bernabò Visconti even while his envoys

were in Florence asking for support for the war. Now,

released from duty in Milan, papal troops led by the English

mercenary John Hawkwood were making their way south to

Florence, “demanding,” in David Peterson’s words, “a

staggering 130,000 florins to spare the city from pillage.”118

Later the same month, the Florentines uncovered a plot by a

friar and a notary in neighboring Prato to turn that city over

to papal troops from Bologna.119

Before summer’s end Florence had reached the consensus

that it could not keep its liberty without a war. In quick

succession the priors created two citizen commissions: first

the Otto dei Preti who were deputized to demand a one year

118 Peterson, “The War of the Eight Saints,” pp. 185-86.

119 Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society, p. 282, observes that by

the early 1370s the “popes had replaced the emperors in their

traditional role as disturbers of the Tuscan peace.” 109

forced loan (prestanza) of 130,000 florins from the clergy of

Florence and Fiesole to pay off Hawkwood. Stefani, a

contemporary chronicler, explains that this was done so that

“the commune should not pay that which the pastors of the

church had wrongly forced the Florentines to give Messer John

Hawkwood.” He reports that the clergy “by force or by love”

paid about 90,000 florins of this debt.120 A little more than

a month later, the priors created the Otto della Guerra,

another council of eight whose mission was to make the

diplomatic and military arrangements necessary for waging war

against the pope. That war became known as the War of the

Eight Saints, most likely for the Otto dei Preti, commissioned

to tax the clergy and, if necessary, to seize their lands:

“The population,” writes Richard Trexler, “because of their

hatred of the priests and more specifically of their riches,

christened them the Saints.”121 “The dam burst,” as David

Peterson puts it, “on 11 November, when Città di Castello rose120 Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society, p. 304 and n. 23.

110

up against its papal governors...Like dominoes, Viterbo,

Perugia, and dozens of other cities of the Patrimony rebelled

as well.”122 Alerted by the ringing of church bells, the

Florentines gathered almost daily in the Piazza Signoria to

hear reports from other Tuscan towns read aloud “in the name 121For a discussion of the war’s name, see Richard C. Trexler,

“Who Were the Eight Saints?” Renaissance News 16, no. 2 (Summer,

1963), 89-94 [now Renaissance Quarterly], who suggests (p. 93) that some

of the confusion of the war’s name is due to the shift of the

populace’s attention “at the end of the year to the otto della guerra,

who through brilliant diplomatic and military service, win the love

of the populace.” See also Felice Tocco, “I Fraticelli,” Archivio

Storico Italiano 35 (1905), ser. 5, p. 348: “Fu chiamata con sanguinosa ironia

la guerra degli Otto Santi, in ricordo della balìa creata apposta a dirigerla.” The

excising of this war (1375-78) by historians, including Poggio

Bracciolini (1380-1459) and Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444) spurs the

lively discussion in David Peterson’s essay, “The War of the Eight

Saints in Florentine Memory and Oblivion.” Peterson (p. 186, n.

33) lists the Otto dei Preti as follows: Paolo di Matteo Malifici, 111

of God and victory.” Greeted by shouts of “Long live Florence

and liberty!” troops of the Tuscan League arrived at the

recently liberated cities distributing to their new allies red

Giovanni d’Angiolo Capponi, Antonio di Forese Sachette, Antonio di

Filippo Tolosini, Bardo di Guglielmo Altoviti, Recco di Guido

Guaza, Salvi di Filippo Salvi, and Michele di Puccio albergatore;” and

(p. 187, n. 35) he lists the Otto della Guerra (from Stefani, Cronaca,

rub.752, p. 293) as: “Giovanni Dini speziale, Alessandro di Messer

Riccardo de’ Bardi, Giovanni Magalotti, Andrea di Messer Franceso

Salviati, Tommaso di Marco degli Strozzi, Guccio di Dino Gucci,

Marco di Federigo Soldi vinattiere, Tommaso di Mone biadaiuolo.” For

the War of the Eight Saints, see also M. Brosch, “Ein Krieg mit dem

Papsttum im 14. Jahrhundert, “ Historische Vierteljahrschrift IX (1906): 324-37;

Brucker, Florentine Politics, esp. pp. 297-396; Marvin B. Becker, “Church

and State in Florence on the Eve of the Renaissance (1343-1382,”

Speculum 38, 4 (1962), pp. 509-27; A. Gherardi, “La Guerra dei Fiorentini

con papa Gregorio XI detta la guerra degli Otto Santi,” Archivio Storico Italiano 5 112

banners, “like those of Rome,” adorned with the word,

“Libertas.”123

An indication of the city’s mood concerning the potential

war between Florence and the papacy is found in a letter of

November 29, 1375, written by Gherardino di Niccolò Gherardini(1867), ser. 3, part 2, pp. 35-131; VI, part 1 (1867), pp. 208-32;

part 2, pp. 229-51; VII, part 1 (1868), pp. 211-32; part 2, pp.

