Making War On The Widow: Boccaccio'S Il Corbaccio and Florentine Liberty

MAKING WAR ON THE WIDOW: BOCCACCIO’S IL CORBACCIO
AND FLORENTINE LIBERTY
by 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 celes-
tial light, a thought (“un pensiero”) 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, 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 an-
nounces that he was formerly married to the very woman in question. He then pro-
ceeds, 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, quarrel-
some, 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 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 completely convinced of his own error, and vows to re-
venge 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 nag-
ging questions: Why would the most prominent early Renaissance defender of women
suddenly turn on them? Why would Boccaccio, an outstanding craftsman of fiction,
invent a story in which the Spirit and the narrator have essentially the same experi-
ence? And why should a man of Boccaccio’s formidable talents assemble such pon-
derous rhetorical weapons in an attack on one woman? As the work itself describes
them,
1
For a discussion of the work’s various titles, including Laberinto d’amore, see the introduction to Gio-
vanni Boccaccio, Il Corbaccio, ed. Tauno Nurmela (Helsinki 1968). Nurmela (16) considers the title Cor-
baccio to be authentic, appearing in the majority of MSS.
128 MICHAELA PAASCHE GRUDIN
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 brush-
wood ...; these words thus spoken are the hammers, the pickaxes, the battering-rams ...]2
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 mi-
sogyny, 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 that
culminated in open warfare in 1375.3
1. THE CRITICAL CONTEXT

I am not the first to find the misogynist interpretations inadequate. More recent read-
ings 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 criticism4—comments that studies of
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 explana-
tions.” 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,” Bar-
ricelli argues that the satire of the Corbaccio “is turned against itself and misogynous
literature generally,” and that the work is (as his title suggests) “a satire of satire.”5
2
Unless otherwise noted, references are to Giorgio Padoan’s (1994) edition of the Corbaccio, Tutte le o-
pere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca, vol. 5.2 (Milan 1994). Translations are my own.
3
The Avignon papacy (1306–1376) is referred to by Boccaccio in 1371 as “the Babylon of the West”;
Giovanni Boccaccio: Le Lettere, ed. Francesco Corazzini (Florence 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 Marti-
nes, “Raging against Priests in Italian Renaissance Verse,” Society & Individual in Renaissance Florence,
ed. William J. Connell (Berkeley 2002) 261–262.
4
Robert Hollander, Boccaccio’s Last Fiction (Philadelphia 1988) 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 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 ...”
5
Gian Piero Barricelli, “Satire of Satire: Boccaccio’s Corbaccio,” Italian Quarterly 18 (1975) 95–111,
esp. 99–102. Barricelli (107) cites critics before him, including Attilo Levi, Il Corbaccio e la Divina Com-
media (Turin 1889); and Francis MacManus, Boccaccio (London 1947) who drew attention to the “Dantean
background” of the work.
MAKING WAR ON THE WIDOW 129
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 misadven-
tures in love) and cannot explain the echoes of Dante except in terms of a “dispropor-
tion” that is ultimately satiric.6 The idea of the Corbaccio as a kind of literary parody
is expanded by both Anthony K. Cassell and Robert Hollander. Cassell’s “Il Corbac-
cio 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 clash.” Seen in this way, the extended and vitupera-
tive misogyny (including the grotesque descriptions of the Widow’s private parts) ul-
timately 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 re-
fined 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. Hol-
lander 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, alert-
ing 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.”10
2. 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
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 atten-
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 hilari-
ous disproportion between the divine Love of the Commedia and the earthly love for Old Crow”; Barricelli
(n. 5 above) 105.
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 ...”; Anthony K. Cassell, “Il Corbaccio and the Secundus Tradition,” Comparative
Literature 25.3 (Fall 1973) 352–360.
8
The Corbaccio or The Labyrinth of Love, trans. and ed. Anthony K. Cassell, 2nd ed. (Binghamton, NY
1993) xii–xvi.
9
Also suggested by Anthony K. Cassell, “An Abandoned Canvas: Structural and Moral Conflict in the
Corbaccio,” Modern Language Notes 89 (1974) 60–70.
10
Hollander, Boccaccio’s Last Fiction (n. 4 above) 7.
tion 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 let-
terati”12 provokes the “uneasiness” that Barricelli described as characterizing re-
sponses to Corbaccio criticism. It fails to account for the Corbaccio’s intriguing vari-
ety of detail, its anger, and its often somber tone. Problems are left hanging, including
perhaps most significantly the Corbaccio’s emphasis on the power of words 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 ac-
knowledgment 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 ...” (Pa-
doan 47); “nella vista mostrando d’avere assai bene le mie parole raccolte e la intenzi-
one di quelle” (Padoan 116). Or the Spirit more than once suggests that both the man-
ner and the mode of the discourse require intense scrutiny: “Tu forse hai teco mede-
simo 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
change, “Nuove cose, e assai dalle passate strane, richiede l’ordine del mio ragiona-
mento” (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 con-
flict in terms more appropriate to institutions, politics, and ideas, than to erotic frus-
tration. The Spirit’s descriptions of his disillusionments with the Widow suggest a
context, like fourteenth-century Florence, in which power, religion, and deceit are pro-
foundly inter-connected. Women are described as “rapide e famelice lupe” and as de-
scended from “rapaci lupi” (Padoan 143, 355) [“swift and starving she-wolves,” “ra-
pacious wolves,”] who have come to occupy the patrimonies, the 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, 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
11
Ibid. 47, n. 13; 7ff.
