Boccaccio's Heroines

Power and Virtue in Renaissance Society

Margaret Franklin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351955157
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte europeo

In contrast to earlier scholars who have seen Boccaccio's Famous Women as incoherent and fractured, Franklin argues that the text offers a remarkably consistent, coherent and comprehensible treatise concerning the appropriate functioning of women in society. In this cross disciplinary study of a seminal work of literature and its broader cultural impact on Renaissance society, Franklin shows that, through both literature and the visual arts, Famous Women was used to promote social ideologies in both Renaissance Tuscany and the dynastic courts of northern Italy. Speaking equally to scholars in medieval and early modern literature, history, and art history, Franklin brings needed clarification to the text by demonstrating that the moral criteria Boccaccio used to judge the lives of legendary women - heroines and miscreants alike - were employed consistently to tackle the challenge that politically powerful women represented for the prevailing social order. Further, the author brings to light the significant influence of Boccaccio's text on the representation of classical heroines in Renaissance art. By examining several paintings created in the republics and principalities of Renaissance Italy, Franklin demonstrates that Famous Women was employed as a conceptual guide by patrons and artists to draw the teeth from the challenge of unconventionally powerful women by co-opting their stories into the service of contemporary Italian standards and mores.

Chapter 1

Authorial Intent

In the Dedication and Preface, before introducing any of his illustrious ladies, Boccaccio lays the conceptual foundation for Famous Women by foreshadowing the significant themes that will be developed throughout the work. Primary among these is the threat to social stability posed by women who sought to exercise power outside the domestic sphere to which prevailing convention assigned them. A corollary of this fundamental premise is the necessity of persuading women to uphold virtues traditionally associated with female domesticity, particularly chastity and obedience. For his thesis to find fulfillment in society, Boccaccio required a male audience prepared to safeguard patriarchal institutions. Accordingly, he uses the prefatory material to define his intended readership and the influence he expects his text to have upon their moral perspective and sense of social responsibility.

Dedication: The Nature of Virtue

Famous Women opens with a dedicatory letter to Andrea Acciaiuoli, who, for political reasons, was chosen as dedicatee when the text was nearing completion. In choosing to honor Andrea, Boccaccio, perennially in quest of a patron, cast his net wide: she was not only the wife of an important Neapolitan military commander, Bartolomeo II di Capua, Count of Altavilla, but also the sister of Niccol6 Acciaiuoli, Grand Seneschal of the Kingdom of Naples. Boccaccio had met Niccolò when they were young businessmen in Naples, and had tried unsuccessfully for many years to parlay this connection into direct patronage.¹ When, in 1362, he received an invitation from Niccolò to visit the Neapolitan court, Boccaccio prepared to present to Andrea the compendium of biographies of notable women that he had been composing over the course of the previous year.

The timing and content of Boccaccio’s dedication strongly suggest that Andrea Acciaiuoli, with her close Neapolitan connections, was a screen dedicatee through whom Boccaccio hoped to recommend himself to a substantially more powerful and illustrious personage: Queen Joanna of Naples. This argument is supported by the redaction history of the manuscript, in which a number of lives (including that of Joanna herself) were added to Famous Women in the interval between Boccaccio’s receipt of the invitation and his visit to Naples.² Moreover, Joanna, “that radiant splendor of Italy, that unique glory not only of women but of rulers” [FW 3], is the first person to be named in Famous Women, where she is identified as the “distinguished lady” [FW 3] to whom he would have liked to have dedicated his book. Further contemplation, however, led him to fear that his work would pale against the magnificence of this monarch: “… as her royal luster is so dazzling and the flickering flame of my little book so small and weak, I gradually changed my mind, fearing that the greater would altogether eclipse the lesser light” [FW 3].³

Beyond making a suitable show of humility, the rhetoric that Boccaccio employs when writing of Joanna immediately sets the stage for the proposition that politically powerful women have the capacity to render impotent the men who come into contact with them. Boccaccio recognizes the danger to himself that such association might bring, and therefore searches for a woman whose character and station in life will not threaten to consume him. Embedded within his claim to have found in Andrea a woman whose reputation would give Famous Women a favorable entrée into the public realm is the implication that her more modest stature would not overshadow his efforts as the queen’s would have done.

The relationship between Famous Women and its dedicatee functions as a model for relations between the sexes which emerges as the ideal over the course of the text itself. This model, based on the principle that a woman’s glory should derive from that of her significant male connections, would have been compromised had Queen Joanna been selected. With Andrea, however, it is maintained, as Famous Women “will do as much to keep your name bright for posterity as (with Fortune’s help) the county of Monteodorisio did formerly and as the county of Altavilla does now” [FW 5]. The Counts of Monteodorisio and Altavilla were Andrea’s first and second husbands respectively; Boccaccio thus defines Andrea’s renown as having been substantially acquired through her associations with worthy men, among whom he now numbers himself.

In conceptualizing her two husbands as consecutively enhancing Andrea’s renown, Boccaccio sidesteps an awkward situation created by his headlong rush to court patronage through Andrea. Integral to the ethos of Famous Women is the moral imperative for widows to remain constant to their deceased husbands, an injunction which not only Andrea but Queen Joanna had defied. In response to the difficulty presented by the two women Boccaccio ultimately decided to honor in his dedication, he deftly reframed Andrea’s remarriage as support for the facet of his thesis which holds association with great men to be a preferred path to legitimate female glory. In joining the cadre of male associates who have played an active role in shaping Andrea’s reputation, Boccaccio signals his approval of women who are elevated through their alliance with prominent men. His dedication sets the stage for distinguishing between women whose road to glory is realized through their links to remarkable men, and those who seek fame on their own terms and in service of their own ambition. That he strongly disapproves of women who aspire to positions of distinction and power on their own behalf will be made abundantly evident in the biographies themselves.

But can any woman, even one possessing qualities traditionally valued in a female, merit the acclaim of serving as honorary intercessor between Famous Women and its public readership? The answer, as Boccaccio continues to outline Andrea’s suitability for her role as dedicatee, appears to be ‘not quite’:

… as I noted your generosity of soul and your powers of intellect far surpassing the endowments of womankind … I saw that what nature has denied the weaker sex God has freely instilled in your breast and complemented with marvelous virtues, to the point where he willed you to be known by the name you bear (Andres being in Greek the equivalent of the Latin word for ‘men’). [FW 5]

Andrea is extraordinary—though female, she possesses virtues withheld from womankind by nature. Her paradox is rendered even more striking by her apparently providential endowment with a name that means ‘men’. In justifying his decision to dedicate Famous Women to Andrea, Boccaccio suggests that not only has she miraculously overcome deficiencies innate to the rest of her sex, she has been christened, with divine blessing, an honorary male. This passage introduces two premises which will prove fundamental to the judgments Boccaccio delivers throughout his text: first, men and women are different in their constitutional and moral essentials, and, second, virtues associated with masculinity are valued more highly than those associated with femininity. In Boccaccio’s cosmology, there can be no higher praise for an exceptional woman than to suggest that she does not simply fall on the superior end of the female continuum but differs from other women in her very essence. This position is responsible for the accusation made by modern commentators that Boccaccio is utilizing backhanded compliments to undermine the accomplishments of praiseworthy women; on the contrary, Boccaccio intends, by distinguishing a woman from the ordinary members of her sex, to bestow on her the highest compliment he can offer to any female.

A text in which the highest praise falls to women who defy the laws of nature cannot have been intended primarily as a sourcebook of role models for women. It is not surprising, therefore, that Boccaccio does not press the exemplary function of his text on Andrea; on the contrary, he suggests that she “read it occasionally [as] its counsels will sweeten your leisure, and you will find delight in the virtues of your sex and in the charm of the stories” [FW 5]. Only after suggesting this rather frivolous approach to his work does Boccaccio note that Andrea’s spirit might be spurred “to emulation of the deeds of women in the past” [FW 5]. He then proceeds to clarify the manner in which Andrea is to reflect upon the ancients, and it becomes apparent that he means for emulation of his heroines by contemporary women to be limited to those qualities conventionally ascribed to virtuous females:

Whenever you, who profess the Christian religion, read that a pagan woman has some worthy quality which you feel you lack, blush and reproach yourself that … you have let yourself be surpassed by a pagan in probity or chastity or resolution [honestate aut pudicitia vel virtute supereris ab extera] … so you should surpass in spiritual excellence not only your contemporaries but even the women of antiquity. [FW 5, 7]

In this advice Boccaccio preempts any challenge to the status quo that might result from untutored probing into the lives of politically active women of yore, and represents a downshifting from the threat of unnaturally powerful women exercising authority in the public arena to the benign image of conventional women incorporating uncontroversial values into the private sphere of their lives.

Unlike legendary pagan women, Andrea Acciaiuoli has the hope of both earthly recognition and heavenly reward, and Boccaccio’s brief accounting of the qualities required to attain both conform to contemporary standards of appropriate behavior:

Remember that you should not embellish your beauty with cosmetics, as do the majority of your sex, but increase its distinction through integrity, holiness, and the finest actions. In this fashion you will please Him who granted you beauty; at the same time, you will stand out among famous women in this earthly life and … you will be received into eternal light by the Giver of all blessings. [FW 7]

Here, again, Boccaccio praises Andrea by distinguishing her from the common run of womankind. As noted previously, however, there is no compelling reason to interpret this as a strategy of tempering compliments with insult; rather, the dissociation of a woman from her gender constitutes the greatest good attainable, and therefore the highest honor Boccaccio can accord.

Preface: A Book for Men about Women

In the Preface to Famous Women Boccaccio turns from dispensing flattery and cautionary advice to his female dedicatee to discourse designed to garner the approval of a male audience and, hence, acceptance into an established realm of male-dominated scholarship. A rather apologetic statement to the effect that he has deviated in some respects from traditional form in order to accommodate the needs and tastes of female readers must be considered alongside the assertion made in the Dedication that he wrote the text for the pleasure of his friends, which more closely corresponds to the many elements in Famous Women that indicate Boccaccio’s intention of courting a male readership.⁴ The text is situated in a tradition that would only be known and appreciated by a highly educated readership overwhelmingly comprised, in the fourteenth century, of males. Boccaccio’s desire to contribute significantly to the viri illustri (illustrious men) genre is made apparent in the opening paragraph of the Preface, where he begins by remembering the “ancient authors who composed biographies of famous men in the form of compendia” [FW 9]. He then notes that the work of these writers is being continued and expanded upon by “that renowned man and great poet, Petrarch” [FW 5].⁵ To this venerable company comes Boccaccio, who seeks to fill a gap in the genre by commemorating for posterity the names and deeds of women who “have gained a reputation throughout the world for any deed whatsoever” [FW 11]. He relates his decision to include the infamous alongside the admirable to the practice of classical biographers, further aligning his text with a revered erudite tradition.

In his Commento alla Divina Commedia e altri scritti intorno a Dante, Boccaccio wrote that “there is much more art and gravity in speaking Latin than in the mother tongue,” and his decision to compose Famous Women in Latin not only proclaims the work as belonging to a literary tradition endowed with solemnity and authority, but also defines his target readership.⁶ Riccardo Fubini points out that in the fourteenth century the two distinct levels of literary discourse represented by Latin and the vernacular languages corresponded conceptually to the relationship obtaining not only between scholars and artisans but to that between maturity and youth and between men and women.⁷ Whereas Boccaccio’s fictional oeuvre was written in the vernacular and was hence more readily accessible to all literate persons, Famous Women was written in Latin, substantially narrowing the scope of its potential readership and excluding the vast majority of even literate women.⁸

Throughout Famous Women, Boccaccio conceptualizes women who merit praise as having been animated by masculine spirits, thereby opening the door to male emulation of their example while effectively closing it to women. Boccaccio recurs in the Preface to the dual nature of the sexes as introduced in the Dedication when he asks, rhetorically,

If we grant that men deserve praise … how much more should women be extolled— almost all of whom are endowed by nature with soft, frail bodies and sluggish minds— when they take on a manly spirit … and dare to execute deeds that would be extremely difficult even for men? [FW 9]

These observations further the work begun in the Dedication to differentiate the “manly” women discussed in the text f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Authorial Intent
• 2 A Bad Example
• 3 Famous Women in Renaissance Tuscany
• 4 Famous Women and Famous Women: Boccaccio and the Court Consorts
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index