MORE DIRTY BOOKS

THERE—THAT SHOULD GET YOUR ATTENTION AGAIN. Who would have guessed Boccacio’s Decameron was once described as “probably the dirtiest great book in the Western canon.” I gleaned this from Barbara Newman’s “Dirty Books,” London Review of Books, August 14, 2025. The article got my attention because Newman mentions my pal, a contemporaneous Geoffrey Chaucer. 

Here are other tidbits gleaned from “Dirty Books” and related sources.

Tre Corone or Three Crowns. “Histories of Italian literature,” Newman observes, “begin with the Tre Corone or Three Crowns: Dante (1265-1321), Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75) and Francesco Petrarca or Petrarch (1304-74), Boccaccio’s intimate friend.” Newman thus introduces us to her LRB topic: a review of two new books: Marco Santagata’s Boccaccio: A Biography and Brenda Deen Schildgen’s Boccaccio Defends Literature. 

Boccaccio: A Biography, by Marco Santagata, translated by Emlyn Eisenach, University of Chicago Press, 2025; Boccaccio Defends Literature, by Brenda Deen Schildgen, University of Toronto Press, 2024.

The Chaucer Connection. Newman recounts, “Chaucer, a younger contemporary of Petrarch and Boccaccio, read all three writers. During his early diplomatic career, he learned Italian and eagerly sought out their works. Yet while he proudly cites Dante and ‘Fraunceys Petrak, the laureat poete’, he never mentions Boccaccio, to whom his debts were far greater.”

Newman notes, “Boccaccio’s Teseida became ‘The Knight’s Tale’; his Filostrato inspired Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer borrowed several tales from the Decameron and adopted Boccaccio’s appeal to reader responsibility to defend bawdy stories such as ‘The Miller’s Tale.’ ”

The Decameron. Wikipedia relates that, as Boccacio dubbed Dante’s work the “Divine” Comedy, his own work The Decameron was sometimes nicknamed “l’Imana” commedia (“the Human” comedy).

Image from Il Cameron, c. 1492 edition from Wikipedia.

Newman describes, “Boccaccio himself would have been startled to learn that his immortality rested on that ‘dirty book,’ rather than his Latin humanist works. He took great pains with his collection of tales, recounted by seven well-heeled young women and three men in the genteel retreat where they go to escape the Black Death. He revised it extensively and produced several copies with his own hand, including a large-format scholarly edition.”

“But at the end of his life,” Newman relates, “fearing for his salvation, he developed scruples. In one letter he even fretted that female readers, to whom he had dedicated the book, would consider him ‘a foul-mouthed pimp, a dirty old man.’ ”

I’m reminded of St. Augustine’s comment, “Oh, Master, make me chaste and celibate—but not yet.” 

A New Style of Holiness. Newman relates, “Yet in his tale of Alibech and Rustico (Day Three, Story Ten), he had instructed girls in a new style of holiness. Deep in the Theban desert, the story goes, a young virgin called Alibech decides to dedicate herself to God. After two holy men send her away because of her beauty, she encounters the hermit Rustico, who takes her in.”

“On finding that she is just as naive as she looks,” Newman continues, “Rustico conceives a stratagem. He tells Alibech to remove her clothes and kneel opposite him in prayer. He soon experiences ‘the resurrection of the flesh,’ and tells the astonished Alibech that the ‘devil’ who has reared up in his body causes him great torment. Although no such devil troubles her own flesh, she does have a ‘hell,’ Rustico explains, and nothing would please God more than for them to put the devil back into hell. Alibech soon learns to take such delight in this service that Rustico’s devil is exhausted, though her hell rages more fiercely than ever.”

Ha. A ripe tale to wile away time during a medieval plague. By the way, Newman notes that “Boccaccio survived the plague of 1347 but Santagata, his biographer, died in the plague of 2020.”

Boccaccio’s Defense. Newman recounts, “Although the book was far from finished, its tales had already begun to circulate and not everyone liked them. It seems that prudish critics had been complaining about Boccaccio’s desire to please ladies, interpreting his literary efforts as amorous exploits. Boccaccio disarmingly responds by accepting their critique. Why, after all, should he not love women and take delight in pleasing them?”

Newman continues, “There is nothing shameful about writing for women; Dante himself did so. Where would the Commedia be without Beatrice? Concluding the Decameron in his own voice, Boccaccio makes the revolutionary move of placing the moral responsibility for literature squarely on the reader, not the writer…. Even bawdy tales have merit for those who know how to interpret them, but a reader who takes offence at trifles can just skip the offending stories and focus on the edifying ones….”

 “This,” Newman concludes, “is Bocaccio’s greatest contribution to literary theory: vernacularity, writing for entertainment, reader responsibility and the autonomy of fiction are all braided together and gendered feminine…. It is more than gender that binds the elegant storytellers of the Decameron to the ‘damned mob of scribbling women’ that Nathaniel Hawthorne would denounce in the 1850s.”

Hmm… Didn’t Hawthorne write The Scarlet Letter? ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025