12
Cassell, trans., Corbaccio (n. 8 above) xv.
13
See 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 men-
daci, / 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. Singleton, 6 vols. (Princeton 1970) 3.302–305.
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 enchaining, shackling, stifling, and entrapping of hu-
man 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 libertà degli uomini
tendono lacciuoli” (Padoan 137). 15 At least once in the Corbaccio, the narrator de-
scribes 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.
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 em-
phasis 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)
[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
14
On the importance of the concept of liberty in 14th-c. Florence, see David S. Peterson,“The War of the
Eight Saints in Memory and Oblivion,” Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence, ed. William J.
Connell (Berkeley 2002) 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.
chap. 1; Gene A. Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society 1343–1378 (Princeton 1962) chaps. 6 and 7;
Marvin B. Becker, “Florentine Politics and the Diffusion of Heresy in the Trecento: A Socioeconomic In-
quiry,” 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 Flor-
ence on the Eve of the Renaissance (1343–1382)” Speculum 38.4 (Oct. 1962) 509–527.
15
See also Padoan 322, 407.
16
For references to Florence, the “contrada,” and our common native city, see Padoan 37, 43, 84, 226;
also 142, 212.
17
See 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,
And when he awakens from the dream, the narrator communicates his own under-
standing of the dream with friends, who “nella mia disposizione medesima tutti con-
correre” (Padoan 409) [“in my same interpretation all agree”].18 The 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 in political and civic affairs”; Martines adds that in the 1360s and 1370s, “un-
der 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 rela-
tion 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 ear-
lier vernacular work,” an envoi, that is, that asks “his book to avoid his beloved, not to
find and inflame her.”21 Here, 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 malvagie femine, 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. (Pa-
doan 413)
[... she is to be stung with a sharper goad than you carry with you; if it be granted by the One
who is giver of every grace, this will at once fearlessly confront and attack her.]
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 (n. 2 above) vol. 9.
18
Nurmela (n. 1 above) 557, here reads esposizione, which recalls the name of Boccaccio’s own
commentary on Dante, Esposizioni sopra la Comedia, public lectures he delivered in Florence that are char-
acterized 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 esposizi-
one allegorica e vera.”
19
Nicolai Rubinstein, “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) 190–
192.
20
Lauro Martines, The Social World of the Florentine Humanists: 1390–1460 (Princeton 1963) 3–4 and
n. 1, citing Eugenio Garin, “I cancellieri umanisti della repubblica florentina da Coluccio Salutati a Bar-
tolomo Scale,” Revista storica italiana 71.2 (1959) 192ff.
21
Hollander, Boccaccio’s Last Fiction (n. 4 above) 17.
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 fol-
lowed by some form of physical or political action.
3. 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 le-
gitimate in the eyes of Boccaccio himself, who not only used allegory, but was a chief
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 charac-
teristically 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 fic-
tion?23 Similarly, in the Trattatello in laude di Dante, 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
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 bus-
ied 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 ec-
logues, 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 be-
came, as for Dante, Giovanni del Virgilio, and Petrarch, a coded version of real
22
For other references to an action outside the text, see Padoan 389, 397.
23
See Boccaccio, Genealogie Deorum Gentilium, ed. Vittorio Zaccaria, Boccaccio ed. Branca, vols. 7–
8.1420; trans. in Boccaccio on Poetry: Being the Preface and Fourteenth and Fifteenth Books of Boccac-
cio’s Genealogiae Deorum Gentilium, ed. Charles G. Osgood (Indianapolis 1956) 52–53.
24
Giovanni Boccaccio, Trattatello in laude di Dante, ed. Luigi Sasso (Milan 1995) 14; Life of Dante,
trans. J. G. Nichols (London 2002) 12. All further references to the Trattatello are to this edition and to the
Nichols trans.
25
Victoria Kirkham, The Sign of Reason in Boccaccio’s Fiction (Florence 1993) 57–58.
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, in-
cluding some characters who stand for himself.27 Within his personal letters as well,
Boccaccio regularly moves into 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 dia-
tribe until the fury of the argument betrays itself to the reader.
4. 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 nar-
rator. The Corbaccio’s Widow is referred to as evil (malvagia);29 and the Spirit ob-
serves that her loquacious pretensions to honesty, devotion, sanctity, and love of fam-
ily—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 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
26
See 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) 120ff., have tended to read the politi-
cal 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) 75, refers to “the very new politically allu-
sive line of the eclogues.” See also Hutton, Boccaccio, 120ff.
27
Written in Certaldo on 5 May 1373 in response to Fra Martino’s questions about the meaning of the
allegory; Boccaccio, Le Lettere (n. 3 above) 261–274.
28
See Hutton, Boccaccio (n. 26 above) 160–161, for a prominent instance of the transition into coded
allegory in a letter to Petrarch of July 1355.