235-48; VIII, part 1 (1868); pp. 260-96; Trexler, The Spiritual Power,

esp. ch. 2: “Preface to Anathema,” pp. 30-43; A. Panella, “La guerra

degli Otto Santi e le vicende della legge contro i vescovi,” Archivio Storico Italiano 99

(1941), part 1, pp. 36-49.

122 Peterson, “The War of the Eight Saints,” p. 188; see also

Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society, pp. 308-309.

123Stefani, Cronaca, rub. 753, p. 293; and “Diario d’anonimo fiorentino

dall’ anno 1358 al 1389,” in Cronache dei Secoli XIII e XIV, ed. A. Gherardi

(Florence, 1876), p. 304, quoted by Peterson, “The War of the Eight

Saints,” p. 188 and n. 42. See also Herbert Grundmann, “Die

Papstprophetien des Mittelalters,” p. 119; and Ronald G. Witt, “The Rebirth

of the Concept of Republican Liberty in Italy,” in Renaissance Studies 113

Gianni to his friend Tommaso de’ Bardi in Bruges. Gherardino

writes that “the commune, if necessary, will impose a loan

every day to defend our liberty against those treacherous

pastors of Holy Church. Their rule is a cruel tyranny and

every person in this city should be ready to give first his

property and then his person to maintain [the city’s] liberty

and to avoid falling into their hands!”124 We know that at

in Honor of Hans Baron, ed. Anthony Molho and John A. Tedescki (Dekalb,

Ill., 1971), pp. 175-76 and notes 1, 2. Witt (n. 2) quotes from

the Stefani’s Cronaca: “Questi otto (the Otto di Balia designated to

supervise the prosecution of the war) fecero una bandiera, la quale era tutta

rossa con lettere a traverso, come quelle di Roma; ma questa bandiera dicea ‘Libertà

lettere bianche....”

124 “..è disposto il Chomune di porne ongni dì una, se tante ne bisongniasse, per

difendere la libertà nostra da questi traditori pastori di Santa Chiesa. Ch’è troppo crudele

tirannia la loro singnioria, e dovrebbe ongniuno di questa città metterci prima l’avere e poi

la persona, per mantenere la sua libertà e per non venire nelle loro mani!” The full

letter is printed in G. Brucker, “Un documento fiorentino sulla guerra, sulla 114

least one of the war council of eight, Alessandro di Messer

Riccardo de’ Bardi, was a friend of Boccaccio’s.125 We also

know, from the dedication of the De casibus in 1373 or 1374,

about two years before that council was formed, that

Boccaccio’s own personal disaffection with the papacy was

coming to a boiling point. Among Boccaccio’s closest friends

and admirers during these years was the Chancellor of

Florence, Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406).126 A renowned

finanza e sulla amministrazione pubblica (1375),” Archivio Storico Italiano 115

(1957), 171-76, quotation from p. 172.

125 Branca, Boccaccio, p. 157.

126 Witt, ‘In the Footsteps,’ p. 301 and n. 29, notes that Salutati

assumed office just when “Florence’s relations with the pope had

deteriorated to the point where talk of war was surfacing.” “It was

widely believed,” he continues, “that the imminent return of the

papacy from Avignon to Rome had been coordinated with an attack of

papal parties on Tuscany. On its side, among a host of complaints,

the Church felt that Florence, an ally of the papacy’s in a war 115

humanist, Salutati was a man of such eloquence that it was

claimed that a single letter of his was worth more than a

legion of armed men.127 He referred to the papacy as the “chiesa

carnale,” and liberty was his byword.128 Writing to Boccaccio

from Rome in April 1369, Salutati too had availed himself of against the Visconti of Milan, had a secret agreement with the

enemy to frustrate military operations.”...“The charges and counter

charges of betrayal are recorded in Salutati’s three earliest

missive, written to the pope in the late spring and summer of 1375.”

127The comment that “one letter of Salutati’s was worth a troop

of horses” is attributed to Giangaleazzo Visconti in the period

when Florence and Milan were opponents;” see Witt, ‘In the Footsteps,’

p. 302, n. 30.

