Giovanni Boccaccio, a Biographical Study

Poggio Gherardo is but a stone's throw from Corbignano, the country house—half farm, half villa—which Margherita brought to Boccaccino as part of her dowry, and where, as we have seen, it appears likely that Boccaccio spent his first youth. But Poggio Gherardo is not the only palace of the Decameron. At the close of the second day Madonna Filomena took the laurel crown from her head and crowned Neifile queen, and it was she who then proposed that they should change their residence.

"To-morrow, as you know," said she, "is Friday, and the next day is Saturday, and both are days which are apt to be tedious to most of us on account of the kind of food we take on them; and then Friday was the day on which He who died that we might live suffered His Passion, and it is therefore worthy of reverence, and ought, as I think, to be spent rather in prayer than in telling tales. And on Saturday it is the custom for women to wash the powder out of their hair, and make themselves generally sweet and neat; also they use to fast out of reverence for the Virgin Mother of God, and in honour of the coming rest from any and every work. Therefore, since we cannot, on that day either, carry out our established order of life, I think it would be well to refrain from reciting tales also. And as by then we shall have been here already four days, I think we might seek a new place if we would avoid visitors; and indeed I have already a spot in my mind."

And it happened as she said, for they all praised her words and looked forward longingly to Sunday.

On that very day the sun was already high when, "with slow steps, the queen with her friends and the three gentlemen, led by the songs of some twenty nightingales, took her way westward by an unfrequented lane full of green herbs and flowers just opening after the dawn. So, gossiping and playing and laughing with her company, she led them ... to a beautiful and splendid palace before half of the third hour was gone." It is by this "unfrequented lane" that we too may pass to the Villa Palmieri,[660] which tradition assures us is the very place. "When they had entered and inspected everything, and seen that the halls and rooms had been cleaned and decorated and plentifully supplied with all that was needed for sweet living, they praised its beauty and good order, and admired the owner's magnificence. And on descending, even more delighted were they with the pleasant and spacious courts, the cellars filled with choice wines, and the beautifully fresh water which was everywhere round about. Then they went into the garden, which was on one side of the palace, and was surrounded by a wall, and the beauty and magnificence of it at first sight made them eager to examine it more closely. It was crossed in all directions by long, broad, and straight walks, over which the vines, which that year made a great show of giving many grapes, hung gracefully in arched festoons, and being then in full blossom, filled the whole garden with their sweet smell, and this, mingled with the odours of the other flowers, made so sweet a perfume that they seemed to be in the spicy gardens of the East. The sides of the walks were almost closed with red and white roses and with jessamine, so that they gave sweet odours and shade not only in the morning, but when the sun was high, and one might walk there all day without fear. What flowers there were there, how various and how ordered, it would take too long to tell, but there was not one which in our climate is to be praised that was not found there abundantly. Perhaps the most delightful thing therein was a meadow in the midst, of the finest grass, and all so green that it seemed almost black, all sprinkled with a thousand various flowers, shut in by oranges and cedars, the which bore the ripe fruit and the young fruit too and the blossom, offering a shade most grateful to the eyes and also a delicious perfume. In the midst of this meadow there was a fountain of the whitest marble, marvellously carved and within—I do not know whether artificially or from a natural spring—threw so much water and so high towards the sky through a statue which stood there on a pedestal that it would not have needed more to turn a mill. The water fell back again with a delicious sound into the clear waters of the basin, and the surplus was carried off through a subterranean way into little water channels, most beautifully and artfully made about the meadow, and afterwards it ran into others round about, and so watered every part of the garden, and collected at length in one place, whence it had entered the beautiful garden, it turned two mills, much to the profit, as you may suppose, of the signore, pouring down at last in a stream clear and sweet into the valley."

If this should seem a mere pleasaunce of delight, the vision of a poet, the garden of a dream, we have only to remember how realistically and simply Boccaccio has described for us that plague-stricken city, scarcely more than a mile away, to be assured of its truthfulness. And then, Villa Palmieri is nearly as beautiful to-day as it was so long ago; only while the gardens with their pergolas of vines, their hedges of jasmine and crimson roses, their carved marble fountains remain, the two mills he speaks of are gone, having been destroyed in a flood of the Mugnone in 1409, less than sixty years after he wrote of them.