29
See Padoan 397; also, malvagie and malvagità (Padoan 413): “Ma sopra ogni cosa ti guarda di non ve-
nire alle mani delle malvagie femine, e massimamente di colei che ogni demonio di malvagità trapassa e che
della presente tua fatica è 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, Floren-
tine Politics (n. 14 above) 303 n. 20, quotes Buonaccorso Pinti: “Malvagi cherici ch’erano per quello tempo,
i quali mai nè prima nè poi vidi buoni.”
of the twenty-one guilds in 1382 reveal that of all the questions faced by the counsel-
ors, the one most certain to provoke bitter and protracted debate was that of the com-
mune’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—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 democ-
ratic in the republic’s history ... Florence was much less independent during this pe-
riod than has generally been realized.”31
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 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, ava-
ricious, conspiratorial, and venal. Conventional, mundane examples of women’s fail-
ings –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 ex-
ile in 1324, condemned by the pope in 1326, and translated into the Florentine ver-
nacular (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 state, and its opposite as a diseased one: it denounces
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 etterna, sostenere” (Padoan 280) [“how much and
what kind of bitterness must one sustain to cure the soul, which is an eternal thing?”].
31
Becker, “Church and State in Florence” (n. 14 above) 509; Richard C. Trexler, “Florence, by the
Grace of the Lord Pope ...,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 9 (1972) 118–119.
32
Putting 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 1925) and an
anecdote (225) in which a pope remarks that away from Rome the popes would become mere bishops of
Cahors. For Eng. trans. see Petrarch, Book Without a Name: A Translation of the Liber Sine Nomine, trans.
Norman P. Zacour (Toronto 1973) 104.
33
For Dante’s use of the image, see n. 13 above.
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 prop-
erty, see also Trexler, The Spiritual Power (n. 14 above) 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] 155 n. 101): “From the marginal comments, it appears that the primary interest of the text
the corrupting influence of the papacy on the social order—on the individual, the fam-
ily, property, city, and countryside.
In the Corbaccio, the temporal aims of the church—and its courting of and collu-
sion 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 an-
cor 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 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
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 in-
stead 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” (Pa-
doan 211).
This criticism of the Widow in the Corbaccio is strikingly similar to Boccaccio’s
comments about modern popes in a Latin dedication to the De casibus virorum illus-
trium, 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 “by-
passed popes, emperors, and kings,” finally chosing Mainardo de’ Calvalcanti as dedi-
catee 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 re-
joicing 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, and his conviction that
was its confutation of papal primacy”; and Peterson, “The War of the Eight Saints” (n. 14 above) 182, who
notes the manuscript’s “numerous marginal arrows pointing to the passages on tithes and church property.”
35
See Becker, “Florentine Politics” (n. 14 above) 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) 102ff. See also Becker, “Church and State in Florence” (n. 14 above) 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.”
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 puz-
zling, 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 second Absolom,”]37 she ridicules the
narrator and his writings:
Ahi, cattivello a te! Come t’erano quivi colle parole graffiati gli usatti e come v’eri per meno
che l’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 peg-
gio che per te: Aristotile, Tulio, Virgilio e Tito Livio e molti altri uomini illustri, per quel
ch’io creda, tuoi amici e domestici,38 erano come fango da loro e scherniti e anullati, e peg-
gio 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’onore e la gloria di questo mondo ... (Padoan 331–333)
[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, 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.]
This passage must be referring to some prior disparagement of Boccaccio’s work, and,
in view of the references to “Aristotile, Tulio, Virgilio e Tito Livio e molti altri uomini
illustri,” possibly of the De casibus virorum illustrium itself, in which all of these au-
thors are mentioned. If so, the De casibus dedication, with its reference to the likeli-
hood 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.
36
See Giovanni Boccaccio, “Dedica,” De casibus virorum illustrium, ed. Pier Giorgio Ricci and Vitto-
rio Zaccaria, Boccaccio ed. Branca (Milan 1983) 9.1–6. For a discussion of the “redactions” of the De
casibus and the dating of the dedication, see Vittorio Zaccaria, “Le due redazioni del ‘De casibus,’” Studi
sul Boccaccio 10 (1977–1978) 1–26.
37
In this passage (see Padoan 327) the Spirit refers to him as “quello amante, di cui poco avanti dissi al-
cuna 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, and 365. For the story of Absolom, a traitor to his father King David, see 2
Samuel; this rebellion of son against father is invoked by Dante, Inferno 27.134–138.
38
Padoan (589) 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, respec-
tively, of philosophy, rhetoric, poetry, and history) are in fact among those most frequented by Boccaccio].
5. THE SPIRIT
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 sup-
porters 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 the long knives
of his eloquence against the papacy in the Comedia and by refuting the pope’s tempo-
ral authority in the Monarchia. It was Dante who, in his invectives, used the force of
biblical metaphor, allegory and prophecy against his clerical enemies—exactly as
Boccaccio’s Spirit rails against his Widow. Granted, the resemblance is not exact. The
Spirit admits of two vices while he was alive; one of them, avarice, does not conform
to Dante’s biography.40 Here Boccaccio may be making the Spirit’s character more
typically Florentine.41 In Inferno 15.68–69, Dante’s master, Brunetto Latini, calls the
Florentine people “avara, invidiosa e superba” [“avaricious, envious, and proud”], and
warns Dante to cleanse himself of their customs.
