Boccaccio on Poetry

 

 References to Boccaccio in parentheses specify the book and section of the Genealogia deorum gentilium.  I used the edition translated, introduced, and edited by Charles Osgood which contains only the poetic theory contained in the XIV and XV books under the title Boccaccio on Poetry.  Numbers in brackets indicate endnotes.

 

     Most medieval literary theory is couched in the language of rhetoric, inherited from ancient authorities like Cicero,  Quintilian, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, and the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum.  Works by Matthew of Vendôme, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and John of Garland focused on figures of speech, thought, and sound, a tradition continued in the Renaissance by scholars like Puttenham and Peacham.  Many moderns are unsympathetic to such an approach as it eschews the emphases on originality, individuality, and inspiration we have inherited from the Romantics.  Yet ancients and moderns alike assert poetry’s special capacity to embody the truth.  Whereas rhetoric is linked with sophism and often suspected of subverting piety and moral order (by Plato and others), poetry has since archaic times been thought in some sense divine and the source of knowledge, spirituality, and moral behavior.  Many ancient authors accepted the Horatian formula that poetry must delight and instruct [1], and, indeed, some modern critics [2] maintain the idea that reading literature makes people better, not merely wiser, but more moral. 

     The concern with theme, what the writer implies about lived experience, and the idea that poetry can uplift readers spiritually, morally, and intellectually is central to Boccaccio’s defense of poetry against critics to whom all non-Christian art is frivolous and probably sinful.  To him even the pagan poets are sources of religious knowledge, albeit with vision limited by not knowing Christ (XIV, 8).  “Poetry devotes herself to something greater [than pursuit of money]; for while she dwells in heaven, and mingles with the divine counsels, she moves the minds of a few men from on high to a yearning for the eternal, lifting them by her loveliness to high reverie” (XIV, 4).  While they lack the inspiration the Holy Ghost lent sacred writers, they are similarly elevated by “mere energy of mind,” for which reason they are called “seers” (XIV, 8).  To him all literature is “a form of discourse which, under guise of invention, illustrates or proves an idea” (XIV, 9).  Poets are then “stimulators of virtue” (XIV, 15) and their works are “maidservants of Philosophy” (XIV, 18).  They may be at time obscure (XIV, 12), and their words may bear multiple meanings [3] (XIV, 12), but these difficulties serve the representation of complex truths.  For him the “sap of Philosophy” runs throughout imaginative literature (XIV, 10).  In his grand (if irritable) polemical style, those who cannot see the real meaning in poetry are denounced as “fools,” “madmen,” “blind,” idiots,” and the like.

     The basis for his analysis is the claim that myths, like poetry, are always allegorical, in the broadest sense of saying something other than the literal content.  This is the nature of rhetorical figures as a whole, and for Boccaccio myth always signifies something other than the apparent meaning. Fiction is for him “far from superficial”; it possesses always a “hidden truth” (XIV, 9).  For him the primary exception to literature’s noble role is certain comic writers whom he repeatedly dismisses as altogether pernicious, really sub-literary.

     Boccaccio’s defense of poetry occurs in the prefaces to the fourteenth and fifteenth books of his magnum opus, the Genealogia deorum gentilium (On the Genealogy of the Gods of the Gentiles) a massive attempt to set forth systematically the entire body of Classical mythology.  Boccaccio clearly regarded this as his magnum opus.  He expanded and revised the book over a period of fifteen years until his death, and it proved popular then for several hundred years.  The text was copied as a whole in forty-seven manuscripts and in part in many more.  The printed editio princeps appeared in 1472, followed by at least seven other editions in Latin before 1532 as well as translations into modern European languages.  Neglected now, it was long his best-known work. 

     Boccaccio’s ambition for this fifteen-volume work of scholarship goes well beyond providing information in a convenient form.  The understanding of Classical mythology for him was far more than a source of ornamentation for poets; it was a route to truth.  Whereas Thomas Bulfinch and Edith Hamilton primarily wished to make allusions explicable to modern readers, Boccaccio saw in myth something truer than true, something sublime and transcendent.  Mythic systems are all encyclopedic; they aim to account for all phenomena.  This is true of Babylonian, Egyptian, Germanic, Yoruba, and Hindu myths as well as those of ancient Greece and Rome.  Though their truths are always symbolic and poetic, they are nonetheless accurate.  Thus to master a mythological system is, in theory, to understand the world.  This all-inclusive hunger for vision explains why the book is so long and complex.  Long before the nineteenth century higher criticism distinguished between the J, E, and P versions of the Hebrew god, Boccaccio had differentiated three different Joves. 