128 Becker, “Florentine Politics,” p. 72, comments that

“Salutati...acting in his official capacity as Florentine

chancellor, had sought to justify this war against the “Chiesa

carnale,” in terms of the prophetic tradition and in the name of

liberty....” For a contemporary discussion of the papacy as

“carnal” and “temporal,”see Defensor Pacis, ed. Gewirth, 2.2.5-7 (pp. 116

the image of the labyrinth to describe the papacy, referring

to “a certain lethargy and disgust at this labyrinth of

Acheron.”129 Salutati’s proximity to Boccaccio during the

decade preceding the war is well documented in letters. Both

he and Boccaccio were part of a humanist group130 that met at

the Augustinian convent of Santo Spirito (Boccaccio’s

neighborhood in Florence) and at Certaldo.131 This group also

105-107). See also Witt, “The Rebirth of the Concept of Republican

Liberty,” pp. 175-199.

129Epistle I, 85-86, passage cited by Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads,

p. 84.

130See Peterson’s remark, “The War of the Eight Saints,” p.

175, that humanists “from Petrarch onward were deeply Augustinian

in their anthropology and attacked ecclesiastics not for their

religion but for their lack of it.”

131 For the importance of Salutati, the chancellor of Florence,

as “the bridge between the world of learning and scholarship and

the world of commerce and politics,” see Brucker, Renaissance Florence,117

included the chronicler Filippo Villani, the eminent cleric

and humanist Luigi Marsili, and in all likelihood Marsili’s

contemporary at the convent of Santo Spirito, the already

mentioned reader of Boccaccio’s eclogues, Fra Martino da

Signa, to whom Boccaccio bequeathed his collection of

classical texts with the stipulation that after Fra Martino’s

death these be made accessible to the monks at Santo

Spirito.132

pp. 232-33; also Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads, pp. 57-58, and U.

Mariani, Il Petrarca e gli agostiniani (Rome, 1940), p. 66ff. and Rudolph

Arbesmann, “Der Augustinereremitenorden und der Beginn der

humanistischen Bewegung” Augustiniana, 14 (1964): 603-39, and 15

(1965): 259-93.

132Arbesmann, “Der Augustinereremitenorden,” p. 270, concludes that

even though we lack other evidence, “Fra Martinos Verständnis für die

humanistischen Bestrebungen findet schliesslich eine Bestätigung in Boccaccios

Testament.” 118

It is to two extant letters from the summer of 1375,

written to their Florentine friend Guido del Palagio by

Marsili Luigi and Giovanni dalle Celle, the Vallombrosan monk,

that we owe what Gene Brucker describes as “a more

sophisticated analysis of the war’s import.”133 Both of these

distinguished clerics convey support for the war and assurance

that in this situation any excommunications issued by the pope

are invalid. Thus Giovanni dalle Celle (in the summer of

1375) distinguishes between paying the “prestanza,” or loan

with which the war is to be funded, with the intention of

opposing the pope, and paying it to defend your country’s

liberty. He assures his friend that regarding the latter,

which he calls a “sacred intention,” he can chatter with all

133Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society, p. 301, comparing these

letters especially to the November 1375 letter of Gherardino

mentioned above, pp. 58-59. Both letters to Guido del Palagio are

found in Felice Tocco, “I Fraticelli,” Archivio Storico Italiano, ser. 5, 35

(1905), 348-51. 119

the officials of the commune without fear of a mortal sin, for

the sin is not valid with God.134 Similarly, Luigi Marsili’s

letter to Guido del Palagio in August, 1375 refers to the

upcoming war as “this sacred enterprise.”135 He decries the

greedy, dissolute, pressing, hungry Limousins who forcefully

seized the lawful authority of secular powers, and are in the

process of reducing Italy to bondage. He claims that his good

friend Petrarch (d. July, 1374) would have supported the

Florentine’s effort and makes reference to three Petrarchan

sonnets enraged with the abuses at the Avignon curia. But

Marsili also offers more personal judgment, saying that any

excommunications issued by the papacy would be invalid:

“Christ sent them [priests] to preach: but in the Gospel I

134“Se paghi prestanza, non sia tua intenzione di fare contro al papa, ma difensione

del paese tuo, e per questa santa intenzione tua puoi discorrere per tutti gli uffici del

comune senza peccato mortale....non vale appo addio...” (Tocco, “I Fraticelli,” p.

348).

135Tocco, “I Fraticelli,” p. 350.120

find nothing that says he sent them to rule.” 136 He asserted,

in Gene Brucker’s words, that “God would help the

Florentines...because they were fighting to cleanse and purify

his corrupt church.” 137 The Augustinians, writes Brucker,

“thus enlarged the target against which the commune’s

hostility could be directed: not exclusively the French

prelates in the papal states, but the entire clerical

caste...Florence’s war was a crusade against all abuses and

defects in the ecclesiastical order.” 138

136 “Cristo gli mandò a predicare...ma nel vangelio non trovo che gli mandasse a

signoreggiare” (Tocco, “I Fraticelli,” p. 351).