Boccaccio, like Dante before him, was among the earliest of a line of distinguished
Florentine scholar/diplomats that 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 re-
cently Robert Hollander) have noted, is remarkably present to Boccaccio as he writes.
39
For a description of the unfolding political situation in Florence in the last years of the 13th c., see
Stephen Bemrose, A New Life of Dante (Exeter 200) esp. chaps. 4 and 5; Giorgio Petrocchi, Vita di Dante
(1983; Rome 1990) 65–69 and 77–103. Boniface VIII’s policy of restraining free 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 had 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
of three 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 and died in Ra-
venna in 1321.
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 di-
soneste 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”].
41
See Nick Havely, Dante and the Franciscans: Poverty and the Papacy in the ‘Commedia’ (Cambridge
2004) 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 ‘of 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, and elsewhere) Boccaccio returns repeatedly to Florentine ava-
rice. The Trattatello in Laude di Dante comments on the avarice of merchants; in the Decameron, Boccac-
cio mentions the decline in excellent and praiseworthy customs, driven away by Florence’s avarice, the
result of its growing prosperity. See Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron 2, ed. Vittore Branca (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; X 8,112: e cfr. Esposizioni, VII all. 58; Consolatoria, passim; e V. Branca, B. medievale, pp.
160 sgg.).”
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 ref-
erence 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 (1365–1367), in the Bargello’s
Cappella di Santa 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 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 al-
lowed 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 “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 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
42
Hollander, Boccaccio’s Last Fiction (n. 4 above) 40–42.
43
Noted extensively by Barricelli and others, and more recently documented in Hollander’s Boccaccio’s
Last Fiction 59–71.
44
An 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 43).
45
See Padoan 63: “... sappi che questo mio vestimento, il quale t’ha, poscia 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 ...”
46
See Zaccaria’s introduction to the De casibus, Boccaccio ed. Branca (Milan 1983) 9.xxxvi–lii.
47
Recent 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 [n. 4
above] 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.”
48
Trattatello, ed. Sasso 59–60: “animo alto e disdegnoso molto”; “Oh isdegno laudevole di mag-
nanimo.” See also Leonardo Bruni Aretino, “Life of Dante,” The Earliest Lives of Dante, trans. James
Robinson Smith (New York 1963) 89; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Eng. trans. H. Rackham (London
1926) esp. III.viii.10; IV.iii.22; IV.v.13–14.
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 par-
don, calling them fitting for depraved, infamous men and not for others.49 Boccaccio
pauses in the Trattatello to explain the political situation in Tuscany that would ac-
count 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 him-
self held the reins of government for the Guelfs, and it was they—not the Ghibel-
lines—who banished him. These events brought on a change in allegiance, and a
reputation for a fierce loyalty to the Ghibellines, so fierce that his reputation in Bolo-
gna 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 ex-
ample, the narrator tells the Spirit that he asked for details about the lady, and then
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 resi-
dence 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 narra-
tor/Boccaccio has indeed—by almost any dating, early or late, of the Corbaccio—vis-
ited the papal curia before, not only once, but on many occasions as an ambassador for
the 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 ac-
tion 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
49
Trattatello, ed. Sasso 60: “... la qual cosa parendogli convenirsi e usarsi in qualunque e depressi e in-
fami 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, Letters of Dante, ed. Paget Toynbee
(Oxford 1920) 158–159.
50
Trattatello, ed. Sasso 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.”
51
See Padoan 87.
52
See Padoan 295.
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:
Forse t’arebbe 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 orec-
chia porta a’ rapaci lupi dello alto legnaggio e 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 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 expecta-
tions which were never consummated, just as the Spirit’s (Dante’s) had been tainted
with excessive sufferance.
6. OVID’S CROW
This stance toward the work explains beautifully the hitherto mysterious title, Il Cor-
baccio.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 de-
nial and severe punishment. The tale, a well-known one in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,
was part of a long and rich tradition with which Boccaccio was familiar.55 In Ovid,
Phoebus’s bird, the raven, is witness to the fair Coronis’s adultery, and though warned
53
For 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, Floren-
tine Politics (n. 14 above) 243ff.
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.
55
Scholars 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 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 [n. 4 above] 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 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 Pro-
posal Concerning the Corbaccio,” Studi sul Boccaccio 16 [1987–1988] 320.
by the crow, who has already been turned black for 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’s anger and seems to suggest that in a
world where authority is distempered, truth is dangerous.56
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 misog-
yny’s obvious and 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 creduli” (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 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 salva-
tion) through words that may cure others’ gullibility. His book is itself Il Corbaccio,
the truthteller.
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 cor-
56
See Bk. 2.542–565, Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Books 1–5, ed. William S. Anderson (Norman, OK
1997); and Ovid Metamorphosis: A New Verse Translation, trans. David Raeburn (London 2004) 78.
57
Boccaccio, Eclogues, trans. Smarr (n. 26 above) 82–83, 96–97.
58
See also Padoan 383. The idea of salvation both for the narrator and the Widow is voiced, as well,
much earlier in the 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 Padoan 111.