Nor are the two palaces the only places mentioned in the Decameron, set as it is in the country about Florence, that we may identify. It was a summer afternoon, six days had almost passed, Dioneo had just been crowned king by Madonna Elisa: the tales had been short that day, and the sun was yet high, so that Madonna, seeing the gentlemen were set down to play at dice (and "such is the custom of men"), called her friends to her and said: "'Ever since we have been here I have wished to show you a place not far off where, I believe, none of you has ever been; it is called La Valle delle Donne, and till to-day I have not had a chance to speak of it. It is yet early; if you choose to come with me, I promise you that you will be pleased with your walk.' And they answered they were all willing: so without saying a word to the gentlemen, they called one of their women to attend them, and after a walk of nearly a mile they came to the place which they entered by a strait path where there burst forth a fair crystal stream, and they found it so beautiful and so pleasant, especially in those hot still hours of afternoon, that nothing could excel it; and as some of them told me later, the little plain in the valley was an exact circle, as though it had been described by a pair of compasses, yet it was indeed rather the work of Nature than of man. It was about half a mile in circumference, surrounded by six hills of moderate height, on each of which was a palace built in the form of a little castle.... And then what gave them the greatest delight was the rivulet that came through a valley which divided two hills, and running through the rocks fell suddenly and sweetly in a waterfall seeming, as it was dashed and sprinkled in drops all about, like so much quicksilver. Coming into the little plain beneath this fall, the stream was received in a fine canal, and running swiftly to the midst of the plain formed itself in a pool not deeper than a man's breast and so clear that you might see the gravelly bottom and the pebbles intermixed, which indeed you might count; and there were fishes there also swimming up and down in great plenty; and the water that overflowed was received into another little canal which carried it out of the valley. There the ladies all came together, and ... finding it commendable ... did, as 'twas very hot and they deemed themselves secure from observation, resolve to take a bath. So having bidden their maid wait and keep watch over the access to the vale, and give them warning if haply any should approach it, they all seven undressed and got into the water, which to the whiteness of their flesh was even such a veil as fine glass is to the vermeil of the rose.[661] They being then in the water, the clearness of which was thereby in no wise affected, did presently begin to go hither and thither after the fish, which had much ado where to bestow themselves so as to escape out of their hands.... 'Twas quite early when they returned to the palace, so that they found the gallants still at play."

This delicious spot, called to this day the Valle delle Donne,[662] may be reached from the "unfrequented lane" by which they all passed from Poggio Gherardo to Villa Palmieri; as Landor, who lived close by, tells us:—

The hundred tales that were thus told in the shade of those two beautiful gardens may doubtless be traced to an infinite number of sources—Egyptian, Arabian, Persian, and French;[663] but these origins matter little. Boccaccio was almost certainly unaware of them, for the most part at any rate, gathering his material as he did from the tales he had heard, up and down Italy. Certainly to the Contes and Fabliaux of Northern France a third part of the Decameron may be traced, much too to Indian and Persian sources, and a little to the Gesta Romanorum. But one might as well accuse Chaucer or Shakespeare of a want of originality because they took what they wanted where they found it, as arraign Boccaccio for a dependence he was quite unaware of on sources such as these.[664] He has made the tales his own. The Decameron is a work of art, a world in itself, and its effect upon us who read it is the effect of life which includes, for its own good, things moral and immoral. The book has the variety of the world, and is full of an infinity of people, who represent for us the fourteenth century in Italy, in all its fullness, almost.[665] It deals with man as life does, never taking him very seriously, or without a certain indifference, a certain irony and laughter. Yet it is full too of a love of courtesy, of luck, of all sorts of adventures, both gallant and sad. In details, at any rate, it is true and even realistic, crammed with observation of those customs and types which made up the life of the time. It is dramatic, ironic, comic, tragic, philosophic, and even lyrical; full of indulgence for human error, an absolutely human book beyond any work of Dante's or Petrarch's or Froissart's. Even Chaucer is not so complete in his humanism, his love of all sorts and conditions of men. Perfect in organism, in construction, and in freedom, each of these tales is in some sort a living part of life and a criticism of it. Almost any one could be treated by a modern writer in his own way, and remain fundamentally the same and fundamentally true. What immorality there is, might seem owing rather to the French sources of some of the tales than to any invention on the part of Boccaccio, who, as we have seen, later came to deplore it. But we must remember that the book was written to give delight to "amorous" women, and women have always delighted in "immoral literature," and in fact write most of it to-day.[666] Yet only a Puritan, and he foul-minded, could call the Decameron vicious, for it is purified with an immortal laughter and joy.