137 Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society, pp. 301-302, and n. 16.

See also Becker, “Florentine Politics and the Diffusion of Heresy,”

p. 71, who describes the “bitterly anti-papal” position of the

Spiritual Franciscans, arguing that they “embraced the ideals for

which Florence purported to be fighting and justified this role in

terms of the prophetic tradition of their order.” 121

Both these letters, moreover, are strong evidence that

those who were loyal to Florence were surrounded by potential

traitors. Thus Luigi Marsili closes by warning that what he

has conveyed to his trusted friend in this part of the letter

should not be seen by “gli semplici” [“the simple”], that he has 138Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society, pp. 302-303, remarks that

“This opinion received a sympathetic hearing in Florence. The

proselytizing activities of the Fraticelli had convinced many,

particularly among the lower classes, that the pope was anti-

Christ, and that all priests who had been ordained since the

pontificate of John XXII were holding their offices illegally.

These doctrines had become so widespread in the city that the

Signoria had scheduled a debate between the orthodox clergy and the

Fraticelli, an ideological contest which was cancelled at the

insistence of the bishop.” For the influence of the War of the

Eight Saints on church reform see Peterson, “War of the Eight

Saints,” p. 182, and n. 18, who directs our attention specifically

to John Wycliff’s De civili dominio (1378) which cites “Gregory XI’s

interdiction of Florence in 1376 as a politically motivated abuse 122

entrusted it only to his good and personal friend.139

Similarly, Giovanni dalle Celle ends his letter by saying he

has told his correspondent many things in this letter that he

fears “che la lettera non venisse alle mani di coloro che amano poco il buono

stato di codesta città” [“must not come into the hands of those who

little love the good condition of this city”].140 These

perilous circumstances may well explain the creation of the

Corbaccio. Boccaccio’s envoi, we recall, also warns his little

book that above all it should guard “di non venire alle mani delle

malvagie femine, e massimamente di colei che ogni demonio di malvagità trapasa e

of papal spiritual authority.”

139“Io o detto molte cose et mai non verrei a fine se non tagliassi, et pero così fo et

avvisovi che questa parte della lettera non veggiano gli semplici che ne piglierebbero

schandalo, e se del vostro conoscimento non mi fossi fidato non ve ne avrei parlato”

(Tocco, “I Fraticelli,” p. 351).

140 Molte cose ti arei detto di queste cose, se non se che io temo che la lettera non

venisse alle mani di coloro che amano poco il buono stato di codesta città” (Tocco, “I

Fraticelli,” p. 348).123

che della presente tua fatica è stata cagione, per ciò che tu saresti là mal

ricevuta...” (Padoan 413) [“that you do not come into the hands

of wicked women, and most of all into those of the one who

surpasses every demon in evil and who is the cause of your

present trouble; for this you would be badly received

there”].141

Although the Corbaccio might have been inspired by any

number of events in the long history of dispute between

Florence and the papacy, the most likely possibility is that

it served as a ‘coterie allegory’– intended to elude the

hands of the papal authority –in justification of the

impending war. In 1372 Boccaccio had shared similarly

satirical allegories – in the form of eclogues –with his

friends. The textual history of the Corbaccio tends to support

the ‘coterie theory.’ The oldest of all the known manuscripts141“Ma sopra ogni cosa ti guarda di non venire alle mani delle malvagie femine, e

massimamente di colei che ogni demonio di malvagità trapasa e che della presente tua

fatica è stata cagione, per ciò che tu saresti là mal ricevuta...” (Padoan 413).124

(1384) was copied by the cleric Francesco di Amaretto

Mannelli, a neighbor and close friend of Coluccio Salutati.142

Another early manuscript (before 1434) was owned by Carlo di

Tommaso Strozzi, a relative of Tommaso di Marco Strozzi, one

of the Eight of War (excommunicated March 31, 1376).143 The

behavior of the Holy See was insufferable because it

endangered Florentine liberty. Indeed, as Boccaccio puts it

late in the Corbaccio, “se animo non si muta, la nostra città avrà un buon

tempo poco che cantare altro che delle sue miserie o cattività” (Padoan 391).

Under these circumstances, the narrator’s reference in the

closing sentences to a “più acuto stimolo” to be visited upon the

misbehaving woman is thrown into full relief. To regain its

liberty, Florence would make war on the Widow.

142See Nurmela, pp. 28-29.

143See M. Donaggio, “Problemi Filologici del ‘Corbaccio,’” pp. 12-14. 125

126