59
See 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 ...”].
ruption 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 medi-
cal 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 com-
mon 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 poverty, accuses the pope and his bishops of being
“sinners,” and challenges them to “strive to imitate Christ and the apostles by com-
pletely 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 Boccac-
cio’s correspondence (in a letter of 1371 to Jacopo Pizzinghe) describing the poet
Zanobi da Strada (d. 1361), Boccaccio who has already expressed doubt 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 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 appre-
ciation of them”].
7. 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
60
See Defensor Pacis, trans. Gewirth (n. 34 above) l.1.3–8 (pp. 4–7).
61
Ibid. 2.26.19 (p. 362).
62
Petrarch’s Book, trans. Zacour (n. 32 above) 62–63.
63
Lettere, ed. Corazzini 196: “... quasi eum decoris assumpti poeniteret, tractus auri cupidine in Baby-
lonem 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 (n. 32 above) 71.
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 inso-
far as it is relevant to the Corbaccio, and do so with relatively broad brush 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 atten-
tion.65
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 Corbac-
cio, 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 Jerusa-
lem 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 pros-
tituted 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 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”; “Jeru-
salem 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 ave-
nue of revenge: “Render to her as she hath rendered to you: and double unto her dou-
ble …” (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 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 to-
ward 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.
65
Herbert Grundmann, “Die Papstprophetien des Mittelalters,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 19.1 (1925)
77–140, esp. 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” (118 n. 1).
The dove, too, carries meaning in this prophetic tradition, signifying, according to Grundmann (118), the
most strict, spiritual branch of the Franciscan order. As insects and birds (including the dove) abound in the
Corbaccio, further study of this tradition may help elucidate the historical 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 Ezechiel 16.2 and 16.15–30.
67
See Ezechiel 16.37–42 and Lamentations of Jeremias 2.1–22.
68
See Padoan 134: “Niuno altro animale è meno netto di lei; non il porco ...”
69
See 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.”
Because she says in her heart, I sit a queen and am no widow, and shall see no sor-
row.”
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 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 Additional examples of what Fer-
rante 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 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 handwriting (probably copied about 1348).75 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:
70
See n. 37 above.
71
Joan Ferrante, The Political Vision of the Divine Comedy (Princeton 1984) 110.
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 19.53–57, trans. Singleton (n. 13 above) 1.196–197.
73
L’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: “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. (Pisa 1827) 2.576–577.
74
See Inferno 19.3–4 and 19.106–108.
75
Letters of Dante, ed. Toynbee (n. 49 above) 121.
“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, 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 “pestilenzi-
osa 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 o-neste 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 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 “dis-
eased” 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 “soph-
ism,” which, as he puts it, wears “the guise of the honorable and beneficial” and “is
utterly pernicious to the human race.”80 Marsilio also draws on biblical imagery,
including the apocalyptic in Revelation, to describe the reach and the effect of the pa-
pacy 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 de-
servedly 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 malvagità trapassa” (Padoan 413) [“surpasses
every demon in evil”].
76
The letter’s opening from Lamentations l.l: “Quomodo sola sedet civitas, plena populo! Facta est
quasi vidua domina gentium ...” ; ibid. 121–146.
77
Defensor Pacis, trans. Gewirth (n. 34 above) 4–5, 91, 96; medical images pervade the work.
78
Ibid. 2.1.1, 98–99.
79
Ibid. 1.18.13 (pp. 96–97).
80
Ibid. 1.1.3–8 (pp. 4–7).
81
Ibid. 2.26.19 (p. 363) quoting from Rev. 12.9.
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) ca. 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 publication until after his death, and pro-
tected 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 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 Revela-
tion to describe the harlotry, adultery, deceit, and incestuousness of the curia. Petrarch
expects to be protected by his own death, and his 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 abominable,” “a
spreading plague,” “a wound” though at the outset “capable of treatment ... finally
grown putrid.” 88
82
“Cum semper odiosa fuerit, nunc capitalis es ueritas”; Piur, Petrarcas ‘Buch Ohne Namen (n. 32
above) 63; Petrarch’s Book, trans. Zacour (n. 32 above) 27.
83
Ibid. 12–13, provides a brief history of this collection of letters. They nearly “fell into 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 nine-
teenth century, “Giuseppe Fracassetti, who did more than any other scholar to rescue Petrarch’s correspon-
dence from obscurity,” had reservations about the Liber Sine Nomine, considering it “unworthy of a Catho-
lic and a Franciscan tertiary.” It was finally translated into French in 1885, and into Italian in 1895.
84
Ibid. 28.
85
Ibid. 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”: “Only when I find an exit from
this labyrinth shall I begin living and feel well”; Letters on Familiar Matters: Rerum familiarium libri IX–
XVI, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo (Baltimore 1982) 157. 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 196. E. R. Chamberlin, The Bad Popes (New York 1969) 130, suggests that Petrarch coined the
phrase.
86
Ronald G. Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads (Durham 1983) 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 inter-
ests.” Over the years this inner circle of Florentine intellectuals would also include Luigi Marsili, Filippo
Villani, and Coluccio Salutati.
87
Petrarch’s Book, trans. Zacour (n. 32 above) 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.”
88
Petrarch’s Book, trans. Zacour (n. 32 above) 59, 91, 62, 106.
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,
Laberinto 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 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 power-
ful 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 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 in-
cest, 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: 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
89
Ibid. 72, 108, 75, and 94. Petrarch had used the image of the labyrinth, albeit more briefly and posi-
tively, 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 1327 just at the first hour—April 6th the day—into the labyrinth I
stepped; I see no gate”]. See Petrarch’s Songbooks: Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, trans. James Wyatt
Cook, ed. Gianfranco Contini (Binghamton, NY 1995) 9–10.
90
Petrarch’s Book, trans. Zacour (n. 32 above) 109, 108, 113–117.
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).
“an ambush such as birdcatchers do to catch doves, and because no one sees the snake
hidden in the grass, she often catches the big ones.”93 In reply to the narrator’s com-
ment 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
8. 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 autobiography, one could, as many commenta-
tors 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 Boc-
caccio is writing an allegory, this solution would be unlikely. He would not want to
reveal his 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
92
See Padoan 58, 186.
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 nascosta, 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 Ezechiel.2–6: “The 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.
95
Cassell 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” (Corbaccio [n. 8 above] 98 n. 87). Gior-
gio Padoan, “Sulla datazione del Corbaccio,” Lettere italiane 15 (1963) 1–27, argues for a date around 1365
or 1366, as does Vittore Branca, “Profilo biografico,” Boccaccio: Tutte le opere (Verona 1967) 1.140.
Tauno Nurmela, ed., Il Corbaccio, Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae 146 (1968) 18–21, argues for
an earlier date in the mid 1350s. Robert Hollander, who favors the earlier date, includes a discussion of the
whole problem of dating in Bocccacio’s Last Fiction (n. 4 above) 26–33; for what Hollander calls “a partial
census of some critical views,” including its dating, see 76–77.
96
See also Padoan 124.
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 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 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 pa-
pacy.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 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 ma-
ture 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 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
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. 3–7. Also see Antonio Scolari, “Rilettura del codice Mannelli (a proposto
di una recente edizione del Corbaccio)” Studi di filologia italiana: bulletino dell’Accademia della Crusca 54
(1996) 193–220.
98
Boccaccio was appointed by the city of Florence to give public lectures on Dante’s Comedia. These
began on 23 October 1373 and extended into sometime in 1375, when illness prevented him from complet-
ing the lectures. Boccaccio died on 21 December 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.
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 suspicion 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 apprehen-
sion of these men increased as a result of Albornoz’s successful campaign to recapture the Patrimony”;
“Florentine Politics” (n. 14 above) 70 and n. 59.
100
The Corbaccio introduces the Spirit as “uno uomo senza alcuna compagnia” (Padoan 34). Hollander,
Boccaccio’s Last Fiction (n. 4 above) 47 n. 13, has observed that this is the same way Dante describes Cato
the Younger in Purgatorio I.30–36.
101
These words (emphasis mine) appear in G. Salvemini, Studi Storici (Florence 1901) 71f., and are
cited more recently by Trexler, Spiritual Power (n. 14 above) 20–21.
102
Ibid. 21–23. Trexler cites the work of Robert Davidsohn, Storia di Firenze, 8 vols. (Florence 1956–
1968); interdicts were registered in 1304, 1323, 1328, 1331, 1336, 1341, 1361, and 1373.
103
Trexler, The Spiritual Power (n. 14 above) 1–5. For the volatile nature of this period and its literary
implications, see David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in Eng-
land and Italy (Stanford 1997) esp. 22ff.
an interdict in the 1370s indicates the economic and social immediacy of the punish-
ment 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
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 im-
portant employment was as orator and diplomat.105 Among Boccaccio’s noteworthy
assignments as 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 embas-
sies that Boccaccio was also closely involved in the 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 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 indica-
tion of the sensitive if not impossible nature of this mission. Not only was he to dis-
cover whether the emperor was coming to Italy with the pope’s consent, and to reas-
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) 51–52 and n. 18.
105
In 1350 he made diplomatic missions for the commune of Florence to Romagna, very likely concern-
ing 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 10 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 Si-
gnoria he negotiated with the Neapolitan court’s agent, Jacopo di Donato Acciaiuoli, the release of all Nea-
politan claims to neighboring Prato. Florence’s annexation of Prato, in Branca’s words, “marked the defini-
tive 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 (n. 26 above) 86–90.
106
Hutton, Boccaccio (n. 26 above) 217 n. 1, proposes the more likely date of the latter mission as fol-
lows: “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.” See also
Grundmann, “Die Papstprohetien des Mittelalters” (n. 65 above) 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.
107
Branca, Boccaccio (n. 26 above) 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 395,
397, 400). Discussion of these missions (and the complexity of their politics) can be found in Hutton’s Boc-
caccio (n. 26 above) chaps. 11 and 14; and Branca, Boccaccio (n. 26 above) chaps. 7 and 9. The circum-
stances necessitating the August 1365 mission are described by Hutton (208): “The pope, however, was far
from satisfied with Florence. He found her to have been lukewarm in the service of the church when Ro-
magna 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 (n. 26 above) 150–151.
sure the pope of Florence’s loyalty to the Holy See, but he was also to obtain a prom-
ise that the pope would “exert himself to save the honor and independence of the re-
public.” 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 in-
structed 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 instruc-
tions 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 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 the 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 in-
spired the plan for a coup d’état in which several of Boccaccio’s friends were to par-
ticipate. 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. Oth-
ers, including Pino de’ Rossi (Boccaccio’s “dear friend and fellow spirit”111) and An-
drea dell’ Ischia, fled and were then exiled. Boccaccio left Florence presumably in
response to 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 devout ser-
vants of Holy Church.’”114 There is disagreement concerning the success of Boccac-
cio’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 success-
ful, 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
109
Hutton, Boccaccio (n. 26 above) 165–167.