     Mythology is one part of a program of Liberal Arts education, a term that yet survives though in practice such general training has been largely displaced in higher education by vocational courses.  For Boccaccio a Liberal Arts curriculum is required to develop “a wonderful keenness of mind” that leads to “the very inner mysteries of sacred philosophy” (XIV, 9).  Victorians justified the study of Classical languages as a sort of calisthenics for the brain, a preparation for the sort of problem-solving one encounters in everyday life, but for Boccaccio familiarity with Greek and Latin literature provided enlightenment directly.  In today’s decay of general culture and wide-open dispute about values, with the crassest material index, money, by far the most generally accepted, one might do worse than to immerse oneself in Homer and Vergil.

     Boccaccio was simply following the taste of his day in seeking to salvage the beauties of ancient poetry by claiming a moral purpose in the fanciful and sometimes racy stories of the gods.  In his own fourteenth century the L’Ovide Moralisé appeared provided thematic readings consistent with Christianity for the old stories of transformation.  Other examples of this pervasive approach to Classical mythology fill John Gower’s Confessio Amantis.  Gower concludes his treatment of the story of Actaeon (admittedly one of the stories more most amenable to a Christianized interpretation) with this cautionary warming.

 

Lo now, my Sone, what it is

A man to cast his yhe amis,

which Acteon hath dere aboght

Be war forthi and do it noght.

                                        (I, 379-382)

 

Many of the readings found there are similar to Boccaccio’s commentaries.  Both for instance, see the story of Apollo and Daphne as a cautionary tale warning against sexual indulgence and praising chastity and restraint. 

     The most common strategies Boccaccio adopts are euhemerism and moralizing.  For instance, he first glosses the story of Antaeus whom Hercules defeated by holding him in the air, out of contact with the earth, as an account of a historical king who founded the city of Tinge (Tangiers) who was so skilled at wrestling that he might be seen to draw strength from standing on the earth.  He then provides the ethical reading, saying that the earth here signifies such “lower” impulses as lust which can be defeated with discipline (I, 13).

     Some of his notions are more fanciful than others.  Venus’ attendant nymph Peristera may reasonably be considered to have been inspired by a “famous Corinthian prostitute,” yet the association of her nymphs with “the perpetual moisture in which the moon abounds” is pure whimsy, and no scholar would accept the derivation of the goddess’ name from “venam rem,” “an empty thing” (V, 2).  Yet even the more extravagant interpretations are significant, of Boccaccio’s vision if not of the ancients’.  The reader might regard his wilder speculations as the effervescence of intellectual ferment, not so different from some inventive post-structuralist readings.

     Moderns may lack the moral certainty that allows Boccaccio to distinguish “good muses,” “worthy of praise and reverence,” from “bad” ones, “obscene and detestable” (XIV, 20) [4], but many cling to the notion that literature improves the individual.  As this defense of art has been asserted since ancient times and Boccaccio adds little to the claim, the primary interest of moderns in his analysis in the Genealogia is instead his argument on behalf of the study of myth, believing, in a medieval anticipation of commentators like Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, that such apparently fanciful and factually erroneous stories may encode profound wisdom and his broader belief that the study of the Liberal Arts exercises the mind in such a way as to elevate students’ behavior as well as their cognitive skills.  To him the sublime, a moral as well as an aesthetic category, is accessible through the language of mythology and the stories of the ancients provide the most complete, beautiful, and true symbolic representation of reality.

  

1.  Though present in earlier writers including Aristotle, this dictum is traditionally ascribed to Horace whose Epistle ad Pisonem states the concept several times.  “The poet strives to delight and help, at the same time to be pleasant and serviceable”  ("Aut prodesse uolunt aut delectare poetae aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere uitae."), “the useful and the sweet mixed” ("miscuit utile dulci"),  and "giving pleasure and admonitions" ("delectando pariterque monendo").  Sir Philip Sidney makes the same claim central in his “Defense of Poesy” as do many writers such as Matthew Arnold since.