But it is in its extraordinary variety of contents and character that the Decameron is chiefly remarkable. We are involved in a multitude of adventures, are introduced to innumerable people of every class, and each class shows us its most characteristic qualities. Such is Boccaccio's art, for the stories were not originally, or even as they are, ostensibly studies of character at all, but rather anecdotes, tales of adventure, stories of illicit love, good stories about the friars and the clergy and women, told for amusement because they are full of laughter and are witty, or contain a brief and ready reply with which one has rebuked another or saved himself from danger. But I have given the subjects of the stories of the Decameron elsewhere.[667] Whatever they may be, and they are often of the best, of the most universal, they are not, for the real lover of the Decameron, the true reason why he goes to it always with the certainty of a new joy. The book is full of people, of living people, that is the secret of its immortality. Fra Cipolla, whom I especially love, Calandrino, whom I seem always to have known, poor Monna Tezza, his wife, whom at last he so outrageously gives away, Griselda, Cisti, the Florentine baker, the joyous Madonna Filippa, or Monna Belcolore should be as dear to us as any character in any book not by Shakespeare himself. They live for ever.

And yet it must be confessed that while the book is a mirror of the world, and doubtless as true to the life of its time as any book that was ever written, it lacks a certain idealism, a certain moral sense which is never absent from English work, and which, even from a purely æsthetic point of view, would have given a sort of balance or sense of proportion to the book, which, I confess, in my weaker moments, it has sometimes seemed to me it lacks.

It is true that Boccaccio deals with life and with life alone. It is true that life then as now made little of sexual morality. But with Boccaccio, as with almost all Latin art, sexual immorality usurps, or seems to us to usurp, a place out of all proportion to its importance in life. One is not always thinking of one's neighbour's wife, even though one should have the misfortune to affect her. Yet it is just there that Boccaccio's comic genius is seen at its best; it is his most frequent theme. And just there too we come upon the unreality of this most real book. His spose are all beautiful young women who live in the arms of beautiful youths; they are nearly all adulteresses; Griselda, indeed, might seem to be the only faithful wife among them. Consider, then, the wife of Pietro di Vincolo,[668] who sells herself fresh and lovely as she is. Consider the pretty Prunella the Neapolitan, who abandons herself voluptuously in her husband's presence to Gianello Galeone.[669] She, like the rest, is not only without regret, but without scruple. They all have this extraordinary astuteness, this readiness of the devil. There is Sismonda, the wife of the rich merchant Arriguccio Berlinghieri.[670] There is Isabella, who loved Leonetto, and Monna Beatrice, who to her adultery adds contempt of her husband, when, victorious at last, trembling with voluptuousness, she kisses and re-kisses "the sweet mouth" of the happy and delighted Lodovico.[671] Nor is she by any means alone, they are all her sisters. Lydia[672] is even more wily, Bartolommea more shameless.[673]

And if the women are thus joyful, lustful, and cunning, the husbands are fools. Yet Boccaccio knows well how to draw the honest peasant, the hard-working artisan, the persistent and adventurous merchant, and a harder thing—the man of good society, such as Federigo degli Alberighi,[674] when he will.

What he cannot do is to compose a tragedy; he has not a sufficiently virile moral sense for it, and so just there he fails with the rest of his Latin brethren. But as a writer of comedy he is one of the greatest masters; and as a master of comedy he was in some degree at the mercy both of it and of his audience. This may excuse him perhaps for his too persistent stories about adulteries. The deceived husband was always a comic figure; he probably always will be. This being granted, we shall not judge the women of Boccaccio's time by his tales, and it might seem that we should discount in the same way his stories about the clergy. Like every other comic master, he naturally finds some of his choicest material among them, who always have been, are now, and ever will be a never-failing source of amusement. But here we must go warily, for Boccaccio's treatment of the clergy might almost be said to exhaust what little moral indignation he was possessed of. "I have spoken the truth about the friars," he tells us with an immense relief in the conclusion to his work, and if he had not time, courage, or opportunity to tell us the truth about the monks, the nuns, and the secular clergy, he has left us, it must be confessed, some very remarkable evidence. His whole attitude of attack is different when he exposes the clergy; moreover, while we have no evidence at all in support of his supposed representation of the married woman as universally adulterous—and it may be questioned whether it was his intention to leave us with any such impression—we have ample evidence from the best possible sources of the frightful wickedness, immorality, and general rottenness of the clergy, both religious and secular, monks, friars, nuns, and priests. We have only to consult the pages of S. Catherine of Siena[675] to find every separate accusation of Boccaccio's confirmed ten times over, with a hundred others added to them which he has failed to bring forward. Nor is it only in the mouth of S. Catherine that Boccaccio is justified. Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, had long ago informed Innocent IV that the Curia was the source of all that vileness which rendered the priesthood a reproach to Christianity. Alexander IV himself described the corruption of the people as proceeding from the clergy. What this had become after the Black Death we know not only from Boccaccio, Petrarch, and S. Catherine, but from every writer of the time. The Church was rotten to the core, she seemed about to sink for ever into the pit of her abominations. Consider, then, what such a beast as the priest of Varlungo must have been in a village; consider the rector of Fiesole. Is Boccaccio's irony too bitter? Is it any wonder that Monna Belcolore answers the wolf of Varlungo, "There is never a one of you priests but would overreach the very devil."

As for the friars, we should not recognise in any one of them the brother of S. Francis or S. Dominic. Consider them then: Fra Cipolla[676] is a lovely rogue of the best; who more cunning than Fra Alberto da Imola;[677] who more eagerly wily than Fra Rinaldo;[678] who more goat-like and concupiscent than Fra Rustico? The only son of S. Francis illumined with light and piety is the confessor of Ser Ciappelletto,[679] and he has no name, and is, I fear, quickly forgotten.

Nor have we better news of the nuns[680] or the monks,[681] and indeed, so far as the clergy are concerned, the Decameron is as eager in its attack on wickedness as the Divine Comedy itself, though its justice is tempered with kindness and its scorn with a sort of pity, a sort of understanding.

And indeed, if we compare the book with that of Dante, a much greater man, it holds its own because of its humanity. Dante puts the centre of gravity into the next world. He hates this world almost without ceasing, and has dared to arraign it before his hatred. His satire is cruel, unjust, intolerant, and vindictive. Of course we are wont to excuse all this on account of the genius which it expressed, of its sincerity and beauty of form. Boccaccio, however, with less than half Dante's genius, was not subject to his madness. He was content to satirise what is bad, the bad customs of ecclesiastics and of fools; but he excuses and pardons all too because of the "misfortunes of the time," and above all he understands.

But if we may not compare the Decameron, the Human Comedy, with the Divine Comedy of Dante as a work of art, we may claim for it that it was the greatest though not quite the first prose work in the Tuscan tongue. But Italian prose maybe said to consist of the Decameron alone for a hundred years after Boccaccio's death. It is written in a very beautiful but very complicated style, a sort of poetical prose—exquisite, it is true, but often without simplicity. Yet who will dare to attack it? It has justified itself, if need be, as every great work has done, by its appeal to mankind, its utter indifference to criticism.

That the Decameron, though widely read and enthusiastically received, was censured very strongly in its own day we gather from the Proem to the Fourth Day and from the Conclusion to the work; while later the book did not escape the knife of the Church, though it was never suppressed.[682] That it was enthusiastically received in its day we know from contemporary documents,[683] and though Petrarch failed to understand it, he praised it in certain places, which were those, it seems, that were the most rhetorical. He translated the last tale of Griselda into Latin, however, but as he tells us, he had known this for many years. Petrarch, however, stood alone; from the day the Decameron was finished its influence both in Italy and abroad was very great.

The original manuscript has disappeared, and the oldest we possess seems to be that written in 1368 by Francesco Mannelli, though the later Hamilton MS. now in Berlin is the better of the two.[684] More than ten editions were, however, printed in the fifteenth century, and some seventy-seven in the sixteenth; while there is not a Novelliere in Italian literature for many centuries who has not inspired himself with the Decameron. Its fortune abroad was almost equally good. Hans Sachs, Molière, La Fontaine,[685] Lope de Vega, to mention only European names, were in its debt; and in England our greatest poets have drawn from it, once the form and often the substance of their work. One has only to name Chaucer, Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, Dryden,[686] Keats,[687] and Tennyson[688] to suggest England's debt to Boccaccio. And although our prose literature, strangely enough, produced no great original example of this school of fiction, its influence was shown by the number of translations and imitations of the "mery bookes of Italy," when, according to Ascham, "a tale of Bocace was made more account of than a story out of the Bible."[689]

In his Praise of Poets, Thomas Churchyard, referring to Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, says—

Of these three great Italians Dante was by far the least known, and William Thomas, in his Dictionarie (1550) defines "Dante Aldighieri" as "the name of a famous poet in the Italian tongue," while he does not think it necessary to explain who Petrarch and Boccaccio are.[690] Sir Philip Sidney, it is true, refers to Dante several times, with the other two, and even mentions Beatrice in his Defence of Poesie, yet there is no trace of Dante's influence in his work. The only writer after Chaucer who shows internal evidence of knowing Dante fairly well is Sir John Harrington, the translator of Orlando Furioso. In his Apology of Poetry he refers to Dante's relations to Virgil, and in the Allegorie of the fourth book of his translation he translates the first five lines of the Inferno:—

Spenser does not mention Dante though he used him; but in the Epistle to Gabriel Harvey prefixed to the Shepherd's Calendar he speaks of Boccaccio as well as of Petrarch and others.

That Boccaccio was well known in England, at least by name, in the fourteenth century, seems certain. Sacchetti (1335-1400) in the Proemio to his Novelle writes as follows: "... and taking into consideration the excellent Florentine poet Messer Giovanni Boccaccio, who wrote the Book of the Hundred Tales in one material effort of his great intellect, ... that (book) is so generally published and sought after, that even in France and England they have translated it into their language ... and I, Franco Sacchetti, though only a rude and unrefined man, have made up my mind to write the present work." All trace of any such translation, if indeed it was ever made, has been lost.[692] In fact, it might seem that the only man in England at that time really capable of carrying out such a task, worthily at least, was Geoffrey Chaucer, who, though for some reason we can never know he refused to mention Boccaccio's name, adapted and translated the Teseide, the Filostrato, and it seems, three tales from the Decameron—the first of the Eighth Day, the fifth of the Tenth Day, and the tenth of the Tenth Day.[693] May it not have been Chaucer's work to which Sacchetti referred? It was not until 1566 that any translation even of isolated stories from the Decameron appeared; in that year and the following Painter's Palace of Pleasure was published, which contained sixteen stories translated from the Decameron. Then in 1579 came the Forest of Fancy, by H. C., in which two more appeared, while Tarlton's News out of Purgatorie (1590) contained four more, and the Cobler of Caunterburie, published in the same year, two more. These and other translations of isolated stories will best be shown by a table.[694]

Such were the stories from the Decameron that had been translated in English when in 1620 the first practically complete edition appeared, translated inaccurately, but very splendidly, apparently from the French version of Antoine Le Macon. Isaac Jaggard published it, in folio in two parts, with woodcuts, and the title bore no translator's name. In 1625 this edition was reprinted, the title bearing the legend "Isaac Jaggard for M. Lownes":[695] other editions appeared in 1655 and 1657 and 1684, making five editions in all during the seventeenth century. In 1700 Dryden's translations appeared of the Three Tales: Decameron, IV 1, V 1, and V 8. A new translation, practically complete, appeared in 1702, and was, I think, twice reprinted in 1722 and 1741. Certainly eight editions were published in the nineteenth century[696] and two have appeared already in the twentieth.[697] The first really complete translation to appear in English, however, was that of Mr. John Payne, printed for the Villon Society (1886), but the first complete translation to pass into general circulation was that of Mr. J. M. Rigg, 1896-1905, which is rendered with a careful accuracy and much spirit.

"The ordinary recreations which we have in Winter," says Burton in the Anatomy of Melancholy, "and in most solitary times busy our minds with, are Cards, Tables and Dice, Shovel-board, Chess-play, the Philosopher's game, Small Trunks, Shuttle-cock, Billiards, Musick, Masks, Singing, Dancing, Yulegames, Frolicks, Jests, Riddles, Catches, Purposes, Questions and Commands, Merry Tales of Errant Knights, Queens, Lovers, Lords, Ladies, Giants, Dwarfs, Thieves, Cheaters, Witches, Fairies, Goblins, Friars, etc., such as the old women told [of] Psyche in Apuleius, Boccaccio's Novels and the rest, quarum auditione pueri delectantur, senes narratione, which some delight to hear, some to tell, all are well pleased with."

Well, after all, we are our fathers' sons, and (God be thanked) there are still winter evenings in which, while the rest are occupied with Burton's frolicks and jests, dancing and singing and card-play, we, in some cosy place, may still turn the old immortal pages.

APPENDICES

APPENDIX I

THE DATES OF BOCCACCIO'S ARRIVAL IN NAPLES AND OF HIS MEETING WITH FIAMMETTA

That the date of the arrival of Boccaccio in Naples commonly accepted, namely the end of 1330, is inadmissible, has, I think, been proved by Della Torre (op. cit., caps. ii. and iii.), who gives us many good reasons to think that the true date was December 13, 1323. With his conclusions I agree, nor do I see how they are easily to be put aside.

To begin with, the departure of Idalagos in the Filocolo[698] forms part of the same episode as the birth of the fratellastro, so that it would seem the two events cannot have been separated by any great length of time; certainly not by nine years, which would be the case if Boccaccio really left Florence in 1330, for Francesco the fratellastro was born in 1321.[699]

Again, Boccaccio tells us that at the time of his departure Idalagos was "semplice e lascivo,"[700] which would scarcely be epithets to apply to a youth of seventeen years. And then, even though we pass that, what are we to think of a youth of seventeen who is so mortally afraid of his stepmother and his little brother, aged say nine, that to save his life, as he thinks, he runs away? Certainly this youth is very unlike Boccaccio. Whatever the date may be, then, the year 1330 would seem to be out of the question.

At that time it was the custom of men to divide human life into seven ages, as Shakespeare records later. These seven ages we find were Infanzia, Puerizia, Gioventù or Adolescenza, Virilità, Vecchiaia, and Decrepitezza. The first three of these ages corresponded to the following years, thus:—[701]

Now Boccaccio tells us quite clearly, "io ... fanciullo cercai i regni Etrurii, e di quelli in più ferma età venuto, qui [that is to Naples] venni."[702] That is to say: "I came to Tuscany before I was seven years old, and during my boyhood (Puerizia) between the ages of seven and fourteen, between the years 1320-1327, I came to Naples."

Does that seem a little far-fetched, a little as though we were trying to prove too much, with such vague words? Let us have patience. When after six years with the merchant in Naples, Boccaccio is abandoned by Abrotonia and Pampinea, they appear to him in a dream and tell him it was not for them he really sang, but for another. Then there comes to him a dream in which he sees this other, and recognises her as the lady who had welcomed him to Naples—"questa era colei, che nella mia puerizia vegnendo a questi luoghi, apparitami e baciatomi, lieta m' avea la venuta profferta."[703] Nor does this passage stand alone. When on Holy Saturday he sees Fiammetta face to face, he recognises her as the lady who had lately appeared to him it is true, but first—"Questa è colei che nella mia puerizia e non ha gran tempo ancora, m' apparve ne' sonni miei...." Now puerizia, boyhood, fell, as we have seen, between the ages of seven and fourteen—between the years 1320 and 1327 in Boccaccio's case.

To clinch the matter, as we might think, in the De Genealogiis, xv. 10, Boccaccio tells us that he entered the merchant's office before he was adolescent—"adolescentium nondum intrantem," that is to say before he was fifteen and before the year 1328. So that it might seem to be proved not only that he came to Naples before 1330, but that he came to Naples between the years 1320 and 1327. Now old Boccaccio himself came to Naples in the autumn of 1327—did Boccaccio then come with him? This at first sight seems likely; let us enquire into it.

In the De Genealogiis, xv. 10, Boccaccio tells us that he was six years with the merchant, wasting his time, "Sex annis nil aliud feci quam non recuperabile tempus in vacuum terere." That is to say, if he came to Naples with his father in 1327, he was still with the merchant in 1333, when he was twenty years old. But Benvenuto da Imola[704] seems to tell us that Boccaccio was sixteen when he began to study Canon Law; in other words, if we read that author aright, Boccaccio began to study Canon Law in 1329. This will not square with the theory that he came to Naples in 1327, but it admirably fits our claim that he came to Naples in 1323, and after six years with a merchant began to study Canon Law in 1329, when he was sixteen years old.

But we know that whatever else may be insecure in this question, it is at least certain that the departure of Boccaccio for Naples took place before the meeting with Fiammetta, for it was in Naples that he first saw her. At first sight this might seem to help us little, for the date of the meeting with Fiammetta is more disputed than anything else in Boccaccio's chronology, the date usually given being either 27th March, 1334, or 11th April, 1338.[705] We do not accept either of these dates. However, let us examine what evidence we have.

In the introduction to the Filocolo Boccaccio tells us that he first saw and fell in love with Fiammetta on that Holy Saturday which fell in the sixteenth grado after the sun was entered into Aries. I give the whole passage, as the argument depends upon it:—

The whole question is then: on what day did the sun enter Aries, in other words, on what day did Spring begin. We seem to be on the point of solving the difficulty by answering that question—an easy task—for sixteen days afterwards in the year we seek it was Holy Saturday, and Boccaccio then saw Fiammetta for the first time. The solution is, however, on consideration, not quite so simple. We have to ask not only when did Spring begin, but on what day did Boccaccio think it began; when did he think the sun entered Aries?

As we know, Chaucer, Boccaccio's contemporary, thought Spring began on 12th March,[707] but Chaucer's "Treatise on the Astrolabe" was written in 1391, more than fifty years after the Filocolo.

All sorts of opinions have been expressed by scholars as to the date that was in Boccaccio's mind as that which marked the entry of the sun into Aries. Baldelli[708] thinks it was March 21st; Witte[709] and Koerting[710] say the 25th; Casetti[711] says the 14th; and Landau[712] says the 11th. The whole question is more or less complicated by the fact that the Julian Calendar was in use.

We shall, then, find ourselves in agreement with many good scholars if we say that Boccaccio thought Spring began on the 25th March (see infra), and calculating thus, we shall find that he first met Fiammetta on April 11th, 1338, when he was twenty-five years old.[713] This, however, is only conjecture.

If we ask ourselves, then, on what day Spring really did begin, we shall find ourselves in agreement with Casetti, who names the 14th March. Why should Boccaccio have been ignorant of this? He cannot have been ignorant of it. Are all his studies with Calmeta and Andalò di Negro to go for nothing? He must have known when Spring began better than most men. If then we take the 14th March as the date and add the sixteen gradi to it, we arrive at the 30th. Now Holy Saturday fell on the 30th March in 1331 and in 1336. Which of these two dates is the true one? The earlier we think.

If for the moment we admit that he came to Naples in 1323, he must have met Fiammetta in 1331, not in 1336, for he himself gives us to understand that seven years and four months passed between his advent and that Holy Saturday.[714] It seems then most likely that he left home in 1323 and saw Fiammetta for the first time in 1331. If we argue back from the year 1336 (and, as has been shown, he met Fiammetta certainly either in 1331 or in 1336), we find that he left home in 1329, when he was sixteen. That would be open to as many objections as the year 1330 (see supra). Without actual certainty we may claim that the years 1323 and 1331 that have a secure relationship exactly fit in with all the secondary evidence that has been brought to bear upon the argument.

Our conclusions are then: that Boccaccio entered Naples in December, 1323; that he was with a merchant for six years, till 1329, in which year he began to study Canon Law. For sixteen months he had followed this study (so that he left the merchant in the winter of 1329), when on Holy Saturday, March 30, 1331, at the age of eighteen, he first saw and fell in love with Fiammetta.[715]

APPENDIX II

DOCUMENT OF THE SALE OF "CORBIGNANO" (CALLED NOW "CASA DI BOCCACCIO") BY BOCCACCINO IN 1336