110
Branca, Boccaccio (n. 26 above) 120.
111
See Becker, “Florentine ‘Libertas’” (n. 14 above) 394.
112
Branca, Boccaccio (n. 26 above) 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, Boc-
caccio (n. 26 above) 209, notes the 10 years since 1354 in which Boccaccio “had not been asked to under-
take 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.”
113
For a discussion of the relations between Florence and the papacy in these years, see Brucker,
Florentine Politics (n. 14 above) 265ff.
114
Hutton, Boccaccio (n. 26 above) 208–210; Branca, Boccaccio (n. 26 above) 151.
Signoria sent him on another mission to the same Pontiff ...” 115 But two years later, in
1367/8, the issues between the commune of Florence and the Holy See were still unre-
solved. Information about the embassy of 1367 (or 1368) is sketchy: “All we know
about the affair,” writes Hutton, “is that on December 1, 1368, Urban wrote to the Si-
gnoria 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 disagree-
ments on foreign affairs within the ruling group” of Florence and that alliance with the
papacy was central to these disagreements.117 Whatever happened on Boccaccio’s
1367/8 mission to the Holy See, by the early 1370s the relations between the com-
mune and the papacy were threatening to break down altogether.
The pontificate of Gregory XI (1370–1378) brought matters to a head. Anxious to
return the curia to Rome, Gregory mounted a massive campaign to soften up poten-
tially 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 Pe-
rugia 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, news
reached the city that the pope had secretly made a treaty with the Milanese ruler Ber-
nabò 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 Peter-
son’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 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
115
Hutton, Boccaccio (n. 26 above) 212; Branca, Boccaccio (n. 26 above) 152.
116
Hutton, Boccaccio (n. 26 above) 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” (Boccac-
cio [n. 26 above] 162f.).
117
Brucker, Florentine Politics (n. 14 above) 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 summation of the reasons for Florentine disaffection with the papacy
in this period, see ibid. 243.
118
Peterson, “The War of the Eight Saints” (n. 14 above) 185–186.
119
Brucker, Florentine Politics (n. 14 above) 282, observes that by the early 1370s the “popes had re-
placed the emperors in their traditional role as disturbers of the Tuscan peace.”
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 rose up against its papal
governors ... Like dominoes, Viterbo, Perugia, and dozens of other cities of the Patri-
mony rebelled as well.”122 Alerted by the ringing of church bells, the Florentines gath-
ered almost daily in the Piazza Signoria to hear reports from other Tuscan towns read
aloud “in the name of God and victory.” Greeted by shouts of “Long live Florence and
liberty!” troops of the Tuscan League arrived at the recently liberated cities distribut-
ing to their new allies red 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 29 November 1375, written by Gherardino di
Niccolò Gherardini 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
120
Ibid. 304 n. 23.
121
For a discussion of the war’s name, see Richard C. Trexler, “Who Were the Eight Saints?” Renais-
sance News 16.2 (Summer 1963) 89–89, who suggests (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, ser. 5 (1905) 348: “Fu chiamata con sanguinosa ironia la guerra degli Otto
Santi, in ricordo della balìa creata apposta a dirigerla.” The excising of this war (1375–1378) by historians,
including Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) and Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444), spurs the lively discussion in
Peterson, “The War of the Eight Saints” (n. 14 above) 186 n. 33; Peterson lists the Otto dei Preti as follows:
Paolo di Matteo Malifici, Giovanni d’Angiolo Capponi, Antonio di Forese Sachetti, Antonio di Filippo
Tolosini, Bardo di Guglielmo Altoviti, Recco di Guido Guaza, Salvi di Filippo Salvi, and Michele di Puccio
albergatore.” Peterson (187 n. 35) lists the Otto della Guerra as “Giovanni Dini speziale, Alessandro di
Messer Riccardo de’ Bardi, Giovanni Magalotti, Andrea di Messer Francesco Salviati, Tommaso di Marco
degli Strozzi, Guccio di Dino Gucci, Marco di Federigo Soldi vinattiere, Tommaso di Mone biadaiuolo.”
See also M. Brosch, “Ein Krieg mit dem Papsttum im 14. Jahrhundert,” Historische Vierteljahrschrift 9
(1906) 324–337; Brucker, Florentine Politics (n. 14 above) esp. 297–396; Becker, “Church and State in
Florence” (n. 14 above) 509–527; Trexler, The Spiritual Power (n. 14 above) esp. 30–43; A. Panella, “La
guerra degli Otto Santi e le vicende della legge contro i vescovi,” Archivio Storico Italiano 99 pt. 1 (1941)
36–49.
122
Peterson, “The War of the Eight Saints” (n. 14 above) 188; see also Brucker, Florentine Politics (n.
14 above) 308–309.
123
Stefani, Cronaca, rub. 753, p. 293; and “Diario d’anonimo fiorentino dall’ anno 1358 al 1389,” Cro-
nache dei Secoli XIII e XIV, ed. A. Gherardi (Florence 1876) 304, quoted by Peterson, “The War of the
Eight Saints” (n. 14 above) 188 and n. 42. See also Grundmann, “Die Papstprophetien des Mittelalters” (n.
65 above) 119; and Ronald G. Witt, “The Rebirth of the Concept of Republican Liberty in Italy,” Renais-
sance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron, ed. Anthony Molho and John A. Tedescki (Dekalb, IL 1971) 175–
176 and nn. 1 and 2.
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 ve-
know that at 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 Boccac-
cio’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 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 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 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
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
nire nelle loro mani!” The full letter is printed in G. Brucker, “Un documento fiorentino sulla guerra, sulla
finanza e sulla amministrazione pubblica (1375)” Archivio Storico Italiano 115 (1957) 171–176, at 172.
125
Branca, Boccaccio (n. 26 above) 157.
126
Witt, In the Footsteps (n. 34 above) 301 and n. 29, notes that Salutati assumed office just when “Flor-
ence’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 coordi-
nated 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 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 Salu-
tati’s three earliest missive, written to the pope in the late spring and summer of 1375.”
127
The 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”; ibid. 302 n. 30.
128
Becker, “Florentine Politics” (n. 14 above) 72, comments that “Salutati ... acting in his official capac-
ity as Florentine chancellor, had sought to justify this war against the ‘Chiesa carnale,’ in terms of the pro-
phetic tradition and in the name of liberty ...” For a contemporary discussion of the papacy as “carnal” and
“temporal,”see Defensor Pacis, trans. Gewirth (n. 34 above) 2.2.5–7 (105–107). See also Witt, “Rebirth” (n.
123 above) 175–199.
129
Epistle I.85.86.
130
See Peterson’s remark, “The War of the Eight Saints” (n. 14 above) 175, that humanists “from Pet-
rarch 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 learn-
ing and scholarship and the world of commerce and politics,” see Gene A. Brucker, Renaissance Florence
1969; repr. Berkeley and Los Angeles 1983) 232–233; Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads (n. 86 above) 57–
58; U. Mariani, Il Petrarca e gli agostiniani (Rome 1940) 66ff.; and Rudolph Arbesmann, “Der Augustine-
reremitenorden und der Beginn der humanistischen Bewegung” Augustiniana, 14 (1964) 603–39, and 15
(1965) 259–293.
132
Arbesmann, ibid. 270, concludes that even though we lack other evidence, “Fra Martinos Verständnis
für die humanistischen Bestrebungen findet schliesslich eine Bestätigung in Boccaccios Testament.”
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 in-
valid. Thus Giovanni dalle Celle (in the summer of 1375) distinguishes between pay-
ing 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 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 re-
fers to the upcoming war as “this sacred enterprise.”135 He decries the greedy, disso-
lute, 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 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 ex-
clusively the French prelates in the papal states, but the entire clerical caste ... Flor-
ence’s war was a crusade against all abuses and defects in the ecclesiastical order.”138
Both these letters, moreover, are strong evidence that those who were loyal to Flor-
ence 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 entrusted it only to his good and personal
133
Brucker, Florentine Politics (n. 14 above) 301, comparing these letters especially to the November
1375 letter of Gherardino mentioned above. Both letters to Guido del Palagio are found in Tocco, “I Frati-
celli” (n. 121 above) 348–351.
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...”; ibid. 348.
135
Ibid. 350.
136
“Cristo gli mandò a predicare ... ma nel vangelio non trovo che gli mandasse a signoreggiare”; ibid.
351.
137
Brucker, Florentine Politics (n. 14 above) 301–302 and n. 16. See also Becker, “Florentine Politics”
(n. 14 above) 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.”
138
Brucker, Florentine Politics (n. 14 above) 302–303, remarks that “this opinion received a sympa-
thetic 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 ideologi-
cal 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” (n. 14 above) 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 of papal spiritual authority.”
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 tra-
passa e che della presente tua fatica è stata cagione; per ciò che tu saresti là mal rice-
vuta ...” (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”].
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 author-
ity—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 manu-
scripts (1384) was copied by the cleric Francesco di Amaretto Mannelli, a neighbor
and close friend of Coluccio Salutati.141 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 31 March 1376).142 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 circum-
stances, 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.
Lewis & Clark College
Portland, OR 97219
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” (n. 121 above) 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”; ibid. 348.
141
See Nurmela (n. 1 above) 28–29.
142
See Donaggio, “Problemi” (n. 97 above) 12–14.

Making War On The Widow: Boccaccio'S Il Corbaccio and Florentine Liberty

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MAKING WAR ON THE WIDOW: BOCCACCIO’S IL CORBACCIO

AND FLORENTINE LIBERTY

by Michaela Paasche Grudin

1. THE CRITICAL CONTEXT

2. PROBLEMS LEFT HANGING

3. THE CORBACCIO AS ALLEGORY

The pervasiveness of the allegorical mode in Boccaccio’s own oeuvre is remarked by

7. THE DISCURSIVE CONTEXT

8. THE HISTORICAL OCCASION

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