 2.  Such views are today marginal.  See, for example, my brother James Seaton’s Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism: The Humanistic Alternative or psychologist Stephen Pinker’s The Better Angles of Our Nature.

 3.  Boccaccio several times delineates these varieties of interpretation, relying (though not absolutely) on the four-fold system of Biblical hermeneutics derived from Jewish practices, elaborated in Origen’s Quadriga, and refined by Augustine.  See XIV, 13.

4.  It is more revelatory about the Catholic Church and European culture than about poetry in general that the main moral deficiencies Boccaccio notes seem to be sexual misdeeds.

Courtly Love in Romance of the Rose

     The thirteenth century allegory Romance of the Rose was immensely popular. Over three hundred manuscripts exist, and other authors frequently allude to the poem. A reading of this poem cannot fail to bear on the most fundamental discussions of the nature of courtly love, still in dispute after almost a millennium. The combination of sensual, spiritual, aesthetic, social, and political ideals produces a fascinating play of tensions in the poem, as indeed in lived experience.
     To limit the scope of this consideration, I will discuss only the first 4058 lines, those by Guillaume de Lorris. [1] This decision is, I know, reductive. The poem, including the more than 17,000 lines added by Jean de Meun, was read as a single work for hundreds of years and I believe that produces the best results, just as it does with the Bible (and Huizinga was speaking of the Romance considered as a whole when he called it the “breviary of the aristocracy”).
     The physical, erotic element is central. Unlike Jaufre Rudel’s love from afar or the dolce stil novisti, physical consummation is the explicit goal. At the conclusion of his part of the poem, Guillaume’s speaker makes love to the rose and expects her to be available in future despite their temporary separation. (anonymous conclusion, l. 34) Initially he had been attracted by her scent (VII, 48) and, when the companions of Mirth abandon their dance, it is to make love “beneath the secret-keeping boughs” (V, 11). How could it be otherwise when, as the poet says,


. . .there’s no better paradise on earth
than any place where lover finds a maid
responding freely to his heart’s desire.
(V, 16-18)


