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
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