The English Boccaccio: A History in Books (Toronto Italian Studies) [Illustrated] 9781442646032, 1442646039

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THE ENGLISH BOCCACCIO A History in Books

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The English Boccaccio A History in Books

GUYDA ARMSTRONG

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2013 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4603-2

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetablebased inks. Toronto Italian Studies

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Armstrong, Guyda The English Boccaccio : a history in books / Guyda Armstrong. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4603-2 1. Boccaccio, Giovanni, 1313–1375 – Translations into English – History and criticism. 2. Boccaccio, Giovanni, 1313–1375 – Appreciation – England. 3. Boccaccio, Giovanni, 1313–1375 – Influence. 4. Translating and interpreting – England – History. 5. Book industries and trade – England – History. I. Title. PQ4286.A75 2013

858'.109

C2013-901850-6

This book has been published with the assistance of a grant from the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Abbreviations xiii Note on Translation and Transcription Introduction

xv

3

1 “Here begynneth the book callyd J. Bochas”: The De casibus virorum illustrium between Italy and England 19 The Production Context of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium (1360–1373) 23 Form and Functions of the De casibus’s Internal Structures 32 The Production Context of Laurent de Premierfait’s Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes (1400–1409) 42 The Production Context of John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes (1431–1439) 65 Conclusion 91 2 The De mulieribus claris in English Translation, 1440–1550 95 The Production Context of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (1361–1375) 96 The Middle English Translation of the De mulieribus claris (c. 1440–1460) 107 Henry Parker, Lord Morley’s Of the Ryghte Renoumyde Ladies (c. 1543) 139 Conclusion 155

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Contents

3 Boccaccio in Print in the Sixteenth Century 157 European Romance and the French Sending Culture 161 The 1560s: Pleasant Reading (The Palace of Pleasure and A Pleasaunt Disport of Diuers Noble Personages) 169 The 1580s: Amorous Fiammetta 184 The 1590s: A Famous Tragicall Discourse of Two Lovers, Affrican and Mensola 197 Conclusion 211 4 “One Hundred Ingenious Novels”: Refashioning the Decameron, 1620–1930 213 The Seventeenth Century: The Translatio Princeps 216 The Eighteenth Century: Excision and Restoration 223 The Nineteenth Century: Through the Peephole 232 Establishing Canonicity: Dubois’s 1804 Edition 232 The 1820s: Griffin’s Serial Decameron and Sharp’s Decameron 236 Mid-century Editions and Popular Readerships: Daly, Bohn, and Blanchard 250 A Limited Licentiousness: John Payne’s Translation 259 The 1890s: Eroticism and Display 263 The Twentieth Century: A Multitude of Decamerons 270 The Decameron in 1930 275 Conclusion 283 5 The Minor Works in the Nineteenth Century: Dante and Chaucer 285 Neo-medievalism, Dante, and Chaucer 286 Boccaccio and the Academy: The Case of the Trattatello Conclusion 328

315

6 The Early Twentieth-Century Recovery of the Minor Works 330 The Author as Lover: The 1907 Fiammetta 331 The Latin Boccaccio Rediscovered: Olympia and the Genealogia 342 Two American Filostratos of the 1920s 356 The Republication of the Historic English Translations 374 The Fall of Princes 375 The De mulieribus claris 378

Contents

The Fiammetta 381 The Thirteen Questions Conclusion 394 Conclusion Bibliography

388

397 403

Index of Boccaccio’s Works

443

General Index 447

Illustrations follow page 112

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Acknowledgments

A book this long in the making incurs many debts, and it would be impossible for me to do justice to the generosity of all those who have helped me along the way. I would like to thank in first place those teachers who supported me, shared their expertise, and inspired me to further study: special thanks must go to Jenny Parkin, Gordon W. Allen, Stephen Matthews, and Elaine Lynch; at the University of Edinburgh Jon Usher, Lino Pertile, and Peter Sharratt; and at the University of Leeds Brian Richardson and Dick Andrews. If I now have a career as a boccaccista, I owe it to two of these in particular. Jon Usher was my first Boccaccio teacher, whose vast learning and leggiadrissimo take on Boccaccio (in the Cavalcantian sense) has always stayed with me. My doctoral supervisor Brian Richardson, another inimitable scholar, provided me with an impeccable training in how to think, and write, that has shaped my work ever since. I have no doubt that this book would have been very much better if it had been written by them and not by me, but I hope that it can stand as a synthesis of their intellectual styles in some way. Laura Lepschy, my PhD examiner, has supported me tirelessly since my viva. In fact, I owe the genesis of this project to her, since it was she who put me in contact with Vittore Branca to work on this topic. The project as originally envisaged comprised only an updated survey article and bibliography for Studi sul Boccaccio, but the quantity of material meant that it has become the very embodiment of academic mission creep. I regret very much that Branca was not able to see the completed study, and am very grateful to Carlo Delcorno, the current editor of the journal, for continuing to support my work.

x Acknowledgments

My friends and colleagues have been an unstinting source of support, erudition, and entertainment during this lengthy writing process: from my time at Brown, working on the Decameron Web, I would like to thank Massimo Riva, Mike Papio, Cristiana Fordyce, Vika Zafrin, Roberto Ludovico, and Tony Oldcorn; from my time at the Centre for the History of the Book at Edinburgh, Bill Bell and Peter France; at Cardiff University, the Department of Italian, James Hegarty, and Claire Gorrara; and now my colleagues in Italian Studies at the University of Manchester, especially my fellow medievalists Steve Milner and Spencer Pearce. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Andrew Mellon Foundation; The Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Edinburgh; the Cardiff University Early Career Researcher Travel Fund; the Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Leave scheme; and finally, the University of Manchester for granting me institutional leave and for their contribution towards the costs of publication of this book. One of the great pleasures in this research was visiting the books in their various libraries, and the unfailing courtesy and helpfulness of the librarians I have met in the course of this work at the British Library and the National Library of Scotland, the Rock and Hay Libraries at Brown, the Houghton and Widener Libraries at Harvard, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, and the Special Collections of Cambridge University Library. I would like to extend particular thanks to Chris Sheppard of the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds; Patrick J. Stevens of the Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University; and Joanna Parker, Librarian of Worcester College, Oxford. Special mention must be made of the extraordinary helpfulness of the staff of the John Rylands Library and the University of Manchester Library, all of whom went above and beyond the call of duty. I’d like to thank in particular Dorothy Clayton for her help with permissions; the Centre for Heritage Imaging and Collection Care (CHICC), especially Carol Burrows, Jamie Robinson, and Gwen Jones, for the photography; John Hodgson and Julianne Simpson for their curatorial expertise (and in the case of Julianne, her tenacious type-sleuthing); and the Head of Special Collections, Rachel Beckett, and the University Librarian and Director of the John Rylands Library, Jan Wilkinson, for their ongoing support for this project. Most importantly, I would like to thank all those who have read, critiqued, and made suggestions about how this book should be

Acknowledgments

xi

improved. I am extremely grateful to the two anonymous readers for University of Toronto Press who provided such detailed and targeted comments for the first draft of this book, and feel lucky indeed to have had such expert input during the writing process. I would also like to thank the anonymous author(s) of the UTP Manuscript Review Committee report. The following people read various parts along the way, and provided me with many astute and nuanced observations: Marianne O’Doherty, A.S.G. Edwards, Nick Havely, Catherine Keen, Neil Rhodes, Steve Milner, Simon Gilson, Kenneth P. Clarke, and David Rundle. In addition, Brian Richardson and Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin were particularly heroic in their engagement, bravely taking on the whole draft and supplying an enormous quantity of feedback and helpful suggestions. This book would simply never have been written without Rhiannon Daniels, who not only generously shared her work on Boccaccio manuscripts and editions, but also read and reread sections for me and provided support and encouragement in the darkest moments. I am also immensely grateful to Victoria Philpotts for her meticulous editing and help in the last stages of the preparation of this manuscript. Linguistically speaking, I have benefited from the expertise of Marianne O’Doherty, David Matthews, and Anke Bernau for the Middle English, Adrian Armstrong for Middle French, Ruth Owen for German, and Jon Usher, Justine Wolfenden, and Spencer Pearce for Latin. I shudder to think how many mistakes were caught by my readers, and it goes without saying that all those which remain are my own. The business of securing image copyright permissions has been rendered much more agreeable by the kindness of the individuals I have dealt with, who have all been generous in granting me permission to reproduce illustrations. Special thanks must go to Alain Bilot, literary executor of the estate of Jean de Boschère, and to John Anzalone who put me in touch with him; Michael Hendricks at Easton Press, for the Limited Editions Club; Mrs Margie King Barab, widow of Alexander King, and her lawyer Dennis Aspland; and Dr Reg. Carr, for his assistance with the mysterious illustrator “M. Leone” of the Mandrake Press. Unfortunately, even with the help of Dr Carr, I have not been able to securely identify this person, and so if anyone can help with this mystery, I urge them to contact me so that this omission can be rectified in future publications. Earlier versions of parts of this book have been previously published elsewhere, and I gratefully acknowledge the permission of the publishers to reproduce this material here: my two review articles in Heliotropia,

xii Acknowledgments

1.1 (2003), http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/ heliotropia/01-01/armstrong.shtml, and 2.2 (2004), http://www.brown .edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/heliotropia/02-02/armstrong. shtml; “The Translated Boccaccio in Early Modern England,” in Caro Vitto: Essays in Memory of Vittore Branca, ed. Jill Kraye and Laura Lepschy in collaboration with Nicola Jones, special supplement 2, The Italianist, 27 (2007), pp. 49–70; “Translations as Cultural ‘Facts’: The History of Boccaccio in English,” in Translation: Transfer, Text and Topic, ed. P. Barrotta and A.L. Lepschy (Perugia: Guerra, 2010), pp. 53–68; “NineteenthCentury Translations and the Invention of Boccaccio-dantista,” in Dante in the Nineteenth Century: Reception, Portrayal, Popularization, ed. Nicholas Havely (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 201–20; and “Print, Paratext, and a Seventeenth-Century Sammelband: Boccaccio’s Ninfale fiesolano in English Translation,” in Renaissance Cultural Crossroads: Translation, Print and Culture in Britain, 1473–1640, ed. S.K. Barker and Brenda Hosington (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 79–99. I would also like to thank Ron Schoeffel, my editor at UTP, for his constant enthusiasm for the project, his encouragement, and his tremendous patience throughout this protracted process, Leah Connor, and Terry Teskey for her scrupulous copy-editing. And finally, my thanks (and possibly an apology) should go to my family, especially to my husband Jon Morris and our children Ishmael and Raphael, the last two of whom have never known a life without this book looming in the background. I dedicate it to them with all my love.

Abbreviations

BL CHBB CHMEL Dec. DMC DNB ECCO EEBO EETS ELH ESTC GW ISTC MLN MLQ MLR ODNB PMLA StB STC

British Library, London Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 6 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999–2011) The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) Decameron De mulieribus claris Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, 2nd ed., 22 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, 1908–9) Eighteenth-Century Collections Online Early English Books Online Early English Texts Series English Literary History English Short-Title Catalogue: http://estc.bl.uk Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke: http://www .gesamtkatalogderwiegendrucke.de/GWEN.xhtml Incunabula Short-Title Catalogue: http://istc.bl.uk Modern Language Notes Modern Language Quarterly Modern Language Review Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: www.oxforddnb .com Publications of the Modern Language Association of America Studi sul Boccaccio A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640,

xiv Abbreviations

Wing

ed. A.W. Pollard, G.R. Redgrave, and K.F. Pantzer, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1976–91) Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700, ed. Donald Wing with John J. Morrison and Carolyn W. Nelson, 2nd ed. (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992–8)

Note on Translation and Transcription

In a book concerned with historic translation, there are many more translations beyond the citations from the target texts under discussion. I have thus provided an English translation of all source text citations, as well as quotations from secondary works not written in English. Where a suitable modern translation of the primary sources exists I have used that, with attribution in the footnotes, while in all other cases I have provided a close literal translation of the passages in question. In my translations of primary sources, I have tended to preserve proper names in their original historic forms (e.g., leaving Boccaccio’s name as the French “Jehan Boccace” in Laurent de Premierfait), so as to preserve their linguistic provenance in the English rendering. In transcribing from manuscripts and printed editions I have unless stated otherwise given the text as found on the page, rather than quoting from a critical edition. I have generally modernized punctuation for the three English manuscripts discussed in detail, following their modern editions, but have retained the Middle English orthography and characters. In manuscripts and early printed editions, the long “s” has been standardized to short “s” throughout, and abbreviations have been expanded. Typographical errors have been preserved, and are indicated where necessary. I provide further information on specific transcription issues in the notes to the relevant sections.

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THE ENGLISH BOCCACCIO A History in Books

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Introduction

The classic aphorism that habent sua fata libelli, that books have their own destinies, informs and exemplifies the aims of this book.1 To this, we might add that authors, too, have their fates, and an author such as Boccaccio, at once both scholarly and accessible, capable of treating subjects that range from Dante’s theology to knockabout sexual farce, has had a more varied afterlife than most. We know that every reader, every reading community, every linguistic community, creates their own personalized versions of authors, texts, and interpretations, and that these versions are made sometimes self-consciously, but more often not. The effect of the passing of time on a text is slow but seismic, and may have consequences far beyond those intended by its original author. A text may become well known, even institutionalized, and its author may be admitted to the canons of literary greatness; or it may languish unread and unknown, a poetic Schrödinger’s cat awaiting a reader who may never come. As time passes, the once-popular text may fall out of favour with readers, just as a once-neglected text may be rediscovered by a new generation who find in it compelling arguments for new intellectual hobby horses. Yet the changes wrought on a text as it is translated from one language context to another are probably the most visible – and measurable – indices of its reception, and form the subject of this study: the history of Boccaccio’s writings in English

1 The quote is taken from Terentius Maurus’s De litteris, de syllabis, de metris, and in its entirety reads “pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli” (books have their own destinies according to the capacity of their readers). De litteris, de syllabis, de metris: I. Introduzione, testo critico e traduzione italiana, ed. and trans. Chiara Cignolo (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2002), 1:93 (line 1286).

4

Introduction

translation from the fifteenth century to the twentieth, as read through the forms of the books in which they have circulated. This book situates itself deliberately within the framework of the new critical discipline of textual studies and the history of the book. The cultural turn in bibliographical studies over the past two decades has created a paradigmatic shift from the traditional belletristic engagement with the authored text of nationally oriented literatures to a newfound focus on the sociology of the book, as represented by scholars such as D.F. McKenzie, Roger Chartier, and Jerome McGann. Key to this new approach are the effects wrought by processes of transmission on the “original” authored text. Now, rather than focusing merely on the author’s intentions and the construction of meaning within the text, new approaches move the debate out to the margins of the page and beyond, investigating the ways in which the text is informed by its material and historical contexts and the transformations that can occur as it moves from reader to reader. Joseph Grigely has termed this phenomenon “textualterity,” and argues that “the uniqueness of the unique art object or literary text is constantly undergoing continuous and discontinuous transience as it ages, is altered by editors and conservators, and is resituated or reterritorialized in different publications and exhibition spaces.”2 Such approaches provide a productive new way of approaching the ultra-canonical author, and his canonical texts, and also for providing a way into a cultural world – here, that of the fourteenth-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio – that is immeasurably distant to us. Grigely’s coinage “textualterity” also highlights and thus allows us to rediscover the otherness of these medieval texts, which have become deceptively familiar by their long-standing presence in the Italian (and English) literary canons. The discipline of translation studies, likewise, offers pragmatic methodologies for measuring and interpreting the ways in which a text is remade in the journey from its source (sending) to its target (receiving) culture. In fact, in recent years, translation studies has itself undergone a realignment similar to that witnessed in literary studies, and one similarly informed by the sociological turn in critical theory. Often figured as an essentially text-based discipline, concerned with the relationship between the original, “source text” (ST) and translated product (“target text,” TT), a strong strand of its activity now addresses broader flows of 2 Joseph Grigely, Textualterity: Art, Theory, and Textual Criticism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 1.

Introduction

5

translational activity, as linked to power, ideology, and literary systems at the macro level, as informed by the writings of Pierre Bourdieu.3 The Bourdieusian model of social practice identifies agents operating according to their “habitus” within a specific cultural field of activity, whose interrelations are concerned with and conditioned by the distribution of capital within the field. If this model is applied to the Boccaccio translations discussed here, then we find agents (such as translators, patrons, publishers, printers) operating within their own specific contexts (such as the court of Henry VIII, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the clandestine pornographers of 1920s New York), who seek to translate Boccaccio’s works as part of their own symbolic capital accumulation, translating the value of the imported Boccaccio into something that contributes towards their own purposes and profit. This book attempts therefore to combine elements from these diverse disciplinary approaches in textual and translation studies in order to present for the first time a broad study of Boccaccio’s place in anglophone reading culture from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. The novelty of The English Boccaccio: A History in Books lies in its presiding focus on the book as object, rather than merely as the text in translation. This book tells the story of more than ninety different individual books, which range from manuscript books of the pre-print period to the mass-produced book club editions of the 1920s and the first manifestations of scholarly translations. It is a survey that demonstrates very simply how the ways in which Boccaccio’s texts were read – and indeed, their very form – differed widely in different linguistic and reading communities. Each book provides a snapshot of the historic context in which it was produced, and I reject the idea of a single “critical” edition of any of the texts in favour of a discussion of individual textual and translational performances. My aim throughout is therefore not to provide a

3 Moira Inghilleri, “The Sociology of Bourdieu and the Construction of the ‘Object’ in Translation and Interpreting Studies,” in Bourdieu and the Sociology of Translating and Interpreting, ed. Moira Inghilleri, special issue of The Translator, 11.2 (2005), 125. Bourdieu’s defining statement on translational activity is his influential “The Social Conditions of the International Circulation of Ideas,” now published in Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Shusterman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 220–8, and first published as “Les conditions sociales de la circulation internationale des idées,” Romanistische Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte/Cahiers d’Histoire des Littératures Romanes, 14 (1990), 1–10. For a further introduction to Bourdieu and translation studies, see the papers collected in Bourdieu and the Sociology of Translating and Interpreting, ed. Inghilleri.

6

Introduction

finite genealogy of Boccaccio in translation, but to highlight the accidents of history and the localization of each individual incarnation of the text in each translated book-object. In my focus on materiality and translation, my book seeks to align itself alongside recent studies such as Thomas More’s Utopia in Early Modern Europe: Paratexts and Contexts, edited by Terence Cave (2008) and Anne E.B. Coldiron’s English Printing, Verse Translation, and the Battle of the Sexes (2009). Historically, studies of Boccaccio in translation have tended to focus rather unselfconsciously on the English destination, rather than the journey as a whole.4 Up to the mid-twentieth century, Boccaccio’s presence in English literary culture tended to be figured in terms of a oneway traffic flow, where the great figures of the English literary canon read, assimilated, and most importantly, improved on the work of the other, foreign, author.5 These traditional narratives of the primacy of English literary culture, perhaps unsurprisingly, tended to emerge from the anglophone English Studies milieu, and themselves show strong cultural ties with strategies of (largely British) anglophone literary and critical self-aggrandizement. Another very strong critical strand in the construction of the subject leads back to the German positivist scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who focused on the recuperation and reconstruction of texts and their sources. (The translations of Boccaccio produced by these two academic constituencies are discussed in the last chapter of this book.)6 The most important treatment of the subject remains Herbert Wright’s vast 1957 study Boccaccio in England from Chaucer to Tennyson, in which he aimed “to see Boccaccio [...] in relation to the personalities of the writers to whom he appealed and simultaneously to observe the changing taste of successive ages as 4 H.G. Wright, Boccaccio in England from Chaucer to Tennyson (London: Athlone Press, 1957). References to Wright are to this book unless otherwise stated. 5 This traditional view is exemplified in articles such as W. Farnham’s “England’s Discovery of the Decameron,” PMLA, 39 (1924), 123–39, which devotes much space to imagining what Boccaccio would have said to Chaucer about his “gay brain-child” (124) (i.e., the Decameron) had they ever met in Florence. Wright himself is arguably guilty of a similar assumption in his laborious tracing of English reworkings of Boccaccio’s texts (albeit without the speculation about Boccaccio’s personal motivations). 6 The contribution of the German scholars of Anglistik in this field is particularly notable. Emblematic of this approach is J. Raith, Boccaccio in der englischen Literatur von Chaucer bis Painters Palace of Pleasure: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der italienischen Novelle in England, Aus Schrifttum und Sprache der Angelsachsen, vol. 3 (Leipzig: Universitätsverlag von Robert Noske, 1936).

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it was revealed by their choice amongst Boccaccio’s writings.” Wright’s book continues to be indispensable as a factual resource, but has a focus primarily on the intertextual presence of Boccaccio within the English canon; the Boccaccio translations that are the subject of my book are briefly discussed there, but are mostly subsumed within this huge influence study. A second wave of interest in Boccaccio in English studies in the later 1970s and 1980s concentrated largely on Chaucer’s reworkings of Boccaccio, and produced a slew of important publications.7 More recently, the field has moved on to a much more nuanced reappraisal of literary interrelations in pre-modern studies. Scholars such as David Wallace, James Simpson, Ardis Butterfield, and Anne E.B. Coldiron, to name but four, are engaged in a process of reframing the traditionally periodized and teleologically “English” view of intercultural textual contacts.8 Although working in different fields and time frames, between English, French, and Italian Studies, they share a concern to reject the traditional master narratives to highlight instead a historically and materially situated plurilingual literary culture in the pre-modern British Isles, in which texts circulate between many languages (English, French, Anglo-French, and Latin). Following their example, I situate Boccaccio within the broader currents of European textualities, and show in particular how central – and how enduring – French manuscript and print culture are to his English reception.9 The Italianist perspective on Boccaccio in English has thus to date been rather obscured, when placed against the prolific outpourings of the English Studies community.10 Apart from the works mentioned 7 E.g., Piero Boitani, Chaucer and Boccaccio (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1977); Nicholas Havely, Chaucer’s Boccaccio: Sources for Troilus and the Knight’s and Franklin’s Tales (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1980); David Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1985); and David Anderson, Before the Knight’s Tale: Imitation of Classical Epic in Boccaccio’s Teseida (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988). See also The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question, ed. L.M. Koff and B.D. Schildgen (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000). 8 See also now Kenneth P. Clarke’s Chaucer and Italian Textuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 9 Wright in his many studies on this subject was the first to establish the centrality of French to Boccaccio’s English reception. 10 Several important contributions on this subject have appeared in Studi sul Boccaccio, such as Patricia Gathercole’s bibliography of “Boccaccio in English,” Studi sul Boccaccio, 7 (1973), 353–68, and the many reviews of various English translations.

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Introduction

above, the translation history of Boccaccio has tended to be written by his translators, who until relatively recently have tended not to be academics in Italian Studies but instead professional translators, academic Anglicists, or anglophone writers simply trying their hand at a classic author. However, from the 1960s onward, Boccaccio’s translators began to emerge from university departments of Italian, and so a new degree of self-reflexivity and critical engagement has become evident in the study of Boccaccio’s reception in English both within the translated editions themselves and in what Genette has called the epitext, the associated literature that has grown up around those texts in the shape of reviews, histories of Italian literature, and so on.11 This study gratefully draws on the work of these individuals who have contributed to this critical hinterland, chief amongst whom is Victoria Kirkham, whose holistic studies of Boccaccio’s translated fortune through the materiality of the translations have advanced the study of Boccaccio’s reception more than anyone else’s. The essays in the conference proceedings of  the 1990 University of Pennsylvania conference “Boccaccio 1990: The Poet and His Renaissance Reception,” directed and edited by Victoria Kirkham and Kevin Brownlee, are exemplary in this regard, and have provided me with valuable methodological pointers for my panoramic approach to the translated book as object. Special mention, in particular, should be made of Peter Stallybrass’s contribution “Dismemberment and Re-memberments: Rewriting Decameron IV.1 in the

See also F.S. Stych’s book Boccaccio in English: A Bibliography of Editions, Adaptations, and Criticism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), and my own updated and ongoing bibliography of Boccaccio in English in Studi sul Boccaccio. The key Italianist perspective is found in the proceedings of the 1970 conference Boccaccio nella cultura inglese e anglo-americana, ed. G. Galigani (Florence: Olschki, 1974); see also T. Pisanti, “Boccaccio in Inghilterra tra Medioevo e Rinascimento,” in Boccaccio in Europe, ed. Gilbert Tournoy (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1977), 197–208. Another Italianist perspective may be found in R. Kirkpatrick, English and Italian Literature from Dante to Shakespeare: A Study of Source, Analogue, and Divergence (London: Longman, 1995). Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin offers a brilliant take on the subject in his “Translating Boccaccio,” in The Cambridge Companion to Boccaccio, ed. Guyda Armstrong, Rhiannon Daniels, and Stephen J. Milner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 11 The epitext in its broadest sense is the subject of chapters 13 and 14 in Gérard Genette’s Paratexts, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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English Renaissance,” which offers a masterclass in how to approach Boccaccio’s early modern English translations via the material forms of the books.12 Like the work of these illustrious predecessors, this book is written from the Italianist perspective (albeit by one who comes from an anglophone background) rather than that of English studies. I have approached the study from the “sending culture” as far as possible, in my capacity as a Boccaccio scholar, while enjoying the linguistic privilege of being able to encounter the target texts in the receiving language (i.e., the various English translations) in my first language and culture. It is my hope that this perspective will allow new connections to be made and new conclusions to be drawn about the changing place of Boccaccio in anglophone literary culture. Reception is more usually defined as literary influence, but the very act of translation is in itself a powerful indicator of reception; indeed, translation is reception in the most fundamental sense.13 The translation studies theorist Gideon Toury has argued that translations should be seen as “facts” of a receiving culture, rather than projections from a sending one, and so, following him, I consider the English Boccaccio primarily in terms of what the importation of this particular author and/or these particular works means for the specific reading communities into which he was imported.14 For a text to be translated from one linguistic culture to another provides evidence that the author or text is already “received” in some sense, by at least one reader who finds a value in the work and who seeks to share the encounter. The same holds true whether this is a text commissioned by an individual aristocratic patron in the early fifteenth century (as in John Lydgate’s paraphrase of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium, commissioned by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and the subject of chapter 1 of this book) or a cheap mass-produced paperback edition of some of the

12 The proceedings appear in Studi sul Boccaccio, 20 (1991–2), 167–377; Peter Stallybrass’s essay is 299–324. 13 I explore this theme in more detail in my article “Translations as Cultural ‘Facts’: The History of Boccaccio in English,” in Translation: Transfer, Text and Topic, ed. P. Barrotta and A.L. Lepschy (Perugia: Guerra, 2010), 53–68. 14 “Translations have been regarded as facts of the culture which hosts them, with the concomitant assumption that whatever their function and identity, these are constituted within that same culture and reflect its own constellation”: Gideon Toury, Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1995), 24.

10

Introduction

racier tales as found in the late twentieth century.15 A further defining characteristic of Boccaccio’s reception in English translation is the remarkably high number of retranslations and new editions that have been made over time.16 This is most marked in the case of the Decameron, which enjoyed at least forty-two different editions by 1900 and more than one hundred and thirty more post-1900; it is a fate, however, that is shared to a greater or lesser degree by all of his so-called minor works, most of which have appeared in a variety of different translations and formats over the centuries. For the purposes of this book, I do not distinguish between a new “translation” (i.e., a new target text produced from Boccaccio’s source text) and a new edition of a previously produced translation. Previous studies of Boccaccio’s history in translation have tended to focus on each new translation as a discrete and privileged moment in the history of the text, yet such a focus on chronologically marked moments betrays the more complex reality of anglophone textual production of Boccaccio translations. In fact, this focus on the individual translation performances privileges the authorial position (of the translator) over that of the publication history, and therefore limits our perspective: the history of Boccaccio is the history of copies and reprints, as much as anything else, and so we must also consider the effects of the less authorially privileged (even “unauthorized”) editions alongside each instance of a new translation. In addition, the materiality of these Boccaccio editions has hitherto not been taken much into account, yet the physical format, paratextual features, and subconscious or deliberate positioning of each of these textual performances provides an additional semantic field above and beyond the features of the target text.17 An overview of these types of “facts” (publishing events) is nonetheless fraught with difficulties, not least those inherent in the imaginative

15 A typical twentieth-century edition of this persuasion is Giovanni Boccaccio, Tales from the Decameron, ed. Mark Cohen (London: Four Square Classics, 1962). 16 Lawrence Venuti notes that canonical texts are frequently retranslated because “diverse domestic readerships will seek to interpret [them] according to their own values and hence develop different retranslation strategies that inscribe competing interpretations”: “Retranslations: The Creation of Value,” Bracknell Review, 47 (2004), 25–6. 17 For a consideration of the implications of the material features of the book on Boccaccio’s reception in England, see my article “Paratexts and Their Functions in Seventeenth-Century English Decamerons,” Modern Language Review, 102 (2007), 40–57.

Introduction

11

reconstruction of the readers and reading communities of the past. But nonetheless, the study of the complete world of the translated book, comprising text, paratext, editorial revisions, and the wider context of its dissemination and readership, while dauntingly complex, provides a much richer critical prism through which to examine the question of Boccaccio’s shifting place in anglophone literary culture.18 At each point in his reception history, Boccaccio has been known for very divergent texts; and surprisingly, the work now perceived as his acknowledged masterpiece, the Decameron, was not at all esteemed for the first two hundred years or so of his English reception.19 If translated texts provide evidence of an unmet need in the receiving culture, and are produced to fill a perceived gap in the reading life of the nation, they can be understood generally to represent a prestige import into English.20 The parameters by which this prestige is valorized, however, are highly variable, and change in different linguistic communities and time periods. Some publics will value the work primarily because of its author, others because of the genre, perhaps another for the subject under discussion. Even in a single linguistic culture, whether it be Italian, English, French, Spanish, or Latin, different reading communities – and even non-reading communities – will make use of the same author. This in turn creates a spectrum of responses and a wide range of target texts, which may be accessed via a variety of text-containers, or even none (in the case of oral communication).

18 In a recent article, “Witness and Access: The Uses of the Fluid Text,” John Bryant argues that we should “expand our notion of textuality to include the dynamics of revision in its various authorial, editorial, and cultural modes. Texts in revision – that is, ‘fluid texts’ or any work that exists in multiple versions – provide concrete evidence of writers writing and readers reading and can be of use in overcoming problems relating to witnessing the otherwise unwitnessable processes of production and consumption in a culture”: Textual Cultures, 2.1 (2007), 16. 19 On the relatively late English publication of the Decameron, see chapter 4, and my articles “The Translated Boccaccio in Early Modern England,” in Caro Vitto: Essays in Memory of Vittore Branca, ed. Jill Kraye and Laura Lepschy in collaboration with Nicola Jones, Special Supplement 2, The Italianist, 27 (2007), 49–70 (esp. 62–3), and “Paratexts and Their Functions,” 42–4. 20 “Translation activities and their products not only can, but do cause changes in the target culture. By definition, that is. Thus, cultures resort to translating precisely as a major way of filling in gaps, whenever and wherever such gaps manifest themselves … Semiotically, then, translation is as good as initiated by the target culture”: Toury, Descriptive Translation Studies, 27.

12

Introduction

While the phenomena described above are generally applicable to any and all translated literary works, it does seem that there is something peculiar to Boccaccio’s works that has led them to be so voraciously (and successfully) adopted into various different reading communities. The key to understanding the enthusiastic and continuing remaking of his texts over centuries lies, I believe, in his characteristic writerly structures, namely his narrative frames and the plurality of voices they permit. One of the defining features of Boccaccio’s writing in both Latin and Italian is his use of complex embedded organizational structures, which allow him the possibility of a huge amount of variation in form, subject matter, genre, register, and voice; while the interplay of frames and voice also creates another of his most rewarding characteristics, the inscribing of unreliability and ambivalence into every level of his work.21 This ambiguity and potential for modularization in his work may well be one of the fundamental reasons for his popularity in translation: unlike other comparable authors (such as Dante, for example), there is a fluidity and adaptability inbuilt in Boccaccio’s writing that allows it to be more easily integrated into the source culture, a certain space into which the translator can insinuate him- or herself. To illustrate this, we need only compare, for example, Dante’s Divine Comedy, which repels attempts at modification by the numerical fixity of its cantos and its rigorous metrical scheme. (Although Boccaccio did do his best to extend it, of course, composing the terza rima Argomenti rubrics to accompany the Commedia in his first Dantean compilation, the Toledo Zelada manuscript.)22 Taking as a starting point Boccaccio’s authorial architecture, and the material forms of his texts in their originating contexts, we can thus find a way into understanding the mechanisms of translation, both intercultural and linguistic, that have operated on his works as they have

21 The instability of Boccaccio’s authorial voice and its effect on the gender inflections of his works have become a key area of interest for feminist Boccaccio studies, as seen, for example, in Marilyn Migiel’s A Rhetoric of the Decameron (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), and in the essays collected in Boccaccio and Feminist Criticism, ed. Thomas C. Stillinger and Regina F. Psaki (Chapel Hill, NC: Studi e testi di Annali d’Italianistica, 2006). 22 MS Toledo, Librería del Cabildo, 104 6. The Argomenti also accompany the Commedia in his other Dante manuscripts, MS Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana 1035, and MS Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Chigiano L.VI.213. On these, see Evi Ianni, “Elenco dei manoscritti autografi di Giovanni Boccaccio,” Modern Language Notes, 86 (1971), 99–113.

Introduction

13

rippled outwards in time and space from their composition in their original historic context in fourteenth-century Italy. As Gérard Genette has pointed out, the paratext presents the text to its readers, and so the fact that Boccaccio’s work already contains multiple authorial paratexts such as dedications, proems, and conclusions, means that it is therefore possible to “add on” structures that are congruent with the rest of the work.23 The narrative integrity and “feel” of the book is therefore superficially retained. In Boccaccio, the authorial concerns are generally aired in the outer reaches of these highly stratified embedded frames (customarily delineated as the “Proemio,” “Introduzione dell’autore,” “conclusione,” and the like), and these then become key sites of potential slippage when the document is translated from one reading community to another. It has become an academic truism to observe that interesting things happen at the margins, in in-between, liminal places, but clichéd or not, these are the places where we can map the repurposing of Boccaccio’s translated texts. Boccaccio’s works are in constant dynamic movement between their different narrative levels and voices, and the places where these shifts take place is in these same structurally marked areas: the beginnings and ending of chapters, the moments when the authorial voice is foregrounded, or in the prominently displayed authorial paratexts at the beginning of individual sections. These themselves are the most memorable and marked sections, and are therefore also the most malleable to authorial – and by extension editorial and/or translational – interventions. Building on the particularly mobile qualities of the Boccaccian authorial frame, then, this book identifies areas beyond the translated text itself as key sites for investigation in the history of Boccaccio in English. I therefore focus primarily on the various elements of the book object itself, such as its material features, mise-en-page, and the interplay of multiple paratexts, rather than merely the linguistic transformations from one language to another. A discussion of the translated target text is, of course, essential, but I consider it to be one of many elements that 23 On this, see my article “Paratexts and Their Functions.” In English, the coinage “paratext” has a far broader meaning than the narrowly defined paratextual categories of péritexte and épitexte that occur in Genette’s seminal work. Its original French title, Seuils (Thresholds), gives a better sense of the dynamism of the encounter between reader and translated text, as well as a sense of the spatial divisions that demarcate the various parts of the translated book. For further critical reflection on the term, see Renaissance Paratexts, ed. Helen Smith and Louise Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

14

Introduction

contribute towards the creation of a particular “English Boccaccio” at a particular point in time. During the long historical period covered by this book (five centuries, from the fifteenth to the twentieth century), certain types of Boccaccio’s writings have been translated at different times, and so I have been able to organize the study in a loosely chronological way, which charts the move from scribal to print culture and from the Latin works into the vernacular, as well as the ebb and flow of interest in particular works over time. If each translation is a snapshot in time, the narrative arc of this book moves from a zoomed-in close-up for the earliest works to a wide-angle survey of the broader field for the mass-produced editions of the nineteenth century and beyond. Since the amount of Boccaccio material available in English increases exponentially over the five centuries covered here, the later chapters are able to develop the idea of trends in publishing in a way that is not possible, for example, with the individual manuscripts discussed in chapters 1 and 2. Given the chronological progression of my book, I will foreground the link to the Boccaccio’s originating textual culture and its bookforms only in the first two chapters, which are dedicated to manuscript culture. In this way, I anchor the narrative in Boccaccio’s own textual culture, from which all these other textual productions ultimately stem. With the coming of print, it becomes impossible to trace the entire translation trajectory of every work of Boccaccio’s across many different languages and reading communities, due to the multiplicity of book-objects and their divergence from the source texts; I have thus organized the book so as to focus in on specific instances of transmission that can exemplify the ways in which these texts make their way from medieval Italy to later anglophone textual productions.24 Likewise, I have reluctantly restricted my discussion of the publishing history of individual tales from the Decameron that circulated independently in English from the fifteenth century onward. Constraints of space meant that it was impossible here to follow so many different reception trajections of so many different tales over five hundred years, although I plan to publish further work in this area. Apart from these exclusions, I have looked at every other named Boccaccio translation published in

24 I discuss these issues in more detail in my forthcoming essay, “Translation Trajectories in Early Modern Print Culture: The Case of Boccaccio,” in Translation and the Book Trade in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jose Maria Perez Fernandez and Edward Wilson-Lee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Introduction

15

English between c. 1430 and 1931, a total of at least ninety books if we count the separate editions. The first chapter is dedicated to the first translation of a single work of Boccaccio’s into English to be named as such: John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, a verse paraphrase of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium, which was first translated into English in the 1430s. Lydgate’s rendering of the De casibus was hugely popular in its day, circulating widely and still existing in multiple copies; the chapter takes as its focal point the magnificent manuscript of the text held in the John Rylands Library of the University of Manchester (English MS 2), and traces the way in which Boccaccio’s text was transmitted from fourteenth-century Tuscany to fifteenth-century England via the intermediate French translation of Laurent de Premierfait. Chapter 2 examines two English versions of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, produced about a century apart. The first of these is a short verse paraphrase after the example of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, held at the British Library (MS Additional 10304), which has been dated to around 1440–1450, while the second is a partial prose rendering of the Latin text, presented as a gift to King Henry VIII by Henry Parker, Lord Morley in the 1540s. In these first two chapters, the English renderings are situated within medieval manuscript textualities and the historical context within which they were produced; particular attention is given to their physical appearance and paratextual features, and how these elements reveal the ways in which Boccaccio was positioned as author and authority. Chapter 3 moves from manuscript books to print, discussing the newfound English interest in Boccaccio’s vernacular works in the sixteenth century, and tracing it once again to the influence of French literary culture. The chapter focuses on three English editions of Boccaccio: the 1567 Pleasaunt Disport of divers Noble Personages, which is a translation of part of book IV of the Filocolo; the 1587 Amorous Fiammetta; and the 1597 Affrican and Mensola, a prose rendering of Boccaccio’s narrative poem the Ninfale Fiesolano. In each case, the English editions are shown to derive wholly or in part from French source editions rather than Italian, and I study the paratextual features in order to demonstrate the way in which Boccaccio is positioned as an elite romance imported author, although in a construction that owes as much to the influence of French print culture as to his Italianity. Chapter 4 is dedicated to the textual history of Boccaccio’s most famous and most translated work, the Decameron, and covers the longest

16

Introduction

chronological span of all the chapters: just over three hundred years from the first “complete” English translation in 1620 up to the year 1930. By tracing one work’s history over such a long period, we are able to witness the developing “shape” of the text, as over centuries it gradually regains the textual wholeness of the Italian original. As will be shown, the act of translation has allowed many other silent modifications to the form of the text, which range from the expurgated rendering of 1620, through the radically abridged eighteenth-century versions, right up to the twentieth century when the (by-now-canonical) controversial passages continued to be managed editorially – either repressively, via tactical deployment of Italian text, or conversely exhibited and amplified via titillating illustrations. The textual history of these books can be characterized in terms of concepts of censorship and display, and the simultaneous yet opposed impulses towards sexual licence and sexual repression, which can be seen to play out in every edition. The last two chapters are dedicated to the recovery and translation of the minor works, some of which are published for the first time since the sixteenth century (e.g., the Fiammetta) and others are translated into English for the first time. Chapter 5 focuses on the nineteenth century, and shows how Boccaccio’s works are made to intersect with contemporary fashions such as Romantic Italomania and neo-medievalism, and recovered again in the cultural turn to academic literary studies towards the end of the century. One of the most striking features of this period in Boccaccio’s translation history is the fact that his minor works are translated merely – and only – to illuminate the writings of other great medieval authors, namely Dante and Chaucer, while their translators are leading lights of literary England, and include Leigh Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and his brother William Michael Rossetti; new translations made in this period include parts of the Esposizioni, Boccaccio’s sonnets on Dantean subjects, and translations of parts of the Teseida and Filostrato in their capacity as sources for Chaucer. The second part of the chapter is dedicated to the competing versions of the Trattatello in Laude di Dante produced by academics on both sides of the Atlantic, at the time when Italian Studies was coming into being as an academic discipline in its own right. The sixth and final chapter is dedicated to the translations of the minor works published in the first three decades of the twentieth century, in which three distinct trends in publishing can be detected. The first of these is the continuing development of a professional, “academic” cadre of translators and editors, and a concomitant academic

Introduction

17

readership for their translations. The second is the continuing fascination with the popular “romance” Boccaccio, which grows out of the widespread anglophone cult of Dante, and which makes some interesting detours into the world of private presses and illustrated erotica. The final trend is the emergence of a desire to rehistoricize Boccaccio, seen materially in the recuperation and republication of historic English translations for the first time since their composition, and intellectually in the fact that much of this work is carried out under the auspices of learned societies of medieval studies. The book comes full circle in this final chapter, as we meet again the translations we first encountered in the early chapters. I have decided to stop the survey in the years 1930–1 for a number of reasons, some pragmatic and some ethical. First, and most practically, there is simply not the space in a single monograph to do justice to the quantity of translations that come after this date; for example, no fewer than seventy different editions of English versions of the Decameron alone have been published after 1930, with at least fifty-nine editions of the “minor” works over the same period. I have included a general survey of publishing trends post-1930 in my article “Translations as Cultural ‘Facts,’” but the full story remains to be written. A second consideration in my decision to stop at this date is my belief that a certain distance, both critical and ethical, is necessary for this type of study. I have deliberately chosen not to write about translations whose authors are still living, not least for the reason that I myself am too close in time to these translations to be able to see the broader picture of their creation. Much work still needs to be done on the post-war scholarly translations of Boccaccio, for example, which have made such an important contribution to the academic study of the author in universities around the world, but perhaps we need to wait a generation or two more so that their contribution can be appreciated at its fullest. Readers of this book may detect a certain authorial frustration at points with regard to the representation and portrayal of women in the books discussed here. As a feminist academic, my intention has been to write a more gender-inclusive history of Boccaccio in English, which has until very recently been presented almost exclusively in male-oriented terms. Boccaccio’s works – which are so concerned with women, amongst other subjects – have always been overtly directed to a male audience, translated by men, marketed to men, and read by men. Indeed, the sexually titillating aspects of Boccaccio’s writing, sometimes – and profitably – combined with illustrative visual depictions, and

18

Introduction

always conceived of appealing to an exclusively male readership and male gaze, have been central to the marketing of his works since the sixteenth century at least. Female readers of Boccaccio have always been there, but they have only begun to be written into the reception history of the author fairly recently, at a time when female and feminist scholars and students have begun to problematize gender as a key area of debate in their engagement with his works. At the start of this project I dreamed of discovering a hithertounknown female translator of Boccaccio, a proto-feminist woman of letters in a room of her own, keeping the wolf from the door with her artful rewriting of Boccaccio for Englishmen. French literary culture rejoices in the figures of Christine de Pizan and Marguerite de Navarre, two female authors who made the Boccaccian model their own, but alas, despite my best efforts, no similar figures have emerged from the anglophone tradition. The shocking fact remains that, out of the ninetyodd translated books covered in this book, only one can be definitively attributed to a female author: the 1930 translation of the Decameron by Frances Winwar (although I continue to hold out hope against hope that in some unattributed translations, the anonymous author was a woman). The 1930 publication of the first female-authored translation of Boccaccio is therefore a date to be commemorated, and is a suitable end point for this study, marking as it does the moment in which the means of production are opened to those who will become its primary consumers by the start of the twenty-first century.

1 “Here begynneth the book callyd J. Bochas”: The De casibus virorum illustrium between Italy and England

In the new reading room of the John Rylands Library, high above Manchester’s Deansgate, is a book. It is a large book, rather longer than it is wide (approximately 43 cm by 32 cm), and some 7 cm thick from cover to cover. Closed, it is an imposing object, monumental in size and self-consciously substantial in its imposing blue morocco and gilt nineteenth-century binding, the thick vellum leaves barely suppressed by the heavy boards. Open at its first page, it is a kaleidoscope of colour, script, and floriated detail in the margins, an object once unknowably strange in the context of its distant execution, and yet even now – almost six hundred years after its making – utterly familiar in form. This is English Manuscript 2 of the John Rylands Library, a fifteenth-century copy of John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, and the book that begins this history of Boccaccio in English translation. To a twenty-first-century reader, this book is an object of reverence, valued primarily, perhaps, for its very great age and its iconic power as a surviving relic of a time more than half a millennium ago, but also for its beauty, the richness of its physical form, and its scholarly importance in the textual history of this work. To us, it is foreign, even exotic, in its witness to a disappeared world, and valorized as such amongst its small contemporary readership of expert medievalists and historians of the book. But at the time of its making, this book was valued for quite different reasons. Certainly, we cannot (and should not) overlook its colossal worth in its originating culture, a fact underlined both by the value of the materials used (a parchment support, as opposed to paper; the expensive coloured inks, paints, and gold leaf, all used in its decoration) and the care with which the manuscript was designed and executed, in both its written and visual forms; nor its function beyond the text as a costly status

20

The English Boccaccio

symbol in itself in the cultural economy of fifteenth-century England. But above and beyond the physical attributes of this volume is the cultural capital it invokes, evident from the first in its titular rubric that gives this chapter its title; this book is a “Boccaccio,” with all that this signifies. Just as this is a prestige book, so John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes is a prestige text: a vast poem on a sonorous and illustrious theme by the leading English court poet, and a retelling, in English, of a text that was already greatly valued but distant both geographically and linguistically. John Lydgate’s version of Boccaccio’s prose compendium of the fates of illustrious men, the De casibus virorum illustrium, thus remakes and reproposes this work for a new audience. This translation is the primal moment, and this book the first artefact, in this history of Boccaccio in English translation.1 Not only is this text one of Boccaccio’s best-known works (in Italy and across Europe) in the century immediately following its composition, but its textual adventures from Latin to English – or perhaps from Italy to England – provide a microcosm of the ways in which texts were circulated and were transmitted between linguistic cultures in the period from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-fifteenth century. As for the Manchester manuscript, its importance to this cultural history of Boccaccio in English does not end here, in its function as the first formal English translation of Boccaccio; in fact, it will play further walkon parts in the reception history. It reappears again in chapter 3 at a crucial moment in the history of reading, with the advent of movable type and the coming of the printed book, when English MS 2 provides the copy-text for Richard Pynson’s editio princeps of the Fall of Princes (1494), and again in chapter 6 as one of the source manuscripts used to establish the text for the first – and indeed last – modern critical edition of the Fall of Princes (1923–7).2 Outwith this study, the history of this

1 I have deliberately chosen to start this survey at Lydgate as the author of the first “named” translation of Boccaccio, despite the fact that Boccaccio’s textual presence can be traced even earlier in the English receiving context, for example in the works of Chaucer, and those Decameron tales which were circulating in the same period via intermediate Latin and French translations. It should be stressed that the Rylands manuscript has not been selected for its chronological primacy or textual superiority, but instead for its location, material features, and future afterlife in the cultural history of Boccaccio. 2 John Lydgate, Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, ed. H. Bergen, Early English Texts Society, Extra Series, 121–4, 4 vols. (London: Published for the Early English Text Society by H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1924–7). Note US edition 1923–7.

The De casibus between Italy and England

21

book’s materiality continues to evolve, as it features in the University of Manchester’s manuscript digitization project In the Bygynnyng (2009): the book is now fully and freely accessible online via the library imaging website. One of the aims of my book is to present a long view of Boccaccio’s reception in English, and the case of the De casibus exemplifies this in excelsis, where we see it revived and remade according to new technological or cultural imperatives over the six-hundred-year span of this study. This first chapter will consider three separate textual incarnations of the De casibus, which correspond to the three principal stages in its journey from Italy to England. Boccaccio’s text is essentially a collection of biographies of notable individuals, who range chronologically from Adam and Eve up to the present day. Such a subject was clearly of direct interest to members of the international aristocratic and republican ruling elites in its scope and theme, as well as catering to the celebrity Schadenfreude of their lowlier subjects. It is thus not at all surprising that this was by far the most popular of Boccaccio’s works across Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, although it is also highly interesting to note that its popularity endured far longer outside Italy than within the peninsula.3 An initial factor in the rapid and enthusiastic dissemination of this work across national and linguistic boundaries was no doubt the fact that it was written in Latin, and so was readily comprehensible outside Italy, but its fame was such that there is evidence of an almost instantaneous demand for it outside a litterati readership, which is evidenced by its almost immediate translation into many local vernaculars.4 In their 1983 critical edition of the text Pier Giorgio Ricci and Vittorio Zaccaria record seventy-two extant manuscripts of the Latin text, alongside other partial and lost witnesses, while there is a similarly substantial tally of surviving manuscripts in

3 De casibus virorum illustrium, ed. Pier Giorgio Ricci and Vittorio Zaccaria, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca (Milan: Mondadori, 1964–1998), 9:875–9. On the general popularity of the De casibus, see Nigel Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes: Narrative Tragedy in Its Literary and Political Contexts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 32–3; on its remarkable popularity in France, see C. Bozzolo, Manuscrits des traductions françaises d’oeuvres de Boccace: XVe siècle, Medioevo e umanesimo, 15 (1973), 37–45. On the declining fortune of Boccaccio’s Latin works in Italy, see Rhiannon Daniels, Boccaccio and the Book: Production and Reading in Italy, 1350–1520 (Oxford: Legenda, 2009), 154. 4 See M. Ferrari, “Dal Boccaccio illustrato al Boccaccio censurato,” in Boccaccio in Europe, 111–13.

22

The English Boccaccio

other countries. Carla Bozzolo records a total of sixty-nine manuscripts of the French translations by Laurent de Premierfait, while Anthony Edwards records “at least thirty-seven” extant manuscripts of the complete Fall of Princes, with at least as many again containing selections.5 The continued reception of this text can also be seen in the move into the medium of print in the later fifteenth century: the British Library Incunable Short-Title Catalogue records a single Latin print of 1474–5, by Georg Husner in Strasbourg; five editions of the French versions (1476, 1483, 1483–4, 1494, [1506]); and one each of English (1494) and Spanish (1495) renderings. It is thus clear that “Boccaccio,” and his De casibus, was very widely known across Europe, yet the ways in which this text was read – and indeed, its very form – differed widely in different linguistic and reading communities.6 This chapter will provide a snapshot of some of its various incarnations as it travels from Italy to England. I first focus on the source, Latin, text in its sending culture in mid-Trecento Italy; I then consider Laurent de Premierfait’s 1409 French translation, and finally examine John Lydgate’s English verse rendering, made in the 1430s. In each of these stages, I will focus on the formal and material characteristics of each version of the text, in order to investigate the specific historic context in which it was produced and the reading communities to which it was directed. The text itself, whether “source” (original) or “target” (translation), is read as only one element in the semantic field that is the book as a whole, and I pay particular attention to the interplay of paratextual and material features that serve to situate, frame, and mediate the text to its audiences. Previous studies on the translation history of the De casibus (such as those by Hortis, Bergen, Wright, Smith, Gathercole, or Mortimer) have focused narrowly on the changes made to the translated text in isolation from its physical and visual format, although Anne D. Hedeman has now redefined the field with her study of

5 A.S.G. Edwards, “Lydgate Manuscripts: Some Directions for Future Research,” in Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England: The Literary Implications of Manuscript Study, ed. Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1983), 14. I provide a full list of mss in “A Bibliography of Boccaccio’s Works in English Translation: Part I. The Minor Works,” Studi sul Boccaccio, 38 (2010), 194–5. 6 For example, provenance studies of the extant manuscripts have shown that the readerships of the De casibus seem to have differed between England and France, being largely scholarly in England and politically active in France. See Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, 32–3.

The De casibus between Italy and England

23

Laurent de Premierfait’s translation in its historical production contexts.7 In this study, I reject a purely literary approach in favour of a renewed focus on each book as an individual compositional performance, localized in the intellectual and linguistic culture in which it was produced. In this way, the translated fortune of Boccaccio in its earliest years is situated within the textual culture of the late medieval period, and is shown to exemplify cross-linguistic transmission practices, rather than merely assuming a teleologically defined destination of the ultimate creation of an English-language version. The Production Context of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium (1360–1373) In a study such as this, so concerned with authorial and translational intentions, it is fundamental to be able to identify as fully as possible the production context of the book. The now classic model for this as pertains to the printed book is Robert Darnton’s “communications circuit” as found in his seminal 1982 article “What Is the History of Books?,” which has been the subject of much debate and further modification by himself and others.8 However, the manuscript book is a quite different beast, and so, after Daniels, for these first two chapters I will approach the source and target texts according to the classifications established by Harold Love, who distinguishes three main categories of manuscripts, defined by their relationship to the agent responsible for their publication. The author of the text and the producer of the text-object are the same person in the authorial holograph. In the case of the manuscript copy made by a specialist scribe there is a clear distinction between the author of the text and the subsequent producer of the text-object, while in the manuscript copy made by an individual who wishes to possess the text, the figures of reader and text-object producer merge.9

7 Anne D. Hedeman, Translating the Past: Laurent de Premierfait and Boccaccio’s De casibus (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008). 8 See Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?” reprinted in The Book History Reader, ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (London: Routledge, 2002), 9–26; and Darnton’s re-evaluation of the model in “‘What Is the History of Books?’ Revisited,” Modern Intellectual History, 4.3 (2007), 495–508. 9 Daniels, Boccaccio and the Book, 15.

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The English Boccaccio

The textual history of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium is complex, and inscribed into the structure itself of the version of the text that has come down to us.10 The first and shorter version of the text (known as redaction A) is thought to have been completed around 1360. Boccaccio continued to revise the text for many years, and the longer, second version (redaction B) was finally completed and dedicated to Mainardo Cavalcanti in 1373. The differences between the two redactions can be identified chiefly by the textual expansions in the second version, and the presence of the opening dedication and closing explicit in which Boccaccio names Mainardo (although the manuscript tradition is somewhat complicated by the presence of several manuscripts of the A-text complete with dedication and, vice versa, of manuscripts of the B-text without the identifying dedication).11 No autograph manuscripts remain of the De casibus, and the composite text of the B-redaction that forms the basis of the newest critical edition has thus been derived from a comparison of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscript witnesses, which are a mixture of the second (i.e., scribally produced) and third (i.e., reader-produced) types of manuscript book.12 Zaccaria’s presentation of the problem of the corrupted textual genealogy is useful in itself as a starting point from which to examine the textual culture in which this text originated: La presenza di tanti codici contaminati conferma le mie ipotesi [...]: che, già vivo il Boccaccio, o subito dopo la sua morte, circolassero copie dell’originale senza dedica e col testo A; dell’originale col testo B, e ancora

10 The critical edition published in the series Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio reproduces the B-redaction of the text. For the complex textual history of the work, see the Nota al testo in this edition, Ricci and Zaccaria, De casibus virorum illustrium, esp. 896–8, and Zaccaria, “Le due redazioni del De casibus,” in StB, 10 (1977–8), 1–26, now incorporated into Zaccaria, Boccaccio narratore, storico, moralista e mitografo (Florence: Olschki, 2001). 11 The Mondadori critical edition contains an appendix that notes the principal divergences between the two texts, 1101–7. 12 These two types of scribes have been respectively defined as “copisti a prezzo” and “copisti per passione.” The term “copista per passione” was coined by Branca in his article “Copisti per passione, tradizione caratterizzante, tradizione di memoria,” in Studi e problemi di critica testuale: Convegno di studi di filologia italiana nel centenario della Commissione per i testi di lingua, Bologna, 7–9 April 1960 (Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1961), 69–83, while Cursi has shown the centrality of professional scribes – “copisti a prezzo” – to the manuscript tradition.

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senza dedica; copie dell’esemplare di Mainardo Cavalcanti con la Dedica; e forse, ancora prima, qualche copia della sola Dedica, subito dopo l’invio a Mainardo.13 The presence of so many contaminated codices confirms my hypotheses [...]: that, either while Boccaccio was still alive, or shortly after his death, there circulated copies of the original A-text, without any dedication; copies of the original B-text, still without a dedication; copies of Mainardo’s presentation manuscript with the Dedication; and perhaps, even earlier, some copies of the Dedication alone, immediately after it was sent to Mainardo.

From this, we can attempt to reconstruct the De casibus’s earliest dissemination in the 1360s and 1370s. We can assume at least two authorial holographs, one dating from around 1360 (the A-redaction) and one from at least a decade later (the B-version). The gift manuscript sent to Mainardo may have been the second of these, or Boccaccio may have made another copy to present to Mainardo as a gift while keeping another by him for his own reference; this putative manuscript would then have been lost by the time his Latin manuscripts were bequeathed to the monastery of Santo Spirito on his death, which seems rather unlikely.14 Beyond those copies that originate with Boccaccio himself, there exists a second class of manuscripts of the De casibus, those made by third parties, either professionally produced or copied by readers. These can be traced to three separate sources: Boccaccio’s A-text, Boccaccio’s B-text (before it was presented to Mainardo), and copies deriving from the Mainardo exemplar complete with dedication. Zaccaria suggests that the dedication may also have circulated separately, and was then reunited with either the A-text or the B-text in a later phase of the stemma. Fortunately, although the primary artefacts of Boccaccio’s autograph manuscripts of this text no longer remain, recent years have seen the publication of two major studies that have reconstructed Boccaccio’s textual culture according to material principles. Informed by these new 13 On these contaminated manuscripts see Ricci and Zaccaria, De casibus virorum illustrium, 883. 14 See A. Mazza, “L’inventario della ‘parva libraria’ di Santo Spirito e la biblioteca del Boccaccio,” Italia medioevale e umanistica, 9 (1966), 1–74. The large number of autograph manuscripts still in Boccaccio’s possession at his death, and thus bequeathed to Santo Spirito, suggests that he kept a large number of his works with him, rather than presenting them to other individuals.

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perspectives, we can now make some further suggestions about the form and intended readership of the De casibus in its original textual contexts. Marco Cursi’s 2007 book Il Decameron: Scritture, scriventi, lettori. Storia di un testo analyses the production and circulation of Boccaccio’s story-collection in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries via an examination of the material features of sixty manuscripts, focusing not only on the tradition of the text itself (as has historically been the concern of previous bibliographical studies), but also on those individuals who wrote, copied, owned, and read the text where these can be reconstructed.15 Rhiannon Daniels, in her Boccaccio and the Book: Production and Reading in Italy 1340–1520 (2009), not only discusses the Decameron but also extends the field of enquiry to the De mulieribus claris and Teseida, and adds early printing to manuscript culture. Cursi’s approach is essentially palaeographical, while Daniels favours a more sociological approach, after D.F. McKenzie; but taken together, the two studies make an enormously valuable contribution to the field.16 It has long been known, of course, that Boccaccio was highly concerned with the form, content, and textual integrity of his writings; the care that he lavished on his writings can be seen in his copious erudition, his attention to their structural architecture, and his ongoing process of authorial revisions over many decades, in some cases.17 His attention to the “shape” of his works can be seen in his structuring devices such as the rubrics and the authorial paratexts, but also in his extratextual graphic interventions on his own manuscripts, such as illustrations, glosses, and visual elements like capital letters and marginal decorations.18 The painstaking studies by Cursi and Daniels have, 15 Marco Cursi, Il Decameron: Scritture, scriventi, lettori. Storia di un testo (Rome: Viella, 2007). 16 “At the heart of the ‘sociology of texts’ is the physical form of the book, whose materiality mediates between and influences both authorial meaning and readings or misreadings of those who receive the text”: Daniels, Boccaccio and the Book, 13. 17 For example, the Hamilton manuscript (MS Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Hamilton 90) has been authoritatively dated to the last years of Boccaccio’s life (i.e., the 1370s), while the Decameron is generally dated to the period between 1348 and 1360 (and usually 1350). For a review of theories of the date of composition and the textual tradition of the Decameron, see Daniels, Boccaccio and the Book, 77–8. 18 On the illustrations to the Decameron, see Maria Grazia Ciardi Dupré dal Poggetto, “Boccaccio ‘visualizzato’ dal Boccaccio: Corpus dei disegni e cod. Parigino It. 482,” StB, 22 (1994), 197–225, which argues that Boccaccio himself illustrated a copy of the text that had been copied by Giovanni d’Agnolo Capponi.

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however, provided a material, evidential, base from which to assess not only Boccaccio’s own authorial intentions for his works, but also and more importantly the ways (i.e., forms) in which his subsequent readers encountered them, and the way in which these intentions and forms inevitably diverge over time. As Daniels writes: “The reception process is traced from the originator of the text to its subsequent consumers, comparing the similarities and differences between those whom Boccaccio desired or intended to read his works, and those who actually read his works.”19 These divergences and distortions are a key feature of Boccaccio’s later reception in English, as will be shown. What form, then, did Boccaccio’s two autograph manuscripts of the De casibus take, and what might their material and paratextual features tell us about his intentions for the text? Some twenty-five manuscripts written by Boccaccio survive, of which eight are autographs of his own works.20 Rhiannon Daniels has surveyed these eight manuscripts, and has identified several features that can allow us to draw some conclusions about Boccaccio’s authorial positioning and his intended readership.21 All of the manuscripts are written on parchment, rather than paper, an expensive choice of support that implies they were conceived as high-status texts, directed towards readers who could afford durable luxury manuscripts. This impression is reinforced by Boccaccio’s choice of script, a semi-gothic bookhand, in which he writes every autograph 19 Daniels, Boccaccio and the Book, 18. 20 Daniels, Boccaccio and the Book, 37n23. Ginetta Auzzas lists the twenty-five manuscripts in her “Elenco e bibliografia dei codici autografi,” StB, 7 (1973), 1–20, and bibliographical descriptions can be found in Evi Ianni, “Elenco dei manoscritti autografi di Giovanni Boccaccio,” Modern Language Notes, 86 (1971), 99–113. See also Mazza, “L’inventario della ‘parva libraria,’” 1–74. 21 For further details, see Rhiannon Daniels, Reading and Meaning: The Reception of Boccaccio’s Teseida, Decameron, and De mulieribus claris to 1520 (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Leeds, 2003), chap. 5, “Autographs,” 133–46. The eight manuscripts in chronological order of composition are: Zibaldone laurenziano, Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS 29.8 (1327–34; 1339–60s); Teseida, Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Acquisti e Doni, 325 (1340–50); Trattatello in laude di Dante, 1st redaction, Toledo, Biblioteca Capitular, MS Zelada 104.6 (1350s); Trattatello in laude di Dante, 3rd redaction, Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Chigiano L. V. 176 (1359–63); Genealogia deorum gentilium, Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS LII. 9 (1363–66); Buccolicum carmen, Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, MS 1232 (1366–68); Decameron, Berlin, Staatsbibliothek der Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, MS Hamilton 90 (1370–71); De mulieribus claris, Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS XC sup. 981 (1370–73); Daniels, Reading and Meaning, 131–2.

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manuscript of his own compositions.22 This script was used for formal writing, and so again implies that these are books destined for publication, rather than being rough working copies.23 Finally, all eight contain various elements of decorative embellishment (such as rubrication, decorated or coloured initial capitals, and illustrations), which also contribute to their identity as high-quality books. From this, we may infer that the lost exemplars of the De casibus were likely to share these broad general features. Chronologically, the A-redaction sits between the manuscript of the third redaction of the Trattatello (1359–63) (which Daniels notes has a layout of full-page text) and another copious Latin prose work, the Genealogia (1363–6). The B-redaction was produced in the 1370s, after the Hamilton manuscript of the Decameron and at the same time as the De mulieribus claris. These latter two manuscripts both have the text laid out in two columns, as does the Geneaologia, and thus conform to the model of the libro da banco (desk-book) identified by Armando Petrucci.24 The libro da banco was a large parchment book (typically 320–400 mm high) designed for an elite educated readership to read at a desk; it was originally intended for Latin scholastic texts, but also became increasingly used as the container for vernacular texts in Italy during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Only two of Boccaccio’s autographs are large enough to technically count as libri da banco – the Genealogia at 350–355 mm high, and the giant Decameron, at 365–372 mm high – but the adoption of the two-column

22 Note that Boccaccio’s Zibaldone magliabechiano (MS Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, B.R. 50) is partly written in chancery minuscule. Not all this manuscript is in Boccaccio’s hand; for a description of the ms (under the classmark of MS BNCF Magliab. II, II, 327), see Ianni, “Elenco dei manoscritti autografi,” 109–10. For a detailed presentation, see Gabriella Pomaro, “Memoria della scrittura e scrittura della memoria: a proposito dello Zibaldone Magliabechiano,” in Gli Zibaldoni di Boccaccio: Memoria, scrittura, riscrittura. Atti del Seminario internazionale di FirenzeCertaldo (26–28 aprile 1996), ed. Michelangelo Picone and Claude Cazalé Bérard (Florence: Franco Cesati, 1998), 259–82. 23 Although Boccaccio also uses these graphic and physical conventions for the first of these manuscripts, his Zibaldone laurenziano (notebook), scholars agree that aspects of its compilation and miscellaneous function mean that it was intended for personal use rather than publication. See Daniels, Reading and Meaning, 134. 24 The following presentation is based on Daniels, Reading and Meaning, 137–8. See Armando Petrucci, “Reading and Writing Volgare in Medieval Italy,” in Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy: Studies in the History of Written Culture, trans. Charles M. Radding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 169–235. For a more detailed analysis of Boccaccio’s manuscript sizes, see Cursi, Il Decameron, 145–52.

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format for the slightly smaller De mulieribus (258–260 mm high) suggests that this is the model in which Boccaccio seeks to situate his own vernacular and Latin compositions. And although no autographs remain of the two redactions of the De casibus, it is surely reasonable to assume that the second of these, at least (the presentation copy made for Mainardo Cavalcanti), would have conformed to this format. A brief glance at some of the material features of De casibus manuscripts circulating in Italy during what Cursi has termed the “proto-diffusione” and “prima diffusione” periods (i.e., during Boccaccio’s lifetime and the fifty years after his death) shows that the wider readership of this text was essentially contiguous with the author’s elevated intentions.25 From the first, then, Boccaccio probably conceived of his De casibus as a text of both elevated form and content, and thus one that would make a suitable gift for a high-ranking courtier in the service of the Angevin court at Naples.26 In fact, the oldest and most authoritative manuscript of the De casibus is known to be of Neapolitan provenance, and, given that it contains the dedication to Mainardo and the B-redaction of the text, it is likely to derive from the now-lost Boccaccian exemplar. (Indeed, the fact that the manuscript was not found with Boccaccio’s other manuscripts at his death suggests that it was in fact presented to the recipient.) This is MS Ottoboniano Lat. 2145 of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, “Vo” in Zaccaria’s handlist of the manuscripts.27 I will therefore use this manuscript as the emblematic witness of the originating sending culture of the De casibus, both for its authoritatively early date and its production in Naples. The Naples connection is fundamental both to Boccaccio’s personal literary formation and the subsequent reception history of his works 25 Cursi, Il Decameron, classifies the manuscripts used in his study according to whether they belong to the “proto-diffusione” (1360–75), “prima diffusione” (1376–1425), or “seconda diffusione” (1426–90). 26 On the intellectual culture of Angevin Naples, see Francesco Sabatini, Napoli angioina: Cultura e società (Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1975), esp. 103–15 on Boccaccio and Naples. 27 The manuscript has most recently been described by Maria Cristina Castelli (with a colour reproduction of the first page of the Dedication) in Boccaccio visualizzato: Narrare per parole e per immagini fra Medioevo e Rinascimento, ed. Vittore Branca (Turin: Einaudi, 1999), 2:146–8. The following analysis is based on this published description. The book also contains descriptions and images of seven other fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts of the text. In Zaccaria’s abbreviations, these are “Vp” (II, 76–9), “C” (II, 135–9), “VeC” (II, 254–7), “E” (II, 277), “RL” (II, 280–1), “Sa” (II, 343–4), and “Ny” (II, 349).

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outside Italy. At the age of fourteen he had moved to Naples with his father, who was associated with the Florentine merchant bankers the Bardi, and would stay there from 1327 until 1340/1.28 It was at this time that he became friends with the heir to another great Florentine merchant family, Niccolò Acciaiuoli, who would go on to become the Seneschal of Naples in later life, and with whom he would have a lifelong (albeit sometimes stormy) association.29 Living on the fringes of the Angevin court in Naples, he followed studies at the Studio Napoletano under the tutelage of Cino da Pistoia and other notable intellectuals of the period,30 and thereby participated at first hand in the aristocratic culture that enmeshed the Angevin royal family with the wealthy Florentine expatriate community that governed Neapolitan vernacular culture.31 Boccaccio then visited Naples again briefly between 1362 and 1363 on the invitation of Acciaiuoli, and on his return to Florence continued to maintain strong links with the Neapolitan elite for the rest of his life.32 His links to Neapolitan circles are evident both in his authorial paratexts and in the manuscript evidence, for example in the dedication of the De mulieribus claris to Niccolò’s sister Andrea in 1361, and the rewriting and dedication of the De casibus to another prominent Florentine expatriate living in Naples, Mainardo Cavalcanti, slightly more than a decade later in 1373. Cavalcanti was, famously, the recipient of Boccaccio’s notorious 1372 letter in which he requests Cavalcanti to forbid the women of his family to read the Decameron.33 Cursi reads this letter as evidence of the historical circumstances of the dissemination of Boccaccio’s works, showing how his elite readers in Naples shaped – and were themselves shaped by – the author’s response to his texts.34

28 29 30 31 32

Branca, Profilo biografico, in Giovanni Boccaccio, Tutte le opere (1967), 1:16, 53. Branca, Profilo biografico, 23. Branca, Profilo biografico, 30. Sabatini, Napoli angioina, 93. For a persuasive demonstration of the textual evidence for Boccaccio’s Neapolitan circles and their centrality to the dissemination of his works, based on the frammento magliabechiano of the Decameron, see Cursi, Il Decameron, 26. 33 This letter is historically one of the most contentious cruces of Boccaccio criticism, although Rhiannon Daniels has recently proposed a new reading that questions the fundamental critical assumption that the letter refers to the Decameron: “Rethinking the Critical History of the Decameron: Boccaccio’s Epistle XXII to Mainardo Cavalcanti,” MLR, 106.2 (2011), 423–47. 34 Cursi, Il Decameron, 44.

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Manuscript “Vo” is rather smaller than the majority of the Boccaccio manuscripts previously described, at 240 by 175 mm. Like the autographs, the support is parchment rather than paper, and it is richly decorated throughout with painted and gilded borders on the first page of every chapter. The text is that of the De casibus B-redaction, written in a single full-page column in a gothic bookhand. Taken together, these elements suggest that the book might be classified as a libro da registro di lusso or libro-cortese, clearly professionally produced for a wealthy reader. The decorative elements provide further clues about the status of the book and even some insights into who this reader might be. The colour palette of the illuminated miniatures and borders is rather restricted but still very rich, with pink, blue, and green predominating, and gilding is used for further embellishment. In addition, the page where the text begins contains visual indicators of the source and destinee: a large illuminated capital D depicts the author Boccaccio sitting at a desk with his hands on an open book, pen and ink to hand, while at the foot of the page we find the fleurs-de-lys of France (repeated several times as a decorative motif throughout the book).35 Finally, the motto “Viva Madama” is integrated into the borders on two further pages (fols. 10r and 82v). The presence of these elements, in conjunction with the smaller size and rich format, has long led critics to suggest that this book was owned by one of the women of the Angevin royal family, and it has even been suggested that the owner was Queen Giovanna I, who was known as “Madama” by her subjects.36 Whether this is the case or not, this first exemplar nonetheless demonstrates perfectly Boccaccio’s (and this text’s) appeal to those in high places. The Neapolitan exemplar of the De casibus (“Vo”) is thus a product of this environment, a book directly associated both stemmatically and “socially” with both the author and an elite mixed-sex intended audience of this most elitethemed of texts. And it is the enthusiasm of this specific receiving public – the highly educated men and women of the Angevin court – to read about the misfortunes of their ancestors and peers, that drives 35 The motif of the frontispiece author-portrait of Boccaccio appears for the first time in this manuscript: Maria Grazia Ciardi Dupré dal Poggetto, “L’iconografia nei codici miniati boccacciani dell’Italia centrale e meridionale,” in Branca, Boccaccio visualizzato, 2:4. 36 On the alleged royal ownership of this ms and the bibliographical history of this attribution, see Castelli’s description in Branca, Boccaccio visualizzato. Sabatini is in favour of the Queen Giovanna hypothesis (Napoli angioina, 114, and see also 260n239).

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forward the translation of this text into French and its transmission to mainland France within four decades of its first composition. Form and Functions of the De casibus’s Internal Structures In order to trace the mechanisms involved in this text’s translation into French, it is useful to describe its formal structural features, in terms of both its macrocosmic structural organization and Boccaccio’s voicing and narrative strategies. Despite its sententious title and theme, and its conscious self-presentation as a classicizing work of Latin scholarship, the De casibus shares many of the characteristics of Boccaccio’s betterknown and more accessible vernacular works. His encyclopaedic erudition is perhaps less lightly worn here than elsewhere in his corpus, but his structural originality, narrative vigour, and human insights are as present as ever. Thematically, the De casibus has often been linked with the De mulieribus claris in the later manuscript tradition both in Italy and beyond. However, although the two works are often conceived of as complementary (the one being primarily concerned with the political downfall of a largely male constituency, the other a collection of female biographies), the De casibus should be seen instead as an attempt at producing a moral-historical text that re-presents Boccaccio’s classical culture through a Christian moralizing frame, while the De mulieribus has a simpler, compilatory focus.37 Boccaccio’s book, however, is notably different from traditional compilations of great men, both in its content (an exercise in the repurposing of classical sources), and especially in its structural originality for the genre. As he did in the Decameron, Boccaccio organizes his material within a framing superstructure based on the illusion of interaction and conversation. But whereas the third-person narrators of the Decameron cornice take it in turns to tell each other stories in each of the ten days of storytelling, here Boccaccio (or better, “the author-persona”) relates the histories as a first-person account as the ghostly shades of the protagonists appear to him in a series of visions while he sits composing the work in his room.38 In its attention to the theme of Fortune the model is 37 Ricci and Zaccaria, De casibus virorum illustrium, xviii. For a stimulating appraisal of Boccaccio’s mythmaking and classical culture, see Tobias Gittes, Boccaccio’s Naked Muse: Eros, Culture, and the Mythopoeic Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). 38 Attilio Hortis was the first to note the similarity of this method of presentation to Boccaccio’s own Amorosa visione: Ricci and Zaccaria, De casibus virorum illustrium, xlviii.

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Boethian, but also recalls an earlier work of Boccaccio’s, the Amorosa visione, where the great figures of the past are presented in a series of tableaux vivants as the protagonist moves through the various rooms of the castle. The mimetic illusion is reversed here, though, as the narrator-protagonist remains static while the souls come to him; these endless waves of miserable souls seem to suggest equally forcefully the model of Dante’s Inferno.39 The De casibus is divided into nine books of varying length, containing a total of 159 chapters in all, and organized according to several embedded frames. At the outermost margins we have the customary Boccaccian authorial frame, which can be seen in the proemial sequences that begin books I, II, III, and IV. The first of these (I, i, 1–10) serves to introduce the work as a whole.40 Within these authorial sequences finally lies the frame narrative, where the narrator-protagonist is alone in his room when the souls of the great and bad begin to appear to him. These elements are common to both the A- and B-redactions of the text, but the B-version contains two extra paratextual elements that sit outside this core embedded framing structure: the dedication to Mainardo and the closing explicit (IX, xxvii, 11). As in the Decameron, the architecture of the book allows a degree of thematic emphasis: the central book, book V, explores the relationship between personified Virtue and Fortune in the histories of lives, a theme that is then approached directly in the dialogue with Fortuna herself at the start of book VI. Since each of the frame levels is reworked in Laurent’s translation, and again in Lydgate’s version, it is useful to describe their salient features. The dedication to Mainardo Cavalcanti can be seen as a paratext 39 Hortis notes the Boethian model, 474 (cited in Ricci and Zaccaria, De casibus virorum illustrium, xxiv). The shade of Dante himself converses with the narrator of the De casibus in book IX, 23, 6–10, while Boethius appears in book VIII, 18, 5–6, preceding the arrival of a whimpering King Arthur. 40 However, while two further books (VI and VIII) lack a formal proem, the opening encounter is nonetheless used as a springboard for a more philosophical discussion, based on the premise of a conversation with these chapters’ visitors, first “that horrible monster, Fortuna,” and then the unnamed Francesco Petrarca, “who will be known to many”: “Michi post pausillum requiei iam calamum resumenti horridum monstrum illud, rerum ministra mortalium Fortuna, affuit” (When, after a little rest, I was about to pick up my quill again, there appeared to me that horrible monster Fortuna, that maid-servant to human affairs), VI, i, 1; “Sino quod nomen tuum, quod tam egregie colendum posteritati paras, multis poterit esse commune” (Let us leave the fact that your name, which you so carefully tend so that it will be honoured by those who come after, will be known to many), VIII, i, 4.

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whose original function has been transformed over time. In its original context, as we have seen, Boccaccio used this dedication to present his revised book to a much-admired friend; the A-text of the book was already circulating and perhaps even well known by the 1370s. But relatively quickly, this letter becomes an integral part of the De casibus itself, even being attached to copies of the work that predated the act of dedication (as seems to have been the case for the source text for Laurent’s French translation). The presence of the dedication in the critical edition – and its importance to the critical tradition – has the effect of effacing the book’s previous textual incarnation, before the revisions and before it becomes associated with the high-status patron (which was presumably Boccaccio’s intention anyway). Given the wealth of evidence to show the close and mutual friendship between Boccaccio and Mainardo Cavalcanti, this dedication can be read as a largely unproblematic example of the genre. The manuscript evidence of an independent textual tradition in Naples and the absence of the exemplar from Boccaccio’s own collection of books also seem to suggest that the book did actually make it to the hands of its dedicatee, which was not always the case. (Other dedications, of course, may not be so closely bound into personal relationships nor so straightforward; they might be more aspirational in their request for patronage, written in the hope that a high-ranking dedicatee would support the work’s publication.) The dedication begins with a short address listing Mainardo’s titles, presenting the book to him: “Generoso militi domino Maghinardo de Cavalcantibus de Florentia preclaro regni Sycilie marescallo Johannes Boccaccius de Certaldo” (To the noble knight Messer Mainardo Cavalcanti of Florence, illustrious marshal of the Kingdom of Sicily, from Giovanni Boccaccio of Certaldo). This is followed by the letter of dedication itself, a relatively lengthy text of some nineteen paragraphs. Boccaccio begins by situating this dedication within the history of the text itself, stating how he had composed this work some years earlier, but had not been able to decide on a suitable person to whom to dedicate it among the princes and rulers of the day (§§1–5). Seeing the abuses of the warmongering rulers of modern times, he despaired that his book would become an object of scorn by such people rather than being prized by them (§§6–7). He then names several particularly corrupt and vicious leaders (§9): Charles V of Valois, king of France, here described with the pejorative name Gallus Sicamber (§8); the “Hyspani” (Enrico II of Castile and Pietro IV of Aragon); “Britannus” (Edward III, the Black Prince); “Pannonus bilinguis” (the two-tongued, i.e., two-faced Hungarian, Louis I); and finally

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“mollis et effeminatus Syculus” (the soft and effeminate Frederick III of Sicily). Sickened by such leaders, he had almost decided to dedicate the book to Fortune when he had the propitious idea of not dedicating it to a splendid prince, but instead, more worthily, to a friend (§10).41 At this point, Mainardo came to mind, almost like a vision from heaven; and the author berates himself for searching amongst wild brutes when he already has someone close to his heart, to whom he is bound by a sacred tie (Mainardo had asked Boccaccio to hold his only son at his baptism in 1373) (§§11–14). Mainardo, while not “pleno phylosophicis eruditis” (fully learned in philosophy), is a man of great intellectual gifts (§15), decorated with military honours, and of noble stock, a scion of the famous Cavalcanti family (§16). The author was so happy to have made this decision that he attacked his theme anew (i.e., by making further editorial revisions; §17). In the concluding paragraphs he implores his friend to accept this modest gift, and to accept it in the name of the sacred friendship between them, hoping that reading it will bring him “honestum ocium” (honest ease) (§19). The closing sentences give an insight into Mainardo’s reading culture and the mechanisms of manuscript publication. Boccaccio asks his friend to correct the text if it displeases him, then to pass it on to their mutual friends, and finally to publish it so that it goes forth into the world under their joint names, a word-of-mouth success amongst illustrious men (§19). At the very end of the book we find a corresponding textual element in this dedicatory frame, the conventional authorial leave-taking and formal explicit to the ninth book, which read (in the critical edition) as follows: Tu autem, parve liber, longum vive felixque, insignis militis Maghinardi meique tenax nominis atque fame. Iohannis Boccaccii de Certaldo ad strenuum militem Maghinardum de Cavalcantibus, preclarum regni Sycilie marescallum, De casibus virorum illustrium liber nonus et ultimus explicit feliciter. (De casibus (henceforth DC), IX, xxvii, 11) You, then, little book, live long and happily, preserving the name and fame of both the distinguished knight Mainardo and me.

41 This moment recalls the dedication strategy of the De mulieribus, where Boccaccio abandons his original intention to dedicate the work to Queen Giovanna, preferring instead a woman of his acquaintance, Niccolò’s sister Andrea Acciaiuoli.

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The English Boccaccio Here finishes happily the ninth and final book of The fates of illustrious men, by Giovanni Boccaccio of Certaldo, dedicated to the distinguished knight Mainardo Cavalcanti, marshal of the Kingdom of Sicily.

Following the dedication we find the Proem to the first book, introduced by a further short incipit: “Johannis Boccaccii de Certaldo De casibus virorum illustrium ad insignem militem Maghinardum de Cavalcantibus, preclarum regni Sycilie marescallum, liber primus incipit feliciter. Prohemium” (Concerning the fates of illustrious men, dedicated to the distinguished knight Mainardo Cavalcanti, marshal of the Kingdom of Sicily, by Giovanni Boccaccio of Certaldo; The first book happily begins. Proem). The function of the proem, here, as elsewhere in Boccaccio’s oeuvre, is to present a summary of his intentions for the book. The style is familiar, with the deployment of typical figures such as the utility and humility topoi, as well as promisingly suggestive teasers for what lies within: principum atque presidentium quorumcunque obscene libidines, violentie truces, perdita ocia, avaritie inexplebiles, cruenta odia, ultiones armate precipitesque et longe plura scelesta facinora. (Proem, 1) The obscene lust of princes and those in power, their savage violence, their sinful idleness, their insatiable greed, their blood-drenched hatred, their sudden and ferocious vendettas, and their infinite wicked crimes.

Where the vernacular fiction of the Decameron uses the device of offering solace and diversion to ladies unlucky in love, here Boccaccio adjusts his authorial persona in line with the expectations of a text in the Christian moralizing genre, articulating a position of outraged morality, in order to reproach the abuses of political leaders. The princes themselves are identified as part of the audience for this work; indeed, it is offered in order that they may see themselves as others see them, and adjust their sinful behaviour in time to save their souls: Bona igitur pace talium, quo inpellit dicendi impetus tendam, si forsan saxea hec corda tenui spiritu oris mei in salutem suam mollire saltem paululum queam. (Proem, 5) For some people, therefore, I will thus turn the intention of my words there to see if I can, with the weak breath from my mouth, soften at least a little their hearts of stone for their salvation.

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This aim will be achieved through the use of examples (exemplis), which will show what God can – and did – do to those in positions of power (although they may call it Fortune) (§6). The proem therefore allows Boccaccio to situate his historical survey both within an overtly Christian moralizing frame and within a recognizable literary genre, that of the exemplum. For the benefit of this fictional ideal readership (the degenerate princes themselves), he will select only the most famous from their number – “sed ex claris quosdam clariores excerpsisse sat erit” (It will be enough to choose the most famous from amongst these illustrious men; §8) – so that they may know the power of the Almighty and curb their ruinous ways, and that they may use these examples of the misfortunes of others for their own benefit. Under the guise of helping his audience, which ostensibly requires an element of distraction to break up its reading, the author then describes the other features of the text: “Porro, ne continua hystoriarum series legenti possit fastidium aliquod inferre, morsus in vitia et ad virtutem suasiones inseruisse quandoque tam delectabile quam utile arbitratus adnectam” (Furthermore, in order that the reading of this series of histories does not bring distaste to the reader, I will add some occasional morsels of warning against vices, or encouragement towards virtue which I consider to be pleasant or useful; §9). He concludes with an appeal to God for his benevolence towards this audacious enterprise, and hopes that the work will resound to His greater glory. It is clear that this proem demonstrates many of the typical features of the Boccaccian preface, but its importance to this comparative study is crucial. In the simplest terms, this is the point where Boccaccio reveals the use to which his book should be put: directing himself ostensibly to the most elite of readership (the princes), he presents the De casibus as a guide to avoiding the vagaries of Fortune. At the same time, the proem also speaks to other constituencies. The skilful rhetorical interplay and the sonorous phrasing are directed towards his circle of scholarly friends, chief among them Petrarch and the dedicatee of the second redaction, Mainardo Cavalcanti (himself a high-ranking politician and soldier, but also a scholar).42 The exemplarity, meanwhile, suggests a concern for a less erudite (but still Latin-literate) readership,

42 It is not too much of a stretch to imagine Petrarch as Boccaccio’s perennial ideal reader, despite, or perhaps because of, his constant criticisms of Boccaccio’s work. On the relationship between the De casibus and Petrarch’s own collection of biographies of illustrious men, see Ricci and Zaccaria, De casibus virorum illustrium, 912–13n1.

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which would appreciate both the content of the dedicated sequences on vice and virtue and the change in pace brought about by their inclusion. These elements, of course, could be easily found and read in isolation from the rest of the text, and it is notable that their exhortative and even vituperative language makes for a much less demanding read than the densely erudite sections. Beyond the authorial paratexts, there are several other points in the text where Boccaccio foregrounds his authorial concerns. The first of these is the Auctoris purgatio et commendatio poesis (III, xiv), where he asserts the importance of otia for literary pursuits.43 Boccaccio allows himself a further opportunity to reiterate his authorial concerns in the Collocutio Fortune et auctoris at the beginning of book VI, this time as a dialogue in direct speech with the terrifying goddess Fortuna (VI, i, 6–16). Finally, the theme of ozio and literary endeavour is revisited in the famous sequence in which Petrarch rebukes the narrator, appearing to him in a dream (book VIII, I). The fundamental narrative building block of the De casibus is not the authorial frame, however, but the startling literary device that forms the basis of the frame-narrative and that introduces the individual histories. This unusual device – of the narrator in conversation with the ghosts of history past – gives the work an unexpected and immediate dramatic force by rendering visible the misfortunes of these once great individuals. They do not appear to the narrator at the height of their glory but instead in the depths of their misery, aged, decrepit, and dressed in rags. The illustrious characters thus themselves become agents in the text as they appear before the author: they address him directly (e.g., Adam, I, i, 2), they flock around him in wailing crowds (“sic iam agmine flentium circundari me video” (so now I see myself surrounded by a wailing crowd, I, vii, 2) or run towards him shouting to attract his attention (e.g., Thyestes, I, ix, 1: “et ecce festinans Pelopis infausta proles, Thyestes, venit clamans” [And lo, running towards me Thyestes, the ill-omened offspring of Pelops, shouting]). The immediacy of this device, created by the present-tense narrative and the urgency with which these wretched souls attempt to transmit their story to their posteri, creates a kind of enforced empathy in the reader, an effect amplified by the skilful narratorial presentation of the characters.

43 The passage is very similar to the defence of poetry found in the Trattatello and Genealogia. See Ricci and Zaccaria, De casibus virorum illustrium, 949.

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In addition to its affective realism, this framing device allows Boccaccio to dramatize the processes of literary composition and inspiration, a feature of this text that is enthusiastically taken up and developed by  its two subsequent translators, Laurent de Premierfait and John Lydgate. The narrator, pen in hand, searches for his subject, and is then interrupted either by this particular character or another one in succession. For additional narrative variation, the historical accounts of the characters’ downfalls are presented in various ways and through various voices. Taking book I as an example, we find that the most common of these is the third-person narrative; this can take the form of either a remote narrative voice where Boccaccio-the-narrator provides a simple unmediated historical account (for example in chapter iii, De Nembroth [Concerning Nimrod]; v, De Saturno [Concerning Saturn]; vi, De Cadmo Thebanorum rege [Concerning Cadmus, King of Thebes]; x, De Theseo, rege Athenarum [Concerning Theseus, King of Athens]; and xv, De Agamenone Micenarum rege [Concerning Agamemnon, King of Mycenae]). Third-person narrations can also be introduced via the metaliterary device of the narrative frame, as discussed above. In this second type of third-person narrative, the characters physically manifest themselves in the space of the narrator’s imagination as a prelude to the third-person account of their misfortunes, either alone (e.g., chapter i, De Adam et Eva parentibus primis [Concerning Adam and Eve, our first parents]) or selected from crowds of sorrowing people (e.g., chapter viii, De Yocasta regina Thebaru [Concerning Jocasta, Queen of Thebes]; xiii, De Priamo, Troianorum rege, et Hecuba [Concerning Priam, King of Troy, and Hecuba]; and xvii, De Sansone [Concerning Samson]). In addition, there are chapters devoted to specific batches of unfortunates (e.g., chapter vii, Concursus infelicium [A gathering of the unhappy]; xii, Conventus dolentium [An assembly of the sorrowful]; and xix, Miseri quidam [Some wretches]). There are also some chapters where characters or personifications speak in the first person, following the rhetorical convention of the jurgium or dispute (e.g., I, ix, Thiestis et Atrei iurgium [Dispute between Thyestes and Atreus]; VII, iii, Tristes quidam et Tyberii Caesaris atque Gai Caligule iurgium cum Valeria Messalina [Some afflicted souls and the dispute of Tiberius Caesar and Gaius Caligula with Valeria Messalina]; the certamen or contest between Poverty and Fortune, III, i). In addition to this type of device, other characters are allowed to speak for themselves: for example, Adam directly announces himself and his wife to the narrator in the first book, but the narrative then moves to a

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third-person account (indeed, as if the narrator’s memory is jogged and writer’s block unblocked by this introduction). This passage will be presented in some detail so as to map its development through the different translations. Boccaccio starts the frame narrative off with a bang with the very first supernatural manifestation of the book, when the parents of humankind, Adam and Eve, suddenly materialize before the narrator: Maiorum nostrorum dum flebiles casus, ut satis dignum principem infortuniis assummerem ex deictorum multitudine, animo volverem, et ecce senes astitere duo, tam grandi annositate graves, ut vix artus tremulos posse trahere viderentur. (I, i, 1) I was turning my mind to the lamentable falls of our ancestors, to find from within that multitude a first one worthy for his misfortunes, when lo, two aged persons are standing beside me, weighed down by such great decrepitude that they hardly seemed able to move their tremulous limbs.

Boccaccio’s presentation shows us the first humans as the apex of mortal frailty, rather than as the venerated ancestors of humankind who were literally touched by the hand of divinity; they are vulnerable, old, and bereaved, and despite their most noble heritage, they participate in the universal experience of aging, frailty, and loss.44 It is a radically democratizing depiction, which explicitly makes manifest Boccaccio’s intentions for the text. Quas insuper eis fuisse mentes suspicer, cernentibus ex duobus filiis alterum alterius mactatum nequitia, cadaver exanime, immobile corpus,

44 It is interesting to compare this depiction with Boccaccio’s presentation of Adam and Eve and their sons in the Esposizioni (IV, esp. litt., 41–52). Here the onus is descriptive and “factual,” closely following the Genesis story. There is one reference to Adam’s great age: “Ultimamente Adamo, diventuto vecchio, d’età di novecentotrenta anni si morì” (Finally Adam, having become old, died at the age of 930; §45), and a short account of the death of Abel: “un dì, con lui insieme discendendo in un loro campo, non prendendosene Abèl guardia, Caìn il ferì in su la testa d’un bastone ed ucciselo (one day, going down into one of their fields with him, and Abel not being on his guard, Cain wounded him on the head with a club and killed him; §52). Giorgio Padoan, Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante, in Tutte le opere, 6:181, 184.

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tabido respersum cruore et insensibile; quas lacrimas, quos dolores, quos horrores et pavores illo usque incognitos arbitrer? (I, i, 13) And how do we think they must have felt, when they saw one of their two sons killed by the wickedness of the other: his inanimate corpse, his immobile body, covered in putrefying blood, unconscious; and what tears and sorrows, what horrors and fears have they undergone until now, unknown to us?

The emphasis here, by contrast with the account in the Esposizioni, which were virtually contemporaneous with the second redaction of this text, is psychological, sorrowful, and elegiac. The reader is forced into a position of sympathy with the aged first humans, living long past their allotted lifespan while bearing the grief of their son’s fratricide. The first chapter can also be used to illustrate the move between narrative voices in the book, as seen in this extract, which begins with reported direct speech within the narrator’s first-person account, before slipping into a more formal, historical voice: Quorum sic alter: – Uti primi vir et uxor auctore Deo celum hausimus, sic Inimico suadente homini Fortune lubricum primi experti sumus: et ideo preter nos nemo decentius quod queris dabit principium. – Ego intueri decrepitos, mirari homines extra nature officinam productos, mortalium parentes omnium et paradisi ante obitum incolas stupens cepi, ac inde libens preferendos assumpsi. Fuit igitur ex limo terre Dei digito primus in terris compactus Adam. (I, i, 2–4) And one of them said, “As the first man and wife we were drawn out of heaven by God the creator, so when the Enemy persuaded man, we were the first to experience slippery Fortune (the vagaries of Fortune); and therefore no one else could be more suitable to begin than us.” I began, astonished, to observe these aged people, and to look amazed at those human beings produced outside the way of nature, the parents of all mortals, who had been inhabitants of paradise before their fall, and I willingly welcomed them as worthy of preferment. Adam was therefore first created from the mud of the earth by the finger of God.

Further moralizing sequences are interspersed with the narrative chapters. These generally take the form of whole chapters (typically following the biography of characters who exemplify this virtue, or,

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more likely, vice) but are sometimes also integrated into a particular biography. In book I there are six chapters of moral reflection: chapter ii, Adversus inobedientiam (Against disobedience); iv, In superbos (Against the proud); xi, Adversus nimiam credulitatem (Against excessive credulity); xiv, Contra superbos (Against the proud [again]); xvi, Paupertati applaudet (Exaltation of poverty); and xviii, In mulieres (Against women). These moralizing reflections are often written in an exhortative voice, sometimes using the first-person plural (“we”), sometimes the secondperson plural (“you”), and sometimes the third-person (“they,” e.g., against women). In the following sections, I will consider how these structurally marked passages of Boccaccio’s Latin text are presented in their translated forms, first in the French prose of Laurent de Premierfait and then in the English verse of John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes. The Production Context of Laurent de Premierfait’s Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes (1400–1409) The manuscript tradition of Boccaccio’s B-redaction of the De casibus, even in the absence of the autograph, reflects the localized context of its production and the very targeted intentions of the author for its dissemination in Naples, all of which condition its subsequent transmission into French and into mainland France. Beyond the expatriate Angevin court, the dissemination and circulation of Boccaccio’s works into France can also be linked to a second location, or “contact zone,” of Franco-Italian relations, that of the papal court at Avignon in Provence.45 Boccaccio visited Avignon twice in his life, sent first as a Florentine envoy in 1354 and returning again on a diplomatic visit in 1365.46 Moreover,

45 Quoting Mary Louise Pratt, Anne E.B. Coldiron defines the “public sphere of early print” as “a space where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other and establish ongoing relations”: “Public Sphere/Contact Zone: Habermas, Early Print, and Verse Translation,” Criticism, 46.2 (2004), 208. The textual cultures of pre-print-culture Avignon demonstrate similar dynamics of encounter. 46 On the importance of Avignon as Boccaccio’s route into French literary culture, see Franco Simone, The French Renaissance: Medieval Tradition and Italian Influence in Shaping the Renaissance in France, trans. H. Gaston Hall (London: Macmillan, 1969), 37–78 (first published as Il rinascimento francese: Studi e ricerche [Turin: Società Editrice Internazionale, 1961]); and Simone, “Giovanni Boccaccio ‘fabbro’ della sua prima fortuna francese,” in Il Boccaccio nella cultura francese (Florence: Olschki, 1971), 64–6. See also Nicholas Havely’s chapter on Avignon in David Wallace,

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his acquaintance and later friendship with another famous “Florentine,” Petrarch, contributed to the creation of an interest in, and local audience for, his works. Simone suggests that Boccaccio’s presentation of a copy of his own Amorosa visione along with a hand-written exemplar of Dante’s Commedia to the Provence-based Petrarch reveals the care with which Boccaccio sought to promote his work in this particular intellectual milieu (a practice that is entirely concomitant with what we know of his dissemination strategies for his Latin works some years later in the Neapolitan milieu).47 It is therefore not surprising, given the multilingual scholarly environment of the curia, that there is evidence of an early – and keen – readership in particular for his encyclopaedic Latin works in Avignon, and the De casibus is first amongst these both in chronological primacy and in popularity.48 A copy of the De casibus is recorded in the library of Cardinal Pedro de Luna (the future Anti-Pope Benedict XIII) by 1375, the first work of Boccaccio’s to be included in an inventory in mainland France, and Mombello shows how this work was recorded in the inventories of many clerical and noble collections over the course of the fifteenth century.49 With so much cultural traffic between Italy and Avignon, it is virtually impossible to isolate a particular transmission route for the De casibus into France at this distance. However, one possible personal transmission route for this text may be found in the figure of the humanist Giovanni Moccia, who was travelling between the Neapolitan court and the papal curia in Avignon in the later 1370s, and who served as papal secretary between 1382 and 1404.50 Moccia makes

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48 49

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ed., Europe: A Literary History, 1348–1418 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). I am grateful to Professor Havely for sharing this work with me before publication. The Dante manuscript (which was not a Boccaccio autograph) is now Vatican City, MS Vat. Lat. 3199. See Simone, “Giovanni Boccaccio ‘fabbro,’” 63–4. For a detailed discussion of this ms, see Carlo Pulsoni, “Il Dante di Francesco Petrarca: Vaticano latino 3199,” Studi petrarcheschi, 10 (1993), 155–208. Boccaccio’s rapid transmission into French literary culture is discussed in more detail in chapter 3. Noted in passing in Simone, “Giovanni Boccaccio ‘fabbro,’” 72–3. The papal library is discussed in detail in Gianni Mombello, “I manoscritti delle opere di Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio nelle principali librerie francesi del secolo XV,” in Pellegrini, Il Boccaccio nella cultura francese, 86–92 (inventory citation p. 87). Simone, The French Renaissance, 60.

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a direct link between Boccacio’s Neapolitan reading community and Laurent de Premierfait and the French humanists.51 Giovanni Moccia’s friendship with Laurent is well known, as is his career between Naples and Avignon, and Franco Simone has tentatively posited that he may have been the intermediary between the two first “authors” of the De casibus.52 However, relatively little has been written about Moccia and Boccaccio. Sabatini highlights his presence at one remove in Boccaccio’s network of Neapolitan correspondents: “Durante l’ultima sua visita a Napoli il Boccaccio scambiò lettere [...] con l” ‘insigne giovane’ Matteo d’Ambrasio, poeta anch’egli e poi corrispondente del Moccia” (During his last visit to Naples Boccaccio exchanged letters with the “distinguished young man” Matteo d’Ambrasio, himself a poet and later correspondent of Moccia’s); while Bozzolo shows how Moccia was introduced to the writings of Laurent de Premierfait by another Avignon-based humanist, Jean Muret, and surmises that it may even have been Moccia himself who invited Laurent to the papal court.53 Crucially, it appears that Moccia was at the Neapolitan court for some years in the late 1370s and early 1380s, the time when we know that MS “Vo” was in the possession of Giovanna I or another of the women of her court.54 Even more significantly, it seems he wrote a 51 On Moccia’s close relationship with Laurent, see Carla Bozzolo, “Introduction à la vie et à l’œuvre d’un humaniste,” in Un traducteur et un humaniste de l’époque de Charles VI, Laurent de Premierfait, ed. Carla Bozzolo, Textes et documents d’histoire médiévale, 4 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2004), 17–29. The volume gathers together a number of previously published and new studies, and thus represents the most recent work on Laurent. On Moccia, see also Richard C. Jensen and Joel T. Ireland, “Giovanni Moccia on Zanobi da Strada and Other Florentine Notables,” Studies in Philology, 74 (1976), 365–75; Franco Peano, “Giovanni Moccia e Laurent de Premierfait: Problemi di stile e di linguaggio nel primo Umanesimo francese,” Studi francesi, 24 (1980), 66–73 (with excellent bibliographical survey of earlier work); Dario Cecchetti, “Un umanista tra Italia e Francia: La poetica di di Giovanni Moccia, in D. Cecchetti, ed., Studi di storia della civiltà letteraria francese: Mélanges offerts à Lionello Sozzi (Paris: Champion, 1996), 55–128. 52 “When we recall the translator’s [i.e., Laurent de Premierfait’s] close connections with scholarly activity in Avignon and his great friendship with Moccia, we are bound to admit the possibility of a link even if we decline to go farther and argue a direct influence”: Simone, The French Renaissance, 64. 53 Sabatini, Napoli angioina, 90; Bozzolo, Manuscrits, 5. 54 Jensen and Ireland, “Giovanni Moccia on Zanobi da Strada,” provide a short biography of Moccia: “Moccia was born in Naples about the middle of the fourteenth century and lived most of his life in the papal court at Avignon. For a time he was

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poetic epitaph of three Italian poets, Zanobi da Strada, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, in a French manuscript dated to around 1400, in which the only work of Boccaccio’s to be named is the De casibus: Epitaphium Domini Jo. Boccacii Condor in hoc tumulo Boccaccius ipse Johannes Qui Florentia natus in urbe fui Qui centena nova, clarorum quive virorum Disserui casus, carmina rara colens.55 Epitaph for Master John Boccaccio Within this tomb, I, John Boccaccio, Lie buried now; in Florence I was born; I wrote a hundred tales, discussed the fates Of famous men: devoted to rare poems.56

For Moccia, Boccaccio is pre-eminently the author of the Decameron and the De casibus. He may have been less knowledgeable about Boccaccio’s other literary productions in Latin and the vernacular, glossing all his other works as “rare poems.” This formulation also allows for a simultaneous affirmation of Boccaccio’s humanistic learning (“carmina rara colens”), thereby memorializing Boccaccio as both an author and a literary historian. Whatever the circumstances of the precise transmission of the De casibus from Italy to France, it is uncontestable that, of the tre corone, Boccaccio is by far the most popular in France in this period, and French translations of the De casibus outnumber those of his other works to a remarkable degree. In the most recent survey of the manuscript tradition, Carla Bozzolo records sixty-nine manuscripts of Laurent’s two translations of the De casibus, against sixteen of the translation of the De

secretary to Cardinal Jacopo Orsini. When Gregory XI moved his court to Rome in 1378, the Cardinal and his secretary moved also. Orsini moved the next year, and Moccia seems to have accepted a post in the court of Joanna I of Naples. This cannot have been a position of long duration, for she was imprisoned in 1381 and died in 1382. Moccia returned to Avignon, where he served as secretary to the Antipope Clement VII and his successor. In 1404 he was still alive and in the service of Benedict XIII” (365–6). 55 See Jensen and Ireland, “Giovanni Moccia on Zanobi da Strada,” 371–2 (the text of the epitaph appears at 372n23). The manuscript is Paris, B.N., fonds lat. 8410, c. 23b. 56 I reproduce the English translation given in Simone, The French Renaissance, 65.

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mulieribus claris (1401) and fifteen of the Decameron translation (1414– 17).57 It is also notable that the French translations are all made well within the “prima diffusione,” that is, within fifty years of Boccaccio’s death, and so are a remarkable testimony to the alacrity with which Boccaccio’s texts, and the De casibus in particular, were assimilated into French literary culture. In addition, the wide dispersal of these manuscripts over the francophone regions (including the court of England), and the fact that they are not limited to the French capital, demonstrates a sustained, consistent, and widespread interest in Boccaccio’s text in the francophone context throughout the fifteenth century. As in the case of the original publishing context of the De casibus, the transmission of the text into France and the French language can be mapped onto the movements of a single individual in the right place at the right time: the French humanist Laurent de Premierfait.58 Laurent’s exact dates are unknown, but he is thought to have been born between 1360 and 1370 and seems to have moved from his Champenois milieu

57 Mombello, “I manoscritti,” notes only 68 mss of the De casibus, a total revised upwards by Bozzolo to 69 in Manuscrits, 39. On the ownership of these Boccaccio manuscripts, see Bozzolo, “La fortune de Boccace en France au XVe siècle,” in Manuscrits, 37–45. The book also contains a full bibliographical description of all the manuscripts of the French translations of Boccaccio known to 1973. 58 Laurent is now considered to have been the author not only of the Des cas, but also the French translation of the Decameron, while his authorship of the first French translation of the De mulieribus claris is now discounted: see G. di Stefano, “Il ‘Decameron’: da Boccaccio a Laurent de Premierfait,” in StB, 30 (2001), 106. On the manuscript tradition and first print editions of the Des cas, see Bozzolo, Manuscrits, but H. Hauvette is also useful: Les plus anciennes traductions françaises de Boccace (XIVe–XVIIe siècle), Extrait du Bulletin italien de 1907, 1908 et 1909 (Bordeaux: Feret et fils, [1909?]), 123–6. (It should be noted that Hauvette did not believe Laurent de Premierfait was the author of the Des cas; see 126n11.) There also exists a modern edition of book 1: P. Gathercole, Laurent de Premierfait’s “Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes,” Book 1 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); although Bozzolo notes that this edition is problematic as Gathercole does not take account of MS Geneva, Bibliothèque universitaire, fr. 190, which has now been securely identified as the manuscript prepared for Jean de Berry: Bozzolo, Manuscrits, 22n1. Gathercole uses another early manuscript (Paris, BNF, MS fr. 226) as the basis for the transcription; her rationale for the selection of the source manuscripts is given at pp. 38–41 and her critical method at p. 67. MS BNF fr. 226 is described in Bozzolo, 61–2, and Branca, Boccaccio visualizzato, 3:86–90. A selection of images of the manuscript illuminations are also available on the Bibliothèque nationale de France website, http://gallica.bnf.fr.

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to Avignon in approximately 1383.59 He is recorded as being in Paris from 1398, and then associated with the royal circles of the king and other princes from around 1400 until his death. His translations of Boccaccio emerge from these highly specific reading communities: his first translation of the De casibus A-text was made for the royal advisor and “trésorier des Chartes” Jean de Chanteprime in 1400, while the second, expanded version was made at the request of the bishop of Chartres, Martin Gouge, for presentation to Jean, Duke of Berry in 1409  (now MS Geneva, Bibliothèque universitaire, fr. 190).60 His final Boccaccio translation, this time of the Decameron, was made with the assistance of Antonio d’Arezzo, again for the Duke of Berry at the request of Bureau de Dammartin between 1411 and 1414.61 Laurent’s first translation of the De casibus of 1400 followed the source text closely in form, syntax, and lexis. Six manuscript witnesses of this text remain, of which two attribute the translation to Laurent, while this version was used for the first printed edition of the French translation of the De casibus, printed in Bruges in 1476 by Colard Mansion.62 Three of the manuscripts preserve a translation of the dedication to Mainardo from Boccaccio’s B-redaction of the text, although this element seems to have disappeared very early in the textual transmission, and does not appear in the oldest exemplar of the first version, Paris, BNF, MS fr. 24289 dated to the early fifteenth century (the only one of these manuscripts to have been made during Laurent’s lifetime).63 From the surviving six manuscripts, we can surmise that Laurent’s first version closely

59 On Laurent’s life, see Bozzolo, “Introduction à la vie” (19–24), and Richard C. Famiglietti, “Laurent de Premierfait: The Career of a Humanist in Early FifteenthCentury Paris,” in Bozzolo, Un traducteur et un humaniste, 31–51. See also G.S. Purkis, “Laurent de Premierfait: First French Translator of the Decameron,” Italian Studies, 4 (1949), 22–36, and Gathercole: “Fifteenth-Century Translation: The Development of Laurent de Premierfait,” MLQ, 21 (1960), 365–70. 60 The manuscript has been separated into two volumes since it was made, and both of these have now been digitized. They can be consulted via the online Bibliothèque virtuelle des manuscrits en Suisse, http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/fr, http://www .e-codices.unifr.ch/fr/list/one/bge/fr0190-1, and http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/ fr/list/one/bge/fr0190-2 (accessed 10 May 2012). 61 Bozzolo, “Introduction à la vie,” 21–3. 62 The mss are listed in Bozzolo, Manuscrits, 15–16, while the edition is described in Attilio Hortis, Studj sulle opere latine del Boccaccio, con particolare riguardo alla storia della erudizione nel medio evo e alle letterature straniere (Trieste: Julius Dase, 1879), 821–3. 63 Bozzolo, Manuscrits, 16.

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followed the structure of Boccaccio’s source text, and was compiled either with or without the dedication to Mainardo. The manuscripts all follow the same sequential structure, comprising Boccaccio’s own authorial prologue, the rubrics to the chapters of book 1, the nine books of the narrative, and a concluding explicit. Only one of the six manuscripts contains an illustration (Paris, BNF, MS fr. 24289), which shows Boccaccio and Laurent together presenting the book of their joint endeavour to a nobleman.64 Hedeman has suggested that this first translation of the De casibus was a “failure,” due to Laurent’s lack of competence in the forms of French vernacular courtly culture, and has noted how Laurent explains the development of his translational choices at some length in the prologue to the second version of 1409.65 While his first version was essentially a literal, word-for-word rendering of Boccaccio’s elaborate Latin, this proved difficult for his French readership to assimilate (and perhaps led to its unpopularity), and so he sought to take a more explicative approach in his writing for a less learned audience. (These passages will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter.)66 The second version therefore amplifies Boccaccio’s text with additional scholarly material such as geographical and historical descriptions, as well as with an entirely new visual frame of reference in the form of an illustration sequence.67 Another major feature of Laurent’s reworking of the text can be seen in his attempt to promote a more moralistic viewpoint, that

64 Hedeman, Translating the Past, 19 (the illustrated page is reproduced on p. 18). See also Hedeman’s article “Visual Translation: Illustrating Laurent de Premierfait’s French Versions of Boccaccio’s De casibus,” in Un traducteur et un humaniste, ed. Bozzolo, 83–113. The manuscript is described in Bozzolo, Manuscrits, 77–8, and Branca, Boccaccio visualizzato, 3:67–8. 65 Hedeman, Translating the Past, 11: “Perhaps because he was newly returned from Avignon and unaware of French court culture and education, Laurent’s first attempt to translate Boccaccio was a failure.” On the textual revisions and Laurent’s amplifying strategies between first and second version see Hedeman, Translating the Past, 11–21. 66 For a comparison of the texts of the 1400 and 1409 versions, see Gathercole, Laurent de Premierfait’s “Des cas,” 29–33. 67 Hedeman’s superb Translating the Past shows in microscopic detail the way in which these visual cycles serve to remediate Boccaccio’s text to this new French elite readership, an argument that constraints of space allow me to treat only briefly here. For references to those scholars who have studied the changes between Boccaccian source text and Laurent’s two target texts, see Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, 34n55.

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the wider ills of society have come about as a result of a collapse in private morality.68 Boccaccio’s original intentions of promoting the regulation of the behaviour of the ruling elite are thus subtly extended by his French translator to the body social as a whole.69 Although we do not have an autograph manuscript of Laurent’s second version of his translation, his authorial input into the production context can be securely traced to two closely related manuscripts, the manuscript commissioned by Martin Gouge and presented to Jean, Duke of Berry on 1 January 1411 (Geneva MS fr. 190) and its “twin,” the manuscript made for the Duke of Burgundy, Jean Sans Peur (now Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 5193).70 Hedeman notes that “while the exact circumstances surrounding the commission for and production of the Des cas are unknown, the people involved – the duke of Berry, Martin Gouge, and Laurent de Premierfait – were well known to one another. Not only were Martin Gouge and Laurent employed by the duke, they were also associated with him through the court ritual of gift giving and to each other through a humanist network.”71 Following Bozzolo and Hedeman, I will thus base my discussion of the forms and attributes of Laurent’s 1409 retranslation on its presentation exemplar, MS Geneva fr. 190.72 This second translation is more than twice as long as Boccaccio’s original, the expansion being due to Laurent’s deliberately explicatory and encyclopaedic tendencies, which put even Boccaccio in the shade.73 If individuals are merely named by Boccaccio, Laurent now supplies biographical details; he inserts proper names to clarify the narrative, and gives geographical information, typified, for example, in the reference to “Perse” in the life of Nimrod (Des cas, I, 3, 14). The original gives 68 Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, 36. 69 On this, see Hedeman, Translating the Past, and Bozzolo, especially the essay “La conception du pouvoir chez Laurent de Premierfait,” in his Un traducteur et un humaniste, 53–68. 70 Hedeman, “Visual Translation,” 86. For a detailed account of the making and features of these manuscripts, see Hedeman, Translating the Past, chap. 3, “Retranslating Boccaccio’s De casibus: The Formation of a Core Visual Cycle for the Princes of the Blood,” 55–127. Full descriptions of these manuscripts are in Bozzolo, Manuscrits, 51–3, 145–7, and Branca, Boccaccio visualizzato, 3:68–72, 76–80. 71 Hedeman, Translating the Past, 56. 72 Quotations from the text are taken from Gathercole’s edition, with folio refs given to their location in the Geneva manuscript MS fr. 190. 73 Gathercole, Laurent de Premierfait’s “Des cas,” provides a detailed (if value-laden) discussion of Laurent’s translational choices, 19–22.

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“imperaturus particule secessit in Persas” (I, 3, 11) (he went away to Persia, to become the leader of a sect), which in the translation becomes “Et afin qu’il seignoriast a une partie du monde il s’en ala en perse, qui est un pays qui se extend de oriant jusques en Ynde, et devers occidante Perse touche a la Rouge Mer, et devers septentrion elle joinct au pays de Mede, et de la part de Midi Perse touche a Germanie que l’en nomme Alemaigne” (And in order that he could rule over part of the world he went away to Persia, which is a country which extends from the East as far as India, and in the West, Persia touches the Red Sea, and in the North, it joins the land of the Medes, and in the South it touches that part of Germania which is called Alemaigne, MS fr. 190/1, fol. 11r).74 Laurent also inserts further explanations or definitions where he feels they are necessary, as well as moral interpolations. Beyond these informative expansions, Laurent’s tendency to amplify can also be seen stylistically, as when he inserts connecting phrases between paragraphs; in his doubling of nouns, verbs, or adjectives (by using two near-cognates where there is only one in the original); and his addition of conventional qualifying adjectives to proper names, such as “le saige Ulysses” (wise Ulysses), stylistic choices that are all typical of the period.75 His work is also amplified by reference to other sources, both in a factual function (as, for example, when he adds numbers and dates)76 and as a stylistic and rhetorical expansion, as in the extended reworkings of classical and contemporary authors in his second translator’s prologue.

74 Noted by Gathercole, Laurent de Premierfait’s “Des cas,” 19 (fol. 109). 75 Gathercole, Laurent de Premierfait’s “Des cas,” 19–21. See also Florence A. Smith for a detailed – if vigorously critical – overview of Laurent’s expansionary tendencies (e.g., “inexcusable verbiage,” “useless padding”): “Laurent de Premierfait’s French Version of the De casibus virorum illustrium with Some Notes on Its Influence in France,” Revue de littérature comparée, 14 (1934), 515. Laurent’s tendency towards descriptive amplification, as seen in his expanded rubrics to the Decameron, is discussed in Raymund Wilhelm, “Alle soglie della narratività: Le rubriche del Decameron nella traduzione francese di Laurent de Premierfait (1414),” Romanische Forschungen, 113.2 (2001), 190–226. The characteristic stylistic device of dittology can also be seen in the near-contemporary French translation of the De mulieribus claris, which is now no longer attributed to Laurent; on this see Jane H.M. Taylor, “Translation as Reception: Boccaccio’s de Mulieribus claris and Des cleres et nobles femmes,” in “Por le soie amistié”: Essays in Honour of Norris J. Lacy, ed. Keith Busby and Catherine M. Jones (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 491–507. 76 Gathercole, Laurent de Premierfait’s “Des cas,” 19–20.

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While Laurent’s first translation of the De casibus showed no significant paratextual additions or innovations, his retranslation of 1409 was, by contrast, re-mediated to his French courtly public by a series of new verbal and visual paratextual framing devices, thereby continuing the deliberate amplification and expansion that characterize his translational choices for the target text itself. Boccaccio’s own authorial paratexts are skilfully interleaved into Laurent’s new apparatus, in a way that preserves and displays the governing principles of the illustrious Italian author while subsuming him to Laurent’s own intentions. The source text is relatively light on prefatory paratexts: the A-redaction essentially comprises the proem, followed by the nine books, to which is added the dedicatory letter to Mainardo for the B-redaction. As we have seen, the Mainardo letter does appear in three of the surviving manuscripts of Laurent’s first translation, but is not included as a formal element of the paratextual structures of the second version. Instead, its function is now superseded by the first of Laurent’s authorial paratexts, the dedication to his patron, Jean, Duke of Berry, entitled in red “Premier prologue sur le livre des cas des nobles hommes et femmes translaté de latin en françois” (fol. 1r) (First prologue to the book concerning the stories of noble men and women translated from Latin into French) [fols. 1r–5v].77 This is then followed by the translator’s prologue, again headed with its own rubric: “Cy commence le prologue du translateur du livre” (fol. 6r) (Here begins the prologue by the translator of the book) [fols. 6r–v]. Next comes a translation of Boccaccio’s own proem to the Latin text (the second prologue) [fols. 6v–7r], the first part of the book to be formally signalled as a Boccaccio-authored text: C’est la translation du prologue Jehan Boccace ou livre des cas des nobles hommes et femmes commençant ou latin: “Exquirenti michi etc.,” et envoye son livre a un sien compere chevalier appellé messire Magnard des Chevalchans de Florence, seneschal de Sicile, ainsi comme il appart par une epistre sur ce faite par le dit Boccace en laquelle il blasme et reprend ouvertement et a cause tous les princes crestians. (fol. 6v)78

77 The headings (all rubricated in the ms) are reproduced from Bozzolo’s description of the manuscript, 145–7. Quotations from Boccaccio’s prologue are taken from Gathercole’s modernized text, with folio references given to the digital facsimile. In the following English translations, I will translate “cas” as “stories,” other than when contexts make it clear that the meaning is more akin to “destiny” or “fall.” 78 Gathercole, Laurent de Premierfait’s “Des cas,” 91–2.

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The English Boccaccio This is the translation of the prologue of Jehan Boccace in the book concerning the stories of noble men and women, beginning in Latin “Exquirenti michi etc.” He sends this book of his to a close friend, a knight called Lord Magnard des Chevalchans of Florence, the seneschal of Sicily, as appears in a letter that Boccace composed on this matter in which he openly blames and reproaches, and with good reason, all Christian princes.

The relationship between the different parts of the text is visually demarcated on the page, in this heading. The heading is rubricated throughout, apart from the words “Exquirenti michi,” which are written in black ink (the same colour as the main body of text). Laurent (or the scribe) inserts one final paratextual element before the start of the first biography of Adam and Eve, a table of contents of the chapters of book I, entitled “Cy aprés s’ensuivent les rebriques des chapiltres du premier livre de Jehan Boccace de cas des nobles hommes et femmes” (fols. 7r–v) (The rubrics of the chapters of the first book of Jehan Boccace’s concerning the stories of noble men and women follow below) [fols. 7r–v].79 The end of the paratext and start of the first book proper is signalled by a magnificent mise-en-page (fol. 7v): divided in two by a twining and gilded tree-like ornament. The table of contents takes up the whole left-hand side of the page, and runs into the top of the righthand column. The top of the right-hand column contains a miniature of a prelapsarian Adam and Eve in a walled garden, with a rubric beneath that cross-refers to the Latin source text (again signalled in black): “De Adam et Eve premier chapiltre commençant en latin: “Maiorum nostrorum” (Concerning Adam and Eve, the first chapter, beginning in Latin “Maiorum nostrorum”). Laurent’s paratextual interventions, then, have the effect of firming up the structure of Boccaccio’s source text by emphasizing the formal structural divisions between sections via the creation of a table of contents made up of rubrics. This also serves as a finding aid for book 1, while simultaneously locating the reader not only in the target translated text but also in the  source Latin text (although Hedeman suggests that, realistically, only humanists such as Gontier Col would have the means or will to  do so).80 Laurent’s editorial consolidation of the frame structures

79 Hedeman suggests that the “twin” manuscripts were copied from Laurent’s own autograph, on which he was still working at the time of production, and may have shared a single scribe: Translating the Past, 58. 80 Hedeman, Translating the Past, 19.

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therefore allows him to superimpose his own authorial contributions, which appear either overtly, as in the translator’s prologue, or covertly, as in the descriptive expansion of the rubrics. We thus find here the first example of the way in which subsequent translator-editors can exploit Boccaccio’s authorial structures so as to reframe them according to their own context and their target reading communities. It is worth briefly reviewing each of Laurent’s additional paratexts in turn, in order to get a sense of both his practice as a translator and the specific historical and cultural context for which he was writing. The first of these, the “premier prologue,” is in fact a dedication addressed to Jean, Duke of Berry, the third son of the reigning king of France, Jean II, and hence the primary element in the repurposing of Boccaccio’s text for a new, high-status French audience. This dedication tends not to be included in later manuscripts, perhaps as a result of its highly specific situating function.81 The dedication begins with the conventional invocation of the prince with all his titles, and a customary protestation of incapacity, asking him to “benignement excuser la petitesse de mon engin au regart de la grant besongne de votre commandement” (fols. 1r; §1) (benevolently excuse the poverty of my intellect in the face of the great undertaking entailed by your commission).82 Laurent then describes the task he has set himself: “le dangereux et long travail de la translation d’un tres exquis et singulier volume des cas des nobles hommes et femmes, escript et compilé par Jehan Boccace de Certald, jadis homme moult excellent et expert en anciennes histoires et toutes sciences humaines et divines” (the long and risky task of translating a most exquisite and unique volume, concerning the stories of noble men and women, written and compiled by Jehan Boccace of Certaldo, who in his day was well versed and accomplished in ancient histories and all human and divine disciplines) (§2). The book has been chosen for its beauty and uniqueness, and Boccaccio is presented as a scholar of great learning and one particularly renowned for his classical studies. The book is then described in terms of its organization and historical range: je tournay mon courage [...] a translater en langaige françois le volume dessusdict, contenant en latin neuf livres particuliers, recomptans ou en long ou en brief les malheureux cas des nobles hommes et femmes, qui, 81 Hedeman notes this was first suggested by Bozzolo: Visual Translations, 91. 82 The paragraph numbering is taken from Gathercole’s edition of book 1 of the De cas.

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The English Boccaccio depuis Adam et Eve les premiers de tous hommes monterent ou hault degré de la roe de fortune, jusques au temps de tres excellent et noble prince Jehan, le premier de ce nom. (fol. 1r) I turned my intentions to translating into French this volume, containing in Latin nine individual books that relate at different lengths the unfortunate fates of noble men and women who have ascended to the top of the wheel of fortune, from Adam and Eve, the first of all mankind, up to the time of the most excellent and noble Prince Jehan, the first to bear this name. (§4)83

While claiming to promote the up-to-dateness of the book, Laurent also reveals its personal interest for the French royal family: “vostre tres loyal pere, jadis roy des François duquel le cas tres briefment racompté fait la fin de ce present volume” (your very loyal father, once the king of the French, a very brief account of whose story forms the end of this present volume; §4). Laurent goes on to explore various themes germane to the book in some detail, each glossed in the manuscript with a marginal note: the transience of worldly goods (fols. 1r–2r; §§7–18), how man may protect himself and his goods from the vicissitudes of fortune (fols. 2r–2v; §§19–26), the current state of the church and its priests (fols. 2v–3r; §§27–35), the fall of noble values in the world (fols. 3r–4r; §§36–47), and the fall of the agricultural labourers (fols. 4r–5v; §§48–65). Throughout, Laurent avails himself of a number of classical and more modern sources for these arguments, naming them as authorities. So we find the Virgil of the Eclogues and Georgics presiding over the discussion of the agricultural labourers, Seneca invoked for the tale of Stilbon (§§22–4), and Boccaccio himself held up as the world authority on degenerate clerics and the loss of high moral values amongst the ruling classes. Each authority has his own area of competence, and is invoked for precisely the right subject: Es choses dessus dictes en ce present prologue jusques icy l’en me doit tenir pour racompteur de paroles de Jehan Boccace en une sienne familiere espitre, et chascun aussi congnoist la verité des deux cas de prestrise et de mondaine noblesse. Mais quant au tiers cas present, par quoy je veuil

83 The reference is to King John II of France, the “Good”; John I (the “Posthumous”) reigned for only five days under his uncle’s regency, dying in infancy.

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monstrer le trebuchet des laboureurs et de la chose rustique, je prens Virgile pour mon aucteur et maistre. (fols. 4r–4v; §48)84 In what has been stated above in this prologue up to this point, I must be regarded as having retold the words of a personal letter of Jehan Boccace, and everyone acknowledges the truth of the two cases of the priesthood and worldly nobility. But as for the third case discussed, in which I wish to show the adverse fortune of the labourers and agricultural matters, I will take Virgil as my authority and master.

In fact, the Boccaccian sequences of this prologue are actually taken from a part of the Boccaccio-palimpsest that Laurent has chosen not to translate explicitly as a free-standing unit for the second version, the dedication to Mainardo Cavalcanti. Instead, this dedication to one high-ranking Italian prince and patron has been repurposed and integrated almost invisibly into the much longer dedication to the son of the king of France. Since Boccaccio’s dedication is highly contextually specific and intimate in tone (Mainardo being a long-standing and close friend of Boccaccio’s), Laurent extracts only those parts that work in the new context of the dedication to Jean. These occur in two principal sites. The first is a passage referring to the corruption and warlike tendencies of the clergy (§6 in the De casibus dedication), which is found at §30 of the premier prologue, and glossed here “le cas deleglise presente et des prestres” (fol. 2v).85 The second, slightly more extensive reuse of the Boccaccian source can be found a few paragraphs on, glossed Du cas de noblesse mondaine in the manuscript (fol. 3r). The way in which the Boccaccio passage is integrated into the prologue is a remarkable moment of literary reflectivity. Laurent deploys Boccaccio’s own device by which he presents the apparition of his subjects within the narrative. Since Boccaccio has already written on this subject, Laurent steps back and allows him his voice – in fact literally, since this passage is presented as a direct discourse by Boccaccio 84 On Laurent’s sources for the first prologue, see Gathercole, Laurent de Premierfait’s “Des cas,” 23–7. 85 Gathercole, Laurent de Premierfait’s “Des cas,” 80. For a comparison of the Latin source text of this passage in the dedicatory epistle, Laurent’s translation of it in the 1400 version, and its reuse in the Premier prologue, see Hedeman, Translating the Past, 256n50. Both Gathercole (23) and Bergen (1:xiv) note that the letter to Mainardo is used in Laurent’s first preface, but do not identify the exact passages or note the repetition of the apparition device.

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himself. Laurent identifies Boccaccio as the “premier aucteur de ce livre” (the first author of this book), the inference being presumably that Laurent is openly, and logically, the second author: Ces paroles ont fontainne et naissance d’une familiere espitre escripte par Jehan Boccace premier aucteur de ce livre. En celle espitre il pleure et regrete le cas de mondaine noblesse. […] “O, dist-il, bon Dieu de sapience qui tout scez et congnois. Enseigne moy, je te prie, en quele partie du monde soit reposte noblesse dont les empereurs et roys portent les tiltres principaux, car je l’ay quise en l’ostel de Cesar, roy des Rommains, de qui les ancesseurs par longs labours et par exquises diligences et par nobles oeuvres de victorieuses armes, jadiz conquistirent la monarchie du monde. (fol. 3r; §§35–6)86 These words spring and are born from a personal letter written by Jehan Boccace, the original author of this book. In this letter he laments and regrets the fall of worldly nobility. “O, he says, good God of wisdom, who know and understand everything; teach me, I beseech thee, where in the world might there lie concealed that nobility of which emperors and kings bear the principal deeds, because I have sought it in the house of Caesar, king of the Romans, whose ancestors by their long labours and excellent industry and noble deeds of victorious arms, forcibly became rulers of the world in days of old.”

Perhaps extrapolating from the short reference to “hodiernum cesarem” (today’s Caesar) in the letter, Laurent situates Boccaccio as an Italian lamenting the passing of the honourable Romans, as he begs God to enlighten him where the good men of old have gone. In his next paragraph, Laurent then reworks this section of the dedication, with some expansions to make the invective against the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV even more specific. The Boccaccian text is given first: Et ab his frustratus, in hodiernum cesarem aciem mentis deflexi; sed confestim revocavi consilium, sentiens eum magnalium maiorum suorum immemorem, preponentemque thebani Bachi vina colentis gloriam

86 The Boccaccio direct discourse is at §§36–8 in Gathercole, Laurent de Premierfait’s “Des cas,” while the scribal forms of the manuscript make the division with a coloured paraph at the phrase “En celle espitre.”

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splendoribus Martis ytalici, nec non torpentem sub circio, in extreme orbis angulo, inter nives et pocula. (De casibus, Dedication, 7) And disappointed by this, I lifted up the eyes of my mind to today’s Caesar, but I immediately dismissed this idea, seeing him oblivious to the greatest of these great men, and putting the liquor of the Theban Bacchus before the splendours of those who till the glories of the Italian Mars, sluggish under the north wind in an extreme corner of the earth, between snow and his wine glass. Mais las moy, j’ay trouvé que l’empereur de ce temps a oublié ou au moins il dissimule les prouesses et loenges et les magnifiques besoignes de ses predecesseurs. Il a laissé le glorieux estude de Mars le dieu de batailles, et s’est du tout adonné a Bachus le dieu du vin. Il a delaissié la riche ancienne et notable Italie es mains de mil tyrans, et s’est alez repondre et dormir entre les naiges et grans hanaps de vin en celle part d’Alemaigne qui gist au coste dextre devers soleil couchant ou derrain anglet du monde. (fol. 3r–3v; §37) But, woe is me, I have found that today’s emperor has forgotten or at least is pretending not to recall the prowess and the glories and the magnificent undertakings of his predecessors. He has abandoned the glorious study of Mars, god of battle, and has given himself over entirely to Bacchus, the god of wine. He has abandoned rich, ancient and worthy Italy to the hands of a thousand tyrants, and has gone off to sleep among the snowfalls and great goblets of wine in that part of Germany which lies on the right side towards the setting sun, in the last corner of the world.

Despite the overtly Boccaccian framing, the remainder of this part of Laurent’s prologue appears to be of his own composition. (It is perhaps not surprising that the following paragraph, which attacks Jean de Berry’s brother, Charles V of Valois, is omitted.) Laurent has thus maintained only two passages from his own 1400 translation of the dedication, while using the ostensibly Boccaccian provenance as a distancing technique to manage the delicate subject of contemporary nobility. The dedication to the Duke of Berry is followed by another of Laurent’s paratexts, the translator’s prologue. This is a very valuable document not only for the reconstruction of the functions of the various parts of this book, but also in terms of the self-presentation of the translator as author, and the light it casts on contemporary notions of

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translation.87 Laurent introduces his own prologue with a statement about the nature of change as learning progresses: Selon raison et bonnes meurs l’omme soy excerçant en aucune science speculative ou aultre puet honnestement muer son conseil ou propost de bien en mieulx, attendue la mutation des choses et des temps et des lieux. Et aussi puest un potier casser et rumpre aulcun sien vaissel, combien qu’il soit bien fait, pour lui donner aultre forme qui lui samble meilleur. (fol. 6r; §1) According to reason and good morals, in applying himself to some field of knowledge, whether speculative or otherwise, a man may appropriately change his mind or improve his plans, taking into account that things, and times, and places do change. And in this way a potter may break and shatter a vessel he has made, however well-made it might be, in order to give it another form which he finds better.

Laurent thus presents the act of retranslation as a necessary stage in the transference of knowledge from one thing, time period, or place into another. This type of drastic change, while unavoidable, is also desirable, as the transformation of the form (here metaphorized as the potter who breaks his own pots to make something better) leads to an inherent improvement in the quality of the product. The process of improving things (“ceste licence de muer la chose en mieulx,” this licence to change the object for the better; §2), is useful not only for the individual but also for wider society, as it is undertaken for the benefit of others (“en la besoingne d’altrui,” according to the needs of others; §2). Just as the author may edit his own work, so may the translator revise the works of others with the aim of disseminating knowledge. Laurent then names himself as the author of this translation, careful also to name its original author and the fact that the work was undertaken at the request of others; Boccaccio’s book and writing style are also praised so as to legitimize the act of translation and to allow Laurent to reflect some of this glory onto himself:

87 MS Geneva fr. 190, fols. 6r–v. The translator’s prologue is at 88–93 in Gathercole, Laurent de Premierfait’s “Des cas,” and is also included in Bergen’s edition of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, 1:lii–liv. Bergen also includes Laurent’s translation of Boccaccio’s Prohemium (li–lii; Gathercole, 91–3), and his dedication to the Duc de Berry (liv–lxv; Gathercole, 75–87).

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Comme doncques ja pieça je Laurens a l’enhortement et requeste d’aulcuns eusse translaté de latin en françois le moins mal que je peu un tres notable et exquis livre de Jehan Boccace des cas des nobles hommes et femmes, en la translation duquel je ensuivi precisement et au juste les sentences prinses du propre langaige de l’auteur qui est moult subtil et artificiel. (fol. 6r; §3) Therefore, as I, Laurens, at the exhortation and request of certain people, had recently translated from Latin into French as best I could, a most worthy and excellent book by Jehan Boccace concerning the stories of noble men and women, in the translation of which I followed precisely and correctly the sayings that I took from the author’s own very subtle and artful language.

Laurent then moves to the practical benefits of his translation. Since many “clercs et hommes letrez” (clerks and Latin-literate men) have only a basic knowledge of the trivium, they struggle with books written in Latin by “philosophes, poetes et historians bien enseignez en toutes sciences humainnes” (philosphers, poets and historians well-versed in all human disciplines; §4).88 It therefore seems desirable to Laurent that these books be translated into the vernacular so that readers and listeners may understand them without too much effort: Il convient ce me samble que les livres latins en leur translation soient muez et convertiz en tel langage que les liseurs et escouteurs d’iceulx puissent comprendre l’effect de la sentence senz trop grant ou trop long travail d’entendement. (fol. 6r; §5) It seems to me that Latin books in their translation should be transformed and converted into such a language that those who read and hear them might understand the impact of what is said without the work of understanding being too arduous or too time-consuming.

The improvement topos of the opening paragraphs is then applied to the textual history of the text, when Laurent explains how this version improves his own earlier (1400) translation:

88 Hedeman, Translating the Past, 11–12.

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The English Boccaccio Je doncques selon le jugement commun en amendant se je puis la premiere translation du dit livre vueil senz rien condempner aultrefoiz translater le dit livre, afin c’est assavoir que de tant qu’il iert plus cler et plus ouvert en sentences et en paroles, de tant il delictera a lire et a escouter pluseurs hommes et femmes. (fol. 6r; §6) I, therefore, according to common judgement, in amending the first translation of this book, if I may, would like to translate it, without condemning anything from days gone by; so that (to be precise) the more its words and phrases will be clear and open, the more it will please the many men and women who will read and hear it.

Hedeman reads this passage as the key to understanding Laurent’s principle of amplificatio in his second version of the text: the book is not merely vernacularized, as was the case for the 1400 rendering, but also opened up to a less educated readership by the provision of additional information to gloss the content. It is also interesting to note that Laurent directs his text towards a mixed audience of both men and women with his repeated references to the two ways in which the text may be apprised (by reading or by listening), a decision that suggests he envisages his text now to be accessed from all levels of literacy, from the most lettered, reading with a parallel Latin text at hand, down through vernacular literates (both male and female), to those who can only apprise it aurally.89 This is a notable broadening of Boccaccio’s own intended audience, as articulated in the dedication to Mainardo, although perhaps not so very different from the actual circumstances of its readership amongst a mixed-sex elite readership in the Neapolitan court. Laurent goes on to describe the contents of the text and its historical sweep, highlighting what was no doubt a bitterly felt defeat for the French at the hands of perfidious Albion: “depuis le commencement du monde jusques a Jehan de France, mort prisonnier en Angleterre” (from the beginning of the world up to King Jehan of France, who died a prisoner in England; §7), while the last part of the translator’s prologue is given over to explaining what Laurent has chosen to do to the text, that is, his self-justification for his translational choices. He delineates two main tasks: to put the book into “cler langaige” (clear language) and, 89 On how Laurent’s contemporary readerships may have accessed this translation, see Hedeman, Translating the Past, 1–6.

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more importantly, to expand it so as to develop those parts which Boccaccio has insufficiently treated. Laurent’s aim is to complete Boccaccio, and he will fill in the (perceived) gaps in his narrative by integrating other authoritative classical sources: En faisant doncques ceste besoingne longue et espendue et recueillie de divers historiens, par le moien de la grace divine, je vueil principalment moy ficher en deux choses, c’est assavoir mettre en cler langaige les sentences du livre et les histoires qui par l’auteur sont si briément touchees que il n’en met fors seulement les noms. Je les assomeray selon la verité des vieilz historians qui au long les escrivirent. (fol. 6v; §9) So in undertaking this long and expanded task, a compilation of the work of various historians, by the means of divine grace, I wish to concentrate primarily on two particular things: that is, to render into clear language what the book says, and those stories that have been so briefly treated by the author that he has only mentioned the names. I will complete these according to the truth of the ancient historians who recounted them in full.

Not wishing to criticize the compositional choices of the great historian, he does not want to say that Boccaccio did not know them or was too proud to include them (“Et si ne vueil pas dire que Jehan Boccace [...] ait delessié les dictes histoires par ignorance de les non avoir sceues ou par orgueil de les non daigner escrire,” Yet I do not mean to say that Jehan Boccace [...] omitted those histories due to ignorance, in not knowing them, or due to pride, in not deigning to write them down; fol. 6v; §10), but rather than he knew them so well that he assumed they were part of the common cultural patrimony, and thus that there was no need to include them (“car il les avoit si promptes a la main et si fichees en memoire il les reputa communes et cogneues aux aultres comme a soy,” because he had them so readily to hand and so wellfixed in his memory that he believed them to be common knowledge and as well-known to others as they were to him; fol. 6v; §10). So that the book may be complete in all its parts, Laurent will add them in: “Afin doncques que le livre ait toutes ses parties et soit complet en soy, je les mettray briément senz delessir que tres pou le text du [sic] l’auteur” (Therefore, in order that the book has all its parts and is complete in itself, I will present them briefly, while only departing very slightly from the author’s text; fol. 6v; §11).

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It is thus clear that Laurent conceives of his work as being not only “translational,” of the moving of information from one linguistic or historical culture to another, but also compositional, by supplying the information so regrettably lacking from Boccaccio’s own text. The justification for this expansion is not framed in terms of the needs of the French vernacular readership, but instead as the restoration of what should have been there; Boccaccio and Laurent together are the two authors of this work. The hierarchical relationship between the primary author and translator, in subordinate position, that we have become accustomed to in our contemporary conceptions of translational practice, is simply not present here: Laurent admits a secondary status only in terms of chronology, in that he encounters the text after Boccaccio (the “premier aucteur de ce livre”) has written it. In terms of editorial and compositional choices Laurent stands beside Boccaccio. His authorial co-presence can be felt everywhere in the book: in the additional authorial paratexts that precede the text itself; the firming-up of the structures of the text via the table of expanded rubrics; at a deeper level, in the amplifications he inserts in the narrative, and even at the syntactic level with his use of dittology. The Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes is a true texte à quatre mains, where Laurent asserts his authorial copresence at every level (even in the title, where Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium is expanded to admit women). Following the translator’s prologue, we find a translation of Boccaccio’s own proem. As we saw earlier, Laurent’s rubric is typically comprehensive, describing the text, its original language of composition, providing background information and a summary of what it contains. The rubric provides some further useful clues as to Laurent’s reading culture: this is a translation from the prologue of “Jehan Boccace ou livre des cas des nobles hommes et femmes” (fol. 6v), and thus we may note that Boccaccio himself stands for the book (much as “Galeotto” performs the same task in Inferno V: Boccaccio is the book and he who wrote it). Once again, the reference to the opening words of this section would serve as a finding aid for anyone seeking to read the two texts together or to use the vernacular as a crib. Finally, in mentioning the dedicatory sending of the book to Mainardo (“envoye son livre a un sien compere chevalier messire Magnard des Chevalchans de Florence, seneschal de Sicile”), Laurent is able to suggest a parallel between the originating contexts of the two texts, both given as gifts to discerning rulers. This acknowledgment at the point in the book where it should

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have appeared had it been included again underlines Laurent’s care in the transmission process. Laurent’s translation of the text of the proem lacks the rhetorical force of Boccaccio’s outrage at the behaviour of the ruling class; in fact, one is tempted to surmise that Laurent deliberately toned it down in order not to give offence to his commissioning patron. The relative ineffectiveness of Laurent’s version may also come about as a result of the linguistic choices and respective prose styles of the two authors. For example, Boccaccio begins with a condemnation of the many sins of the princes: “principum atque presidentium quorumcunque obscene libidines, violentie truces, perdita ocia, avaritie inexplebiles, cruenta odia, ultiones armate precipitesque e longe plura scelesta facinora” (the obscene lust of princes and those in power, their savage violence, their sinful idleness, their insatiable greed, their blood-drenched hatred, their sudden and ferocious vendettas, and their infinite wicked crimes; I, Proem, 1), while Laurent merely has “Et quant je les apperceu ordoiez en vains delitz et en plaisir deshonneste” (And when I saw them corrupted by worthless crimes and in depraved pleasures; fol. 6v; Prologue II, §1). Boccaccio then expands on their unbridled pleasure-taking, which sullies the honest people and violates the holy laws of justice, whereas Laurent minimizes their sins and seeks to put the blame elsewhere: “je consideray yceulx estre destroiez et senz freins ainsi comme si ilz eussent endormie fortune par herbes ou par enchantemens” (I considered them to be as fallen and unbridled as if they had put Fortune to sleep by drugs or magic; fol. 6v; Prologue II, §1). Boccaccio and Laurent have widely divergent views on the essential nature of their rulers: Boccaccio, as roving diplomat for the Florentine commune (and the classical tradition he invokes at I, Proh., 4) considers them to be essentially corrupt and degenerate, while Laurent the court official sees them as essentially good men, whose bad behaviour is a deviation from this norm, as if fortune had put them to sleep, as if sedated by drugs or witchcraft.90 The stylistic characteristics of Laurent’s version of the main text have already been described in some detail, but it may be as well to consider some key passages. The apparition of Adam and Eve is presented in a way that follows the source text quite closely, but Laurent makes some significant additions and amplifications: 90 Bergen makes a similar point in 1:xvii–xviii.

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The English Boccaccio L’un de ces vieillars, c’est assavoir Adam, me arraisonna et dist: “Beau nepueu Jehan Boccace, qui serches et enquiers lequel tu mettes premier ou rang des malheureux, je vueil que tu saiches comme vray est que ainsi comme nous deux qui sommes les premiers homme et femme faiz a l’ymage de Dieu, qui par le moyen et accroissement de lui avons premiers accreu et empli les sieges de paradis par le merite de la mort de Jhesucrist, aussi nous avons premiers esprouvé par l’admonnestement du diable le trabuchet de fortune, et pour ce aulcun homme fors nous ne donnera a ton livre plus convenable commencement. (fol. 7v; I, i, 2) One of these elderly men, namely Adam, addressed me and said: “My fair kinsman Jehan Boccace, you who are searching and enquiring for whom to put first in the ranks of the unfortunates, I want you to know that it is true that, just as we two are the first man and woman made in the image of God, who, raised up by his agency, were the first to take up and fill the seats of Heaven by virtue of the death of Jesus Christ, so we were the first to experience, because of the devil’s incitement, the reversals of Fortune. For this reason, nobody but we will provide a more suitable beginning to your book.

Compare with the much more compressed original: Quorum sic alter: – Uti primi vir et uxor auctore Deo celum hausimus, sic Inimico suadente homini Fortune lubricum primi experti sumus: et ideo preter nos nemo decentius quod queris dabit principium. (I, i, 2) And one of the two of them said: – As the first man and wife, by God the father’s will we tasted heaven, so when the Enemy persuaded man, we were the first to experience the reversals of Fortune; and for that reason no-one apart from us will be able to offer more appropriately the beginning which you seek.

Laurent first of all inserts identifying names, so the reader will be in no suspense about what is happening. This is one of his most identifiable stylistic characteristics: to do much of the reader’s work for him or her. As author, he first identifies the speaker (using a telling construction, “it is to be known”) and then makes him address the original author, Boccaccio. This has the effect of reinforcing the identity of Adam’s interlocutor (who is, nonetheless, voiced by Laurent in French), and of

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course distancing Laurent from the possibly contentious opinions expressed in the text. Adam helpfully restates what “Boccace” is doing (“qui serches et enquiers lequel tu mettes premier ou rang des malheureux,” you who are searching and enquiring for whom to put first in the ranks of the unfortunates) and provides their “happy ending” (redemption and eventual admission into paradise through the death of Christ)  before speaking of their previous great misfortune. Laurent thus removes much of the tragic force and narrative momentum from Boccaccio’s account through his expansionary tactics. After this opening speech by Adam, Laurent follows Boccaccio’s shift in voicing from first person to third person. In conclusion, then, Laurent’s second translation of the De casibus represents a very targeted reworking of Boccaccio’s text for a specifically French audience. His vernacularization project can be seen as a process in two stages: first, with the 1400 version, creating a very close French rendering of the source text, almost word for word in its language and content, with little attention to the matter of glossing; and second, the thoroughly revised, expanded version of 1409, which amplifies the source material with additional information, and is reframed by a new sequence of paratextual framing devices to explain his purpose to his intended audience. His first translation, while theoretically linguistically accessible to a less lettered (or perhaps non-humanistic) French readership, remained nonetheless impenetrable by dint of its complex content, and was perhaps even redundant in terms of its functionality, since those readers who could manage the allusions to classical material would probably be able to access the text in its original Latin. The second version can thus be seen as the culmination of Laurent’s vernacularization project, by truly opening up the audience of this work via the simultaneous provision of explicatory information, embedded within the prose. A similar impulse to open the text to a broader vernacular readership can be seen in the production of the English version of the De casibus, again conditioned by the specific individuals and cultural context of England in the first half of the fifteenth century. The Production Context of John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes (1431–1439) We have finally come full circle in this chapter, back to the book that begins it: John Lydgate’s translation of the De casibus, which appeared

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in English under the title The Fall of Princes.91 Once again, the circumstances of this text’s genesis are locatable in a highly specific receiving context, and can be shown to illustrate in microcosm the ways in which a text moves between cultures in the early fifteenth century. The impetus for this text’s final linguistic and geographical translation, from France to England, is derived from the specific agency of a single early English reader, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester (1390–1447), who commissioned the leading poet and translator of his day, John Lydgate, to make an English translation of the De casibus from Laurent’s second French version at the start of the 1430s.92 Humphrey is an extraordinary figure in terms of his cultural and political reach in the period. The youngest son of King Henry IV, brother of Henry V, and regent of England during Henry VI’s minority, he is perhaps best known today as the first English patron of Italian humanism and the benefactor of Oxford University’s library, whose reading room still bears his name. As a member of the ruling Lancastrian family, he moved in the highest political circles, and naturally occupied a plurilingual milieu, in which Latin remained the formal language of the state, academia, and the church, while “French” French

91 The only critical edition of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes remains the Early English Text Society edition, edited by H. Bergen (hereafter cited as FP). Despite (or perhaps because of) its extraordinary length and Lydgate’s centrality to early to midfifteenth-century English literary production, the Fall has suffered considerable critical neglect or even disapprobation: however, a new movement towards its rehabilitation can be seen in recent works such as Nigel Mortimer’s John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes: Narrative Tragedy in its Literary and Political Contexts, in its treatment in Alessandra Petrina’s Cultural Politics in Fifteenth-Century England: The Case of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (Leiden: Brill, 2004), and in James Simpson’s analysis of periodized readings of Lydgate and their pitfalls, as seen for example in his Reform and Cultural Revolution: 1350–1547, in The Oxford English Literary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), vol. 2, especially chap. 2, “The Energies of John Lydgate,” 34–67. On Boccaccio’s De casibus in English, see also H.G. Wright, Boccaccio in England from Chaucer to Tennyson (London: Athlone Press, 1957), 3–28; Edmund Reiss, “Boccaccio in English Culture of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” in Il Boccaccio nella cultura inglese e anglo-americana, ed. Giuseppe Galigani (Florence: Olschki, 1974), 15–26. 92 The key study on Humphrey’s life and intellectual activity is Petrina, Cultural Politics, but see also G.L. Harriss’s entry in the ODNB and his section on Humphrey in J.B. Trapp, “The Humanist Book,” vol. 3 in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, ed. Lotte Hellinga and J.B. Trapp, 293–6 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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was used at court and Anglo-French was a co-vernacular with English.93 Butterfield notes that the Anglo-French culture that existed in England for several centuries prevented either English or French from being a single condition. To communicate in French was no less an English act than to use English. Conversely, to speak English was to speak only one of the English vernaculars. It was a divided and unequal but shared English culture.94

The formal, institutional use of English, meanwhile, was spreading upwards and outwards from the less educated lower classes in this period.95 Over the span of Humphrey’s life, the official use of French in England would recede significantly, due in no small part to the determination of the Lancastrian kings to create an elevated English vernacular not only for literary reasons but also as a “political and nationalistic raison d’être.”96 John Lydgate’s translation of Boccaccio’s De casibus should therefore be seen first and foremost as emerging from this charged linguistic and political context, in which the creation of an English literary language, canon, and mythos is linked directly to the political fortunes and intentions of the ruling princes; seen in this light, it is nigh-on inevitable that this is the first named work of Boccaccio’s to be transmitted into England and turned to the ends of this specific receiving context. Humphrey was a notable bibliophile even in a family of book collectors. His brother, King Henry V, “evidently possess[ed] a vast store of manuscripts” and left donations of books to various religious houses, his wife, and other individuals.97 Meanwhile, another brother, John, Duke of Bedford, had acquired the library of the Louvre in 1424 while 93 The complex co-presence of plural languages and literary cultures in late medieval Britain is an increasingly important (and decentred) area of critical interest; on this, see Ardis Butterfield’s magisterial The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), and also D.A. Kibbee, For to Speake Frenche Trewly: The French Language in England, 1000–1600: Its Status, Description and Instruction (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1991), chaps. 5 and 6. 94 Ardis Butterfield, “National Histories,” in Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary Histories, Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches, ed. Brian Cummings and James Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 2:38. 95 On the Lancastrian linguistic project, see Petrina, Cultural Politics, 81–90. 96 Petrina, Cultural Politics, 87. 97 Petrina, Cultural Politics, 172; on the books bequeathed in his will, see 168–72.

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regent of France, and these books were brought to England after 1429.98 Petrina suggests that “his acquisition of the Louvre books must also, to a certain extent, have reflected upon the reading habits of other members of his family, who had, together with John, the possibility of reading and copying a large number of previously unapproachable texts.”99 We know that John sent a number of these French manuscripts to Humphrey as gifts in 1427, including French translations of Livy and courtly literature, and Humphrey would presumably have had access to the library when it was moved to London100 (although, surprisingly, the Louvre library did not appear to contain any works by Boccaccio, Petrarch, or Dante).101 While there is no evidence for a direct textual relationship between this major family acquisition of French books and Humphrey’s decision to commission this translation, the popularity of Boccaccio’s works in France, and the family contacts and political networks between the two territories, may suggest the most likely transmission route of the French version of the De casibus out of France into England. It seems likely that Humphrey’s preferred language for reading and writing was French, rather than English, as shown by the large number of French translations he owned, the fact that he annotated his books in French, and perhaps most significantly, that the books given to him by his brother John (who presumably knew his tastes very well) were in French.102 Although he associated with Italian humanists, he did not possess their literary and linguistic facility in the classical languages: his Greek was non-existent and he could not write humanistic Latin. Nor could he read the Italian vernacular, apparently, as he had the Corbaccio translated into Latin by his Italian secretary, Antonio Beccaria.103 In fact, in a letter on the completion of this translation, Beccaria

98 Petrina, Cultural Politics, 164, and see also Jenny Stratford, “The Early Royal Collections and the Royal Library to 1461,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 3:256. 99 Petrina, Cultural Politics, 164. 100 Petrina, Cultural Politics, 164–5. 101 Mombello, “I manoscritti,” 97. 102 Petrina, Cultural Politics, 183. 103 Reiss, “Boccaccio in English Culture,” 23. Beccaria’s Corbaccio translation is Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lat. Misc. d. 34 (although this is a copy, and not Humphrey’s original volume: Petrina, Cultural Politics, 202). On the Corbaccio MS, see Gabriella Albanese, “Per la fortuna umanistica di Boccaccio: Il Corbaccio latino di Antonio Beccaria,” Studi umanistici, 2 (1991), 89–150.

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comments on Humphrey’s liking in particular for French histories, or rather, Latin histories translated into French (a definition made for the De casibus): “Verum etiam si quid est quod alieno sermone aliqua cum dignitate confectum sit, id etiam studere ac cognoscere non desistis. Omitto nunc gal[l]icas historias aut potius romanas eo sermone conscriptas, quas ita memoriter tenes” (Yet if something worth perusing is in a foreign tongue, this does not stop you from wishing to study and know it. I will not speak of those French histories, or rather Latin histories translated into French, which you know by heart.)104 Beyond these French histories, and a private taste for chivalric romance, Humphrey’s reading tastes were wide ranging. His humanistic interests have been widely noted, but he also owned medical and scientific works, as well as the standard theological, philosophical, and religious texts familiar from the curriculum.105 One notable and unusual feature of his collection was “a particular curiosity [...] regarding latemedieval Italian writers,” evidenced by the presence of a considerable number of works by all three of the tre corone.106 Latin manuscripts of works by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio are represented in two of his three catalogued donations to Oxford (he seems also to have made some earlier donations, which are not documented with the same thoroughness).107 His “first” detailed donation of 1439 (129 manuscripts) includes Petrarch’s De vita solitaria, Rerum memorandarum libri, and De remediis and Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium, while the third (135 manuscripts) shows a particular focus on humanistic texts and “modern” Italian authors. Petrarch is now represented by seven works (Epistolae, De remediis, Secretum, De viris illustribus, “possibly De uita solitaria and two other works of more difficult identification”), Dante by two (Serravalle’s Latin translation of the Commedia and his commentary), and Boccaccio by four (Genealogia, De casibus virorum illustrium, De mulieribus claris, and De montibus).108 To these five donated manuscripts of Boccaccio, we can also add at least two other of his works that Humphrey is known to have owned, neither of which were 104 Petrina, Cultural Politics, 181–2, and n. 97 for translation. 105 Humphrey’s personal library is analysed in great detail in Petrina, Cultural Politics, chap. 4, “‘Thair librair vniuersal’: Collecting and Donating Books,” 153–258. 106 Petrina, Cultural Politics, 201. 107 Petrina, Cultural Politics, 238. On the contents of the donations, see 224–58: first donation (1439), 241–8; second (1441), 248–9; third (1443), 249–55. 108 Petrina, Cultural Politics, 248, 252.

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donated to Oxford. The first of these is the previously mentioned Latin translation of the Corbaccio, made for Humphrey by his Italian secretary Antonio Beccaria, and the second a copy of Laurent de Premierfait’s French translation of the Decameron (now Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS fr. 12421), given to Humphrey by the Earl of Warwick, Richard de Beauchamp.109 While he possessed more manuscripts of Petrarch than Boccaccio (at least ten of Petrarch versus seven of Boccaccio), Humphrey’s interest in Boccaccio seems to have been more deeply rooted. This is shown by the fact that he commissioned two new translations of Boccaccio’s works (the Corbaccio in Latin and De casibus in English), and kept these along with his French Decameron in his private collection even after the donations. Perhaps Humphrey’s affinity with Boccaccio is not surprising: as an author of both proto-humanist histories and vernacular narrative, Boccaccio’s oeuvre was almost designed to appeal to the duke’s tastes, and the correspondence of the De casibus, in particular, with Humphrey’s personal situation as prince at the mercy of fortune, and his cultural mission in England, meant that this translation was a marriage made in heaven. It is therefore clear that the commissioning of Lydgate’s English translation of this text was undertaken for reasons other than the patron’s personal linguistic convenience. Humphrey was simultaneously using Italian humanist scholars to translate Greek texts into Latin (or indeed Italian into Latin, in the case of the Corbaccio) and English scholars to translate Latin into English. Of this last category, only two translations can be reliably said to have been commissioned by Humphrey: an agricultural treatise, Palladius’s De re rustica, and the Fall of Princes.110 Lydgate’s translation should therefore be seen in the wider cultural context in which Humphrey encouraged the use of English for works of wider interest, an activity that was related simultaneously to his humanistic interests and his creation of an institutional endowment to disseminate this new learning.111 The specific production context and commissioning relationship of the Fall of Princes is as deeply embedded in its English incarnation as it

109 On Humphrey’s Decameron, see Petrina, Cultural Politics, 182, 188. The manuscript is described in Bozzolo, Manuscrits, 107–8, and in Boccaccio visualizzato, 3:230–5. 110 Petrina, Cultural Politics, 266. The Palladius translation is discussed at 266–77. 111 On Humphrey’s practice of commissioning of translations, see Petrina, Cultural Politics, 264–5. Lydgate’s Fall of Princes is discussed in detail on 281–312.

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had been in Laurent’s shaping paratexts. Petrina suggests that “the links with the humanist texts arriving in Humphrey’s library and the references to contemporary history are [...] set in the foreground, and the poem, with its complex system of lengthy prologues, becomes at the same time a continuation of the medieval de casibus tradition and the celebration of a library that unites classical and new authors in harmonious continuity.”112 This is certainly true, although in terms of form, the text has been entirely remade for the new anglophone audience. While the organizational and paratextual structures that underpin both Boccaccio’s original and Laurent’s second version do remain, most importantly Lydgate’s text shows a fundamental transformation from prose to verse. The Fall of Princes consists of 36,365 lines of decasyllabic verse, arranged in seven- and eight-line Chaucerian stanzas. Like both its predecessors, it is arranged in nine books, and in content presents roughly the same individuals who are included in both Boccaccio’s and Laurent’s versions, with some additions and subtractions.113 The remainder of this chapter will thus consider the principal transformations of the English version, tracing the way in which key elements from the previous two incarnations evolve into its final form; the functional and interpretative implications of this shift in form will be considered in the concluding section. It is clear both from the critical history and a close reading of the text itself that Lydgate based his translation on Laurent’s source text, but to date, only Petrina has suggested that Lydgate may also have consulted the Latin original.114 However, as will be shown, the Fall of Princes is in  some ways a return to Boccaccio after the digressions of Laurent, and  we must therefore consider the possibility that Lydgate, like the Boccaccio translators of the sixteenth century and later, may have

112 Petrina, Cultural Politics, 295. 113 For a tabular representation of the contents of all three texts, see Mortimer’s “Conspectus of the Narratives,” in John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, 278–95. Bergen’s edition contains the marvellously detailed “Notes on Laurence and Bochas,” a comparative study of the relationships between the three texts, which highlights which sections are original to Lydgate and which are derived from Laurent’s version: Bergen, 4:137–397. 114 “The relation between the three texts has been the object of much critical debate, but it is almost certain that the French version (which occasionally Lydgate decidedly and surprisingly abbreviates) was not Lydgate’s only source; he certainly glanced at Boccaccio more than once, besides availing himself of a number of other sources”: Petrina, Cultural Politics, 295.

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worked from multiple versions in different languages. We know, for example, that while there were many more copies of Laurent’s Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes than the Latin original circulating in England in the period under discussion, Humphrey did possess a manuscript of the Latin text.115 Mortimer suggests that the success of the Laurentian translations may clearly be seen in the paucity of surviving manuscripts of the original Latin work: it is possible that it was as a result of the greater abundance of copies of Laurent’s translation that Lydgate based his verse translation on the French Des Cas rather than the Latin original.116

However, the identification of the principal source text should not preclude the possibility of another text being used at the same time. It is clearly not beyond the bounds of possibility that Humphrey, as commissioning patron, allowed Lydgate access to his library, and Petrina has posited that Humphrey took a decidedly interventionist line with Lydgate with regard to the composition of the poem.117 Furthermore, Maura Nolan has shown that Lydgate (like Boccaccio, in fact) triangulated his own compositions between different sources, seeking out “multiple versions of the stories he reproduce[d] and attempt[ing] to do justice to them all.”118 As an author working in a trilingual literary culture – of Latin, French and Anglo-French, and English – it seems highly likely that he would also triangulate his translations through references to different renderings of the “same” text in different languages. Although the verse form of Lydgate’s rendering is different from its  prose predecessors, this lengthy poem shares the same structural division into nine books, each equipped with a proemial section.119 In 115 Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, 32–3. Humphrey’s copy of the Latin De casibus, which he donated to Oxford University, has not been identified and is now presumed lost. 116 Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, 32. 117 Petrina, Cultural Politics, 299–306. 118 Maura Nolan, “‘Now wo, now gladnesse’: Ovidianism in the Fall of Princes,” ELH, 71 (2004), 531. 119 In citing from the text, I follow the Rylands manuscript, which has a variant text to that given in Bergen, whose edition is based on MS Bodley 263 (B), collated with other manuscripts. For a description of the critical method, see Bergen, 1:xxiii–xxiv. Rylands English MS 2 is “MS J” in the Bergen edition, described at 4:21–3. See also the description in the Rylands electronic finding aid, ELGAR (Electronic Gateway to Archives at Rylands: http://archives.li.man.ac.uk/ead/

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addition, the text is expanded via the inclusion of sententious envoys, moralizing addresses to the reader that are inserted into the text at particularly instructive points. The poem lacks the prefatory progression of clearly distinguished paratextual frames that characterize both Boccaccio and Lydgate’s version; however, these elements have not been omitted entirely, but are instead synthesized into the long (470line) opening narrative sequence of book 1. This prologue serves both as an introduction to the project as a whole and as a statement of Lydgate’s compositional and translational practice.120 A glance at the Rylands copy of the poem demonstrates typical visual strategies used to articulate the beginning of a prestigious text (figure 1).121 The opening page is laid out with ornate floriated borders to all four margins, with a further floral border separating the two columns of script. The page is headed with the word “Prologus” written in red ink above the floral border, and there are two illuminated initials: the first to the rubricated title at the top of the left-hand column, and a second, much larger one signalling the beginning of the poem itself. Each stanza begins with a larger capital letter that on this first page alternates between red and blue ink or gold illumination. The titular rubric presents a summary of the text and its provenance: Here begynneth the book callyd .I. Bochas descriuing the falle of Pryncys pryncessys and othir nobles translatid in to Inglissh bi Iohn Ludgate Monke of the Monastery of seynt Edmundes Bury atte commaundement of the worthi prynce Humfrey duk of Gloucestre begynnyng at Adam & endyng with kyng Iohne take prisonere in Fraunce bi Prynce Edward.

[accessed 20 July 2012]). I have generally modernized the punctuation in line with Bergen’s edition. Expansions are silently italicized throughout, except in those passages that use italics for comparison; in these cases they are given in square brackets. 120 Larry Scanlon defines the prologue as a “frame tale,” recognizing, unlike many other critics, that Lydgate the author presents himself as protagonist in a process: “the frame tale is precisely a narrative of the process of moralization, just as the frame tale is in the De casibus”: Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1994, 327. Scanlon provides a close reading of the prologue at 327–43. 121 In the following discussion, I use this particular late fifteenth-century manuscript simply as an example of a single textual event that has its own afterlife in the reception history, and to demonstrate typical features of the medieval book forms of this text. As a chronologically later copy, I make no attempt to use it in my discussion of Lydgate’s literary intentions.

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This informational rubric does not occur in all the manuscripts, and so cannot necessarily be ascribed to Lydgate, in any case. However, Lydgate does discuss the poem’s provenance himself in his introductory prologue. Scanlon has noted that this prologue can be divided into three distinct sections: The first presents the poem as a translation of Laurent’s translation of Boccaccio, then discusses the problem of translation more generally. The performative model Lydgate establishes in this part leads him to Chaucer, the master of the language into which he is doing his translating, and this specification leads him to Humphrey, his patron, dedicatee, and exemplar of political authority.122

Marked out with a large illuminated capital in the Rylands manuscript, the first stanza introduces the continuum of authors involved in the process: He that sum tyme dide his diligence The book of Bochas in frenssh to translate Out of latyn, he callid was laurence. The time remembrid truly and the date, There whanne kyng Iohn thorugh his mortal fate Was prisoner brought unto this region, Whanne he began first on this translacion.

(FP, Prologue, 1–7)123

Although there is some inaccuracy regarding dates (King John was captured in 1356, while Boccaccio did not complete the first redaction of the De casibus until about 1360, and Laurent’s first translation was made a generation afterwards in 1400), this attention to historical facts and chronological sequence immediately establishes Lydgate’s place in a tradition and a literary continuum.124 This is no silent translation, but a deliberate remaking, a process where Lydgate gives every man his due: first Bochas, then Laurent, and finally himself, the newest author. His careful attention to the text is shown in the next stanza, which refers explicitly to Laurent’s second, translator’s prologue and his metaphor of the potter who breaks his own pots to make something better: 122 Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power, 327. 123 Fol. 1r, verso column. 124 See Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power, 328.

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In his prologe affermynge of reson, Artificeris hauynge excercise May chaunge and turne bi good discrecion Shappis, fourmys, and newly hem deuyse, Make and vnmake in manye sundry wise, As potters whiche that to put crafte entende, Breke and renewe theire vessels to amende. Thus men of craft mai of due right, That ben inuentif and han experience, Fantasien in theire ynward sight Deuyses newe thurgh theire excellence.

(FP, Prologue, 8–18)

As in Laurent, the breaking and remaking is a necessary part of the process of improvement; the multistaged transfer of the text from Boccaccio, through Laurent, to Lydgate is a movement of refinement and intellectual development, undertaken by “men off crafft.” Writers are like master craftsmen, polishing up old things for a new audience (FP, Prologue, 19–28).125 Lydgate explicitly likens himself to Laurent, two learned men in different cultures; the implication is that like Laurent he will make whatever editorial amendments are necessary to mediate this text to his particular audience: In whiche processe, lik as I am lerid [learned], He in his tyme of kunnynge dide excelle In þeire language, he was required Of estatis, whiche gan him compelle [...] To vndirfonge þis labour þei him preie.

(FP, Prologue, 43–8)126

Lydgate, ventriloquizing for Laurent, claims that Laurent felt it would be important work to memorialize “the falle of noblis, with euery circumstaunce, | From þeire lordshippis, dredful and vnstable” (FP, Prologue, 51–2), with the aim that their bad example would serve to show others the instability of worldly glory: “That oþir might, as in a mirour see | In worldli worship mai be no suerte” (FP, Prologue, 55–6). The mirror simile does not occur in either Laurent or Boccaccio, but the 125 Scanlon provides a detailed reading of the corn and chaff metaphor in this passage: Narrative, Authority, and Power, 330–1. 126 Fol. 1r, recto column.

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utility topos occurs in both their authorial paratexts: the source passage may well be §§5–6 in Laurent’s first prologue. Lydgate then moves from Laurent’s authorial statements back to Boccaccio himself, foregrounding him as the original author. Boccaccio is presented as a prudent, sober, and thoughtful scholar (“wise and riht sad”), who compiled his book from the works of classical authors: Wherefore Bochas for a memorial, Considerynge þe grete dignitees Of worldli princis, and þeire power rial, Greet emperours, estates and degrees How fortune hath cast hem fro þeire sees; Namli suche as coude hem self not knowe Ful sodenli to make hem lyn ful lowe. This said auctour, wise and right sad, Hath gaderid out, with rethorikis swete In divers bookis whiche þat he hath rad Of philosophirs and an old poete Beside him, boþe in colde and heete Out to compile and write as he fonde The falle of noblis in many divers londe.

(FP, Prologue, 64–77)127

The idea of Boccaccio as “compiler” can be traced back to Laurent’s prefatory matter, which makes mention of both his classical learning and his compositional methods in his prefatory matter. The book is “escript et compilé par Jehan Boccace de Certalde, jadis homme moult excellent et expert en anciennes hystoires et toutes sciences humaines et divines” (written and compiled by Jehan Boccace of Certaldo, a most excellent man of days gone by, and an expert in ancient histories and all human and divine knowledge; Des cas, first prologue, 2); and elsewhere described as “ceste besoingne longue et espendue et recueillie de divers historians” (this long and expanded work gathered from diverse historians; second prologue, 9). Boccaccio himself mentions his own book in relation to – but crucially, not compiled from – ancient authors in his proem, §4. Lydgate then returns to Laurent’s translator’s prologue (Prologue II), but reframes it slightly. Whereas Laurent talks of the process of vernacularization and the necessity of translating Latin works into an amplified French so that the unlettered may understand 127 Fol. 1r, verso column.

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without too much effort (second prologue, 4–5), Lydgate makes this into a discussion of stylistics, not distinguishing between Latin and the vernacular but between “open and [...] pleyn” language and “straunge termys.” However, this opinion is still ascribed to Laurent: Uppon whoos book in his translacion The said laurence rehersith in certeyn, And holdith this, in his opinion, Suche langage as open is and pleien Is more acceptid, as it is oft seien, Than straunge termes which ben not vndirstonde, Nameli to folkis þat dwellen vppon londe.

(FP, Prologue, 78–84)128

Lydgate’s lexical choice recalls some words from Laurent’s next sequence, where he describes his process of self-improvement between the first and second versions of his French translation: “de tant qu’il iert plus cler et plus ouvert en sentences et en paroles, de tant il delictera a lire et a escouter pluseurs hommes et femmes” (in order to make known that which it contains more clear and open in my words and sentences, so that it will delight the many men and women who will read and hear it: second prologue, 6, my italics). This is developed further in the next stanza, again through reference to Laurent’s translator’s prologue: And he seith also, þat his entencion is to amenden, correcten and declare Not to condempne, of no presumpcion, But to supporte, pleynli, and to spare Thinge touchid shortli, of þe storie bare, Vnder a stile breef, and compendious, Hem to prolonge, whan þei ben vertuous. (FP, Prologue, 85–91, my italics)129

Here, Lydgate summarizes the last half of Laurent’s translator’s prologue, where he explains his intention to amplify Boccaccio’s story. Reminiscent phrases include “amendant si je puis,” “senz rien condempner” (§6), “de noble exemple de vertus,” “ce livre moult estroit et brief” (§7). His translation technique might be characterized as a paraphrase around certain key calqued words that have cognate meanings

128 Fol. 1r, recto column. 129 Fol. 1v, verso column.

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in both French and English, a procedure that was entirely characteristic of this period in which the two vernaculars coexisted. Moving on from the description of the work of “this noble translatour,” there follows a sequence describing Boccaccio’s intentions for the De casibus and a discussion of the principal theme of Fortune’s fickleness (lines 113–224). The textual authority reverts to “This Bochas” who “bitt þat men sholde enclyne | Sette hire hertis, voide of vnstabilnesse | Vpon þinges, whiche þat ben dyuyne” (114–16), that is, that men should set their hearts on the divine rather than the worldly realm. Lydgate then summarizes the subject matter of the work – “of princis, boþe yonge and olde” (129) – and the span of the work – “Begynneth at Adam, and endiþ at kyng Iohn” (136). For Lydgate, Laurent’s text serves as a springboard for original invention, rather than as a text to be translated and explained; interestingly, this process of rewriting around a theme means that his version seems to respond to Laurent, rather than simply representing his argument in a different language. This can be seen in the stanzas where he reworks Laurent’s passage about Boccaccio’s shortcomings as a writer of histories, and the need for amplification (Des cas, second prologue, 9–11). As shown above, Laurent argues that he must complete Boccaccio; since he assumed some sources were part of the common cultural patrimony, he omitted to include them and merely signalled them by name alone. In Lydgate’s hands, this becomes part of Boccaccio’s literary history, and is subtly changed in order to underline Boccaccio’s status as a great authority, with such a command of the literature than he can pick and choose the best stories for his exemplary purpose: This seid Bochas, aucto[ur] of þis book, Whiche of stories had gret intelligence, Sum he lefte, and sum also he took, – Such as he lefte, was off no necgligence, Supposinge and deniyng, of credence, Alle þe stories, which þat co[m]mu[n] bee, Other knowe hem, also wele as he. And lest þat folke, wolde have had disdeyn, Thingis co[m]mu[n], to be putt in memorie, Therfore Bochas, þouঢt [thought] it was but veyn, To his name, noon encrees of glorie, To remembre, no cronicle ne historie,

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But þo þat weren, for hir merit notable, Auctorised, famous, and co[m]mendable. (FP, Prologue, 141–54, my italics)130

We can see the same calquing of reminiscent words and expressions as found in the previous example: “Boccace, auteur”/“Bochas, auctor”; “delessié”/“leffte”; “il les reputa communes et cognues aux aultres comme a soy” (he thought them to be common knowledge and as well known to others as to him)/“Alle the stories which that comoun be, | Other knew hem also weel as he.” For the last section of this sequence (stanzas 155–224), Lydgate uses the final part of the prefatory paratexts: Laurent’s translation of Boccaccio’s own proem. Laurent’s striking simile of fortune putting the princes to sleep (“comme si ilz eussent endormie fortune par herbes ou par enchantemens”; as if they had been put to sleep by drugs or by magic; Des cas, Prologue III, 1) recurs here. The narrative positioning also shifts accordingly: whereas Boccaccio claims in his first-person narrative to be thinking about the possible uses of his work (“Exquirenti michi”), a stance reprised in the first person by Laurent (although announced as the words of Boccaccio, not Laurent: “Quant je enqueroie”), here Lydgate gives us Boccaccio in his historical moment, musing on his task: The whiche þhinge [i.e., Fortune], in ful sobre wise, He considred, in his inward entent, In his reson, he began to avertise, Seyng of princis, þe blynde entent, With worldli worship, how þat þei be blent, As þei shulde euer þheire estatis kepe, And as Fortune were I leied to slepe. And as þei had of Fortune þe maistrie, Hir enchauntid with þeir pociouns Bi sum crafte of newe sorcerie, Or bi power of incantacions, To make stable þeir dominacions With iren cheines for to laste longe, Lockid to rockis of ademantis stronge. 130 Fol. 1v, verso column.

(FP, Prologue, 162–75)

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Lydgate follows Laurent fairly closely here, translating also the lines about princes fortifying their possessions: “comme se ilz eussent fermees leurs seignories a crocs de fer en roche de aymant” (as if they had fastened their power with iron bands to adamantine rock; Des cas, Prologue III, 1). After this close paraphrase, Lydgate then moves back to a free summary style, focusing on the utility of these examples in order to “corretten and amende | þe vicious folk” (206–7). For the rest of the prologue, Lydgate is on his own, adding his own authorial paratext to the palimpsest that frames Boccaccio’s text. At line 225, Lydgate himself enters the narrative, invoking “Mine auctour Bochas,” and hoping that his version will be as close to Boccaccio’s “substance” as possible: And þouঢ [though] my stile, nakid be and bare, In Rethorik, myn auctour for to sewe [follow], Þitt fro þe truþe, shal I nat remewe. But on þe substaunce bi good leiser abide, Aftir myn auctour lik as I may atteyne, And for my part set eloquence aside.

(FP, Prologue, 229–34)

In an entirely typical rhetorical device, the Lydgate-character now calls for help in the task that lies before him: “But, o allas, who shal be my muse | Or unto whom shal I for helpe calle?” (239–40). His subject matter is too sorrowful for Calliope and her sisters on Parnassus, and Chaucer, the master of English poetry, is gone: “My maister Chaucer, with his freissh commedies, | Is deed, allas, cheef poete off Breteyne” (246–7). Although the author is alone in his endeavour, however, this first mention of Chaucer is designed to situate Lydgate alongside his illustrious predecessor, and even surpass his achievements.131 Through a skilful and progressive encomium, Lydgate mourns Chaucer, situates him in a continuum of illustrious authors: Seneca to Cicero, Petrarch, and Boccaccio (the eventual inference being, of course, that Lydgate, not Chaucer, is the current leading literary light and heir to these writers). Interestingly, Chaucer is presented primarily as a translator, which allows Lydgate to frame himself as a maker in the Chaucerian tradition,

131 For a detailed discussion of Lydgate’s authorizing strategies in this sequence, see Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power, 332–4.

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and one who has even exceeded the achievements of his master.132 (Of course, Chaucer himself wrote a much smaller version of the Fall of Princes in his Monk’s Tale – some 775 lines, set against the 36,365 lines of Lydgate’s poem – a fact that can only redound to Lydgate’s advantage in comparison of quantitative length of outputs.) It is interesting to note that Lydgate places Chaucer’s version of Griselda (“The Clerk’s Tale”) alongside “The Monk’s Tale,” although this may be because he felt these two stories from the Canterbury Tales were analogously derived from Petrarch rather than from Boccaccio: “And of Griseldis parfiঢ pacience, | And how þe monk of stories newe & olde | Pitous tragedies bi þe wei tolde” (348–50).133 The invocation of Chaucer’s texts of Boccaccian derivation at this point thus serve to position Lydgate as “like Chaucer” in source material, but within the textual culture of a generation later in which sources are named and geneaologies traced as part of the creative process. As Simpson notes, “Writers in such a textual culture represent themselves as readers, whose rereading of old texts produces a rewriting.”134 As he moves towards the final part of the prologue, the encomium of his patron, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, Lydgate carefully constructs an analogy between his contemporary reading culture and that of the illustrious past. The notable authors previously cited, we are told, were the favourites of kings and princes in the olden days; why, Julius Caesar himself listened to Cicero’s lectures and was a renowned booklover (358–71). The last fourteen stanzas of the prologue are then, unsurprisingly, given over to the biography and praise of Humphrey, by analogy the English Julius Caesar: “Also in þis londe, I dar afferme a þinge: | Ther is a prince ful mighti of puissance” (372–3; fol 2v, recto column).135 Humphrey’s noble lineage and royal standing are presented in this first stanza, followed by 132 “Of the sixteen works he catalogues, eleven can be considered translations, either in the narrow, modern sense, or in the more extended one Lydgate uses, and six he explicitly identifies as such [...]. This catalog strongly implies that Chaucer’s sovereignty as a maker inhered in his deference to the auctors which preceded him. To make is to translate, and the project Lydgate has in hand makes him Chaucer’s peer”: Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power, 333. 133 Scanlon (Narrative, Authority, and Power, 333) notes that the Monk’s Tale is invoked again in the concluding part of the poem, in Lydgate’s final address to his patron: “The Fal of Prynces gan piteously compleyne, | As Petrark did, and also Iohn Bochas | [...] | As Chaucer dide in the Monkys Tale” (FP, IX, 3422–7). 134 Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, 64. 135 The Rylands ms has marginal marks highlighting this section of the prologue in praise of Humphrey, from this stanza to line 434 (fol. 3r, recto column).

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his nobility and honour, framed in a mixture of chivalric and classical terms: “He is in dede proued a good knight, | Eied as Argus, with resoun and forsight” (383–4). He is a man of great knowledge, who loves to consort with scholars; “And noman is more expert of langage” (388), and he spends much of his time studying, despite his “estaat and dignite” (394). He is also a pillar of the church, “boþe manli and also wise, | Chosen of god, to be his owne knight” (407), and his reading is directed so as to acquire ever more Christian virtue, ward off vices, and – crucially – gain practical knowledge about personal self-improvement as a prince: Reding of bookis bringith in vertu, Vices excludyng, slouþe and necligence, Makiþ a prince to haue experience, To knowe himsilf, in many sundri wise, Where he trespasiiþ his errour to chastise.

(FP, Prologue, 416–20) (fol. 3r)

In this way, Lydgate is able to sidestep cleverly the delicate question of how to present a book describing the misfortunes of bad princes to his royal patron. Moreover, the duke, being a man of great learning, considered Boccaccio’s De casibus to be a very important work, and one that would be certainly useful for princes (421–7); it is for this reason that he commissioned Lydgate to make a translation, with the twofold aim of “hym to do pleasaunce | To shewe þe chaunge of wordli variaunce” (428–34, ll. 433–4). And amonge bookis, pleynli þis is þe caas, This said prynce [i.e., Humphrey] considred of resoun, The noble book of þis Iohn Bochas Was, accordyng in his opinion, Of greet noblesse, and reputacion, And un to princis, gretli necessarie To geue exaumple, how this world doiþ varie. And for þise causis, as in his entent, To shewe þe untrust of al worldli þing, He gaf to me in commaundement, As him semys it was right welsittyng, That I shulde, aftir my kunnyng, This book translate, him to do plesaunce, To shewe þe chaunge of worldli variaunce. (FP, Prologue, 421–34) (fol. 3r, verso-recto column)

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Although Lydgate is of course completely unfit for the task (“Though þat I have lak of eloquence,” 437), he will do his best and follow his author. And, importantly, since Humphrey has asked especially, he will follow Boccaccio very closely and will therefore not be partial in his presentation of these bad princes (442–8), thereby seizing another opportunity to blame Boccaccio for the anti-ruling class slant while excusing himself in the eyes of his patron. The closing stanzas of the prologue are once again dedicated to Lydgate’s work, and show his concern with a suitable style for writing in the historical genre: All þis conceyuyd, I began my stile dresse, Thouঢ I wolde in my matier procede; And for þe matier abreide heuynesse, Of fresshe colours I took no maner hede, But my processe pleinli for to lede, As me semys it was to me most meete To sette apart of Rethorikes sweete.

(FP, prologue, 449–55)

Lydgate speaks of his preparations before the translation proper, in which he must begin by arranging (“dresse”) his style to suit the demands of the genre; since the subject approached seriousness (“the matier abreide heuynesse”), he must avoid “fresshe colours.” In other words, the seriousness of the subject matter dictates a sober translation, with no extraneous additions or rhetorical flourishes. Returning to his earlier renunciation of Calliope and the Muses (239–45), he reiterates that the miserable tales contained here are no topic for them: “Ditees of mournyng and off compleynyng | Not tp pertene unto Calliope, | Neiþir to þe musis” (456–8), and indeed they would be unwilling to show favour with their “sugred aureat licour” for “matiers of aduersite” (460–2). Lydgate will thus write plainly as best he can on this subject, “Havyng no colours but onli whit and blak, | To þe tragedies whiche þat I shal write” (465–6), armed only with the support of his future readers: “Vnder þe support of all þat shal it rede, | Vpon Bochas right þus I wol procede” (468–9). While Lydgate’s proemial prologue incorporates much of the paratextual material from Laurent’s second version, the English manuscripts do not tend to include the next element from the Laurentian palimpsest, the table of contents made up of the rubrics to each chapter of book 1. The absence of this element in the English rendering of the text points up the difference in function, and the ways in which the text is read in the two different linguistic communities. Laurent’s version is

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an instructional text, a reference work for which a finding aid is fundamental to its navigation; Lydgate’s is a history, for sure, but one conceived of as a progressive narrative rather than as a repository of facts. Lydgate is engaged in the creation of a new story, a retelling of Boccaccio for his ideal reader (Humphrey) and wider English audience; the summary rubrics and constant labelling of the organization of the text are not functional or necessary for his text in the same way as they were for Laurent’s version. Laurent’s endless signposting is not relevant or useful to Lydgate’s poem, which is a text in motion, and whose rhyme scheme and rhythm constantly move it forward in a way that perfectly expresses the parade of unfortunates. By contrast, Laurent’s version is a text in stasis, whose stolid amplification and repetition (in the text as well as the organizational framework) serve to authorize and fix its subjects in a hyperdocumented past. Despite the lack of a formal indexing tool, the divisions between the various parts of the text are clearly delineated visually in the later fifteenth-century manuscript witness of the text. Immediately below the final line of the prologue in the Rylands manuscript (“Vpon Bochas right þus I wol procede,” fol. 3r), the words “Explicit prologus” are written in red in the centre of the column, with a blue and gold initial “E,” while the next line reads “Incipit liber primus,” once again rubricated, with a red and blue initial “I.” The scribe has left a blank line of space, which is followed by the rubric for the first “life”: “How adam and Eve for theire inobedience were put out of paradis lyved in sorowe and how thei and theyr offspryng.” The text is truncated abruptly at the foot of the page, while the next section begins at the top of the verso page, with a gilded and floriated decoration twining over the top, side, and bottom margins of the page. Here, in this first book of this book, just as in later ones, the forms of the page direct the reader’s encounter with the text itself. With the start of the narrative proper, Lydgate maintains his presentation of Boccaccio-personaggio composing his book (lines 162–3); the passage is once again derived from the prologue, as discussed above. The apparition motif is maintained, as it was in Laurent, but Lydgate historicizes it through his shift from first person to third person. The source French version reads: Quant je considere et pense en diverses manieres les plourables maleurtez de noz predecesseurs, a celle fin que du grant nombre de ceulx qui par fortune ont esté trebuchiez je prensisse au commencement de ce livre

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aulcun prince terrien assez digne d’estre premier entre les malheureux, et voicy deux viellars se arresterent devant moy si tres eagiez et si ancians qu’il sambloit que ilz ne peussent trahiner leurs membres tremblans. L’un de ces vieillars, c’est assavoir Adam, me arraisonna et dist: “Beau nepueu Jehan Boccace, qui serches et enquiers lequel tu mettes premier ou rang des malheureux.” (Des cas, I, i, 1–2) When I consider and think about the various deplorable miseries of our predecessors, in order to select for the beginning of this book, from the great number of those who by fortune have been entrapped, some earthly prince who was worthy to be first amongst the unfortunate; and lo, two elderly people stopped in front of me so very old and aged that it seemed as though they could no longer drag along their trembling limbs. One of these elderly men, namely Adam, addressed me and said: “My fair kinsman Jehan Boccace, you who are searching and enquiring for whom to put first in the ranks of the unfortunates.”

Laurent’s text has already moved the apparition from the historic present in Boccaccio to a past tense, and Lydgate’s version now sends it even further into the past: Whan Iohn Bochas co[n]sidred had souঢ [sought] The woful fal off myhti conquerours, A remembrau[n]ce entrid in his þouঢt [thought], Rekenyng þe nou[m]bre of oure predecessours, And first to mynde cam þe p[ro]genitours Of al mankinde, ferre Iro[n]ne in age, And toward him holding þeir passage, As hym þouঢt in his inward sight, In þeir comyng ful pitousli tremblyng, Quaking for age and for lak off might, Ther greet febilesse bi signes out shewyng; And oon of first at his comyng – Oure fadir Adam – sodenly obreide, And to myn aucto[ur] euene þus he seide, How Adi[m] & Eve stondyng naked before Bochas desired hi[m] to put theire woful fall first in remembraunce

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The English Boccaccio “Cosyne Bochas, I wol wel þat þou lere, That art so besi to serche oueral Of infortune þe maner to enquere.

(FP, I, 470–86)

The passage shows clear traces of Laurent’s text with some significant adjustments. We find related reminiscent words and phrases as seen in the prologue (italicized above), and additions such as “our fadir Adam” (which, although it has been modified from Laurent’s explanatory phrase, nonetheless has the same form of an interpolated explanatory subclause). A change of consanguinity between speaker and auditor can also be observed in the change from Laurent’s “Beau nepueu” to Lydgate’s “Cosyne,” used not only for a blood relative but also a fellow member of the nobility.136 The Rylands manuscript presents these first two stanzas almost as an introductory passage to this section, with an additional rubric separating them from the beginning of Adam’s direct speech: “How Adam and Eve stondyng naked | before Bochas desired him to put thiere | woful fall first in remembraunce” (fol. 3v). This rubric actually represents a significant deviation from Lydgate’s text, where the appearance of the shades is clearly represented as a purely mental process, conjured up in the author’s mind as he casts around for a suitable subject (“As hym þouঢW in his inward sight”). The reference to their physical and naked presence beside “Boccaccio” may therefore indicate that the rubrics of this manuscript were intended to serve as a guide to the Latin source text, to be read alongside the Middle English rendering.137 Once again, Lydgate dramatizes both Boccaccio’s compositional process and the content of his text together, by imagining his author actually bewailing the fate of Adam and Eve: “In compleynyng, myn auctour Iohn Bochas | Ful pitousli in his aduertence | Biwepiþ, wailiþ, and oft seiþ alas” (FP, I, 785–7, fol. 5r). The translation of this chapter is as free as the previous examples discussed, but it does nonetheless follow the broad thrust of Laurent’s version, and ends, like Laurent and Boccaccio, with an invocation to Christ to allow mortal sinners to enter the Paradise from which Adam and Eve were expelled. One characteristic feature of Lydgate’s style in comparison with Laurent’s is the notable affective component of his writing, as seen, 136 Petrina provides this explanation of “cousin” when discussing the ex-libris of Humphrey’s book: Cultural Politics, 186. 137 I am grateful to Marianne O’Doherty for suggesting this point to me.

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for example, in the Cain and Abel sequence of this first history, again enhanced by the resonant compressed form of the verse.138 Laurent follows Boccaccio quite closely in this sequence, but Lydgate re-orders the narrative (Laurent, §§23–4) so as to enhance the dramatic force of Adam and Eve’s discovery of Cain’s body: And whethir wer þei sorowful or sayn, Longe tyme aftir þeir desolacioun, Whan þei fonde Abel þerre owne soun slayn Bi cruel Caym to his confusioun, The same Caym, as made is mencioun, Aftir þat tyme wilde and vacabounde Til blinde Lameth, gaf him his deþis wounde.

(lines 729–35, fol. 4v)

Compare Laurent: “Aprés ilz virent Cayn leur aultre filz fuitif, banni et vagabonde, et qui a la fin se cachoit entre les espines et ronces, lequel fut tué de la saiette de Lameth son nepueu qui par mesprison le tua dedans un buisson, cuidant que Cayn feust aucune sauvaige beste” (After they saw Cain, their other fugitive son, banished and wandering, and who in the end was hiding out among the thorns and brambles; he was killed by his nephew Lameth’s arrow, who killed him by mistake within the bushes, thinking that Cain was some wild animal; Des cas, 24). This is itself an amplification of Boccaccio’s own compressed prose: “Inde alium [filius] transfugam, exulem, vagabundum, et postremo inter vepreta lustraque ferarum delitescentem, nepotis sagitta confossum?” (And another son a fugitive, an exile, wandering, finally hiding himself amongst the brambles and in the lairs of wild beasts, and [then] run through by his nephew’s arrow; De casibus, I, i, 13). Lydgate’s narrative instincts can be seen in this compressed aside about Cain’s death, which reduces Laurent’s multiclaused wanderings to three lines of verse. In Lydgate’s version, the focus is kept constantly on the sorrowing parents, shocked by the sight of their murdered son, by the very fact of death, and by the obscenity of the first funeral being for their son (the mention of the funeral is incidentally Lydgate’s own invention).

138 Discussing another sequence in the Fall of Princes, Nolan notes that by contrast with Laurent, “Lydgate’s version is saturated by affectivity” (“Now wo, now gladnesse,” 539).

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The English Boccaccio Adam nor Eue aftir þat ilke time Had neuer seen noo feest funeral, It was of chaunge to hem a newe prime, For to beholde a þing disnatural, Brethre of oon wombe bi hatred eternal, Þe toon of hate so ferre himsilf deuide, Of fals malice to ben an homicide. And was it rouþe whan þei stood, For to beholde þeir son pale and dede Ligge on þe grounde, baþid on his blode, And al þe soil where he lai was rede, Þat whan Adam and Eue token hede, It was to hem ful grete aduersite Þe newe slauঢWer to beholde and se.

(FP, 736–49, fol. 4v)

Aside from the stylistic features discussed above, Lydgate’s Fall of Princes differs from its source texts in several other ways. Although he follows Boccaccio’s and Laurent’s chapters in sequence, Lydgate does not use numbers to separate the various chapters. However, the poem does maintain the division into books, both by external indications (such as the titles in the manuscript) and within the verses themselves: for example, in the prologue to book II, Lydgate writes, “Thus Iohn Bochas procedyng in his book, | Whiche in noumbre is callid the secounde” (FP, II prologue, 127–8, fol. 37v). In Bergen’s critical edition of the text, like the preceding versions, the distinction between chapters is indicated by a non-numbered title summarizing the next section of the poem, which replicates a typical feature found in some of the source manuscripts. So, for example, chapter 2 (Adversus inobedientiam in Boccaccio; “Second chapiltre qui raisonne contre l’inobedience de noz premiers parens et de tout l’umain lignaige, et commence en latin: ‘Si cetera’” in Laurent) becomes “The compleynt off Bochas vpon the fall off Adam” in Bergen. The Rylands manuscript instead has a rubric that relates to the Latin text, reading “A commendacioun of Bochas uppon the vertue of obedience” (fol. 40r). The principal addition to Lydgate’s version is the sixty-nine envoys, which occur at the end of certain biographies and which are intended to direct the reader’s attention towards the practical avoidance of such misfortune. Book I has fifteen envoys, but they become less and less

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frequent as the poem progresses, with only one in book VIII, and none by book IX.139 Lydgate’s translation of Laurent’s text also contains significant moralizing amplifications of its own, and demonstrates once again a further stage of remodelling for the anglophone audience. If we are to believe Lydgate’s authorial interventions, Humphrey himself specifically asked for additional moralizing directives (the “remedie”) to be added, so that he could derive the maximum benefit from them:140 This myhti prynce […] Gaff me charge […] That I sholde in euery tragedie, Aftir the processe, made mencion, Atte the ende set a remedie, With a lenvoye conveied by resoun, To noble pryncys lowli it directe Bi othres fallyng hemself to correcte.

(FP, II, 146–54, fols. 37v–38r)

Whether these moralizing internal paratexts are a direct result of the patron’s wishes is almost by the by; we do not need evidence of Humphrey’s personal reading preferences to detect evidence of the taste of the times. In fact, Catherine Reynolds has suggested that it was in these moral envoys that the essential interest of the text lay for the English readership, drawing her conclusions from the limited number of illustrated manuscripts of this text.141 It is interesting also to consider the placement of Lydgate’s explanation about the envoys within the poem at large. One might have expected this description of the patron’s request to have been placed in the prologue to book I, as part of Lydgate’s encomium to his prince and the discussion of his translating style. Instead, however, we find it towards the end of the prologue to book II (which begins on fol. 37 of the Rylands manuscript). The first eighteen stanzas of the prologue are an entirely typical verse paraphrase of Boccaccio’s preface to this book, wherein Lydgate writes around the topics

139 On the envoys, see Petrina, Cultural Politics, 301; Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, 58–61. 140 Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, 58. 141 C. Reynolds, “I codici del Boccaccio illustrati in Inghilterra,” in Boccaccio visualizzato, 3:268–9, cited in Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, 61.

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introduced by Boccaccio, while maintaining Boccaccio’s authorial “I.” In the next stanza, Lydgate then retrospectively inserts the attribution of this passage to Boccaccio and resituates the text as the second book (“Thus Iohn Bochas procedyng in his book, | which in noumbre is callid the secounde” [FP, II prologue, 127–8, fol. 37v]) before returning to the substance of the prologue with the apparition of Saul: “Mighti Saul to him did appere, | kyng of Israel, pitously wepyng” (134–5, fol. 37v). Interestingly, however, this apparition of Saul is followed by a second, in another authorial sequence that echoes the situation of Boccaccio writing in his room interrupted by visitors. Now we have Lydgate working away at his translation who is himself interrupted by a visitor, his patron Prince Humphrey: Anoon aftir, I of entencioun, With penne