     Even the artificial convention of love’s entering by the eyes accurately conveys the role of visual stimuli in people’s eroticism and the wounding by love’s dart implies a real life passivity and a “bittersweet” experience. (VIII, 10) This realistic biological focus provides the libidinous energy to support the elaborate structure of courtly love.
     Though contemplation of Ultimate Reality may seem far removed from sex, the two have been linked in many cultures. One reads in Frazer of traditional people having ceremonial intercourse on their fields to ensure their fertility. Daoist and Tantric adepts have sought to integrate the physical here-and-now with the eternal. For Plato the beloved leads naturally to the Perfect. Even in Christianity, with its deep suspicion of the body, the rhetoric of St. Bernard on the Song of Songs and of the Victorines, the poetry of Mechthild von Magdeburg and St. John of the Cross, to mention only a few names, all indicate deep and significant links between sexuality and worship. Indeed the whole approach of the devotional sensibility to the divine is susceptible to expression in the imagery of human love.
     The relationship may vary. The physical can present a comic or bathetic debunking of the pretensions of the holy. For Chaucer’s Prioress “amor vincit omnia,” yet for all the pious anti-Semitism of her tale, she is clearly no exemplar of the religious life. The love imagery may simply be the best worldly analogy for the devotional emotion of some devotees as in Hildegard of Bingen’s “Columba aspexit.” In such medieval lyrics as “Maiden in the mor lay” the two are so intimately commingled that critics debate whether the poems are secular or religious.
     Section XVI, in which Franchise and Pity intercede for the lover, features much religious terminology. They plead his case “for God’s love.” (6) When Danger (who had herself earlier sworn by Christ, XIII, 74) relents, he is “raised from Hell to Paradise” (72) as Fair Welcome leads in a recitation of the rosary. (74) Far from satire, the poet here emphasizes his case with the strongest language possible, rather like one saying his lover is most beautiful in the world or that their relationship is a unique marvel. The psychological reality may be that one feels such conviction at times, but these hyperboles are cultivated figures of speech as well, admired as elegant and artistic.
     In fact aesthetic criteria enter here no less than in the cast of unpleasant allegorical figures outside the wall. Obdurate rejection of the lover would be culpable “discourtesy” (50), a violation of taste and a lapse from the standards of one’s class. Danger is scolded, not for causing pain or doing wrong, but because “You dishonour but yourself .” (9)
     In a clever dodge of the moral implications of love, the lover’s particular infatuation in the Romance of the Rose arises not from the extraordinary qualities of the rose, but rather from a charm, rather like that in Tristan and Iseult. The lover is thus helpless, bound after a glance in the marvelous Mirror Perilous. [2] While this may convey the potent sense of compulsion felt by a lover, it also frees him from any responsibility for his actions.
     The aesthetic and the social meanings of courtly love are closely linked. Refinement and sophistication became important signifiers of high social position, a position they retain to some extent yet today. The earliest narratives about King Arthur focus almost exclusively on the king’s strength and martial valor, whereas the later ones dwell on the love-exploits of Galahad and Lancelot.
     Skill at love became another indicator of nobility (and treatment of women still provided the measure of the gentleman in Victorian times), but it was hardly the sole aristocratic skill. When King Mark’s huntsman first encounters Tristan in the woods, he shows them a more elegant way of butchering their prey, and then prescribes a ceremonious protocol for transporting it, impressing everyone including the king with his accomplished taste. From the quasi-martial tourneys, sports, and hunting to poetry, music, and wit, the courtly man sought to master each so that he might practice each with grace and ease. [3]
     The cultivated man, just like the man of sensibility in the eighteenth century (who survives today in etiolated form as the “sensitive” man) was necessarily a man of property. In fact, his aesthetic and cultural acquisitions imply wealth and may at least partly compensate for its lack. Tristan himself seemed a lost wanderer, but gained acceptance because of his sophistication. The same quality, however, made him a lover, and thus a threat to his patron the king.
     The first section of the Romance describes the ugly figures on the outside of the garden wall (which express in negative the glories within). Many are conventional moral failings such as hatred, anger, and covetousness, but others are purely aesthetic. Old Age, for instance, appears as hideous and apparently demented (II, 142 ff.), inspiring a wholly pagan riff on Time. Poverty is there as well, and the poet curses “the hour in which poor men are conceived” without any regard for their role in producing the wealth that supports the genteel.
     He does, however, recognize the essential characteristic of the ruling class when the dreamer is admitted to the exclusive garden by Idleness (III, 40), and in Part VIII (11 ff.) Love approaches the dreamer as a feudal vassal, reproducing even in the realm of desire the structures of society and thus reinforcing them.
     Surely, then, the most reasonable and productive concept of courtly love is pluralistic, recognizing a group of characteristics that may be selected and used by different writers over a number of centuries and over an entire continent (and beyond) [4] in a variety of ways and yet share enough elements to justify the common term. The continua I have suggested -- sensual, spiritual, aesthetic, and social -- may be useful for distinguishing one use of the concept from another while maintaining at the same time a clear view of the significant shared elements. Works that tend toward the encyclopedic (such as the entire Romance of the Rose, the Canterbury Tales, Confessio Amantis, the corpus of troubadour poetry or of romances) will be likely to vary considerably, even to the point of self-contradiction.
     In the Romance of the Rose the outright opponent of Love is Reason (XIV) which might imply an element of arbitrariness to all of those definitive social values for the upper class of the Middle Ages. One’s love, one’s god, one’s taste, one’s place in the structure of society – all of these perhaps would be equally liable to the assault of Reason, but the poet makes the human choice, rejecting logic for the endlessly absorbing pastime of elaborating the relations between men and women.



1. Some critics would have it that Guillaume’s section is less problematized than Jean’s. My partial reading here will make it clear that I cannot agree.

2. The incestuous father in Emaré is similarly under a spell. For a more extreme version of the Mirror Perilous, see Borges’ “Aleph.”

3. Castiglione’s The Courtier provides a full curriculum “to practice in all things a certain sprezzatura [nonchalance], so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.” 32

4. The partially Arab origins of Europeans’ courtly love has been demonstrated by Nykl and others. Beyond that rich evidence exists in Persian and Indian poetry, in Li Shang Yin, and elsewhere. Peter Dronke provides a nice collection of passages in Medieval Latin and the Rise of the European Love-Lyric. See also Discourses of Power, Grammar, and Rhetoric in the Middle Ages by Carol Poster and Richard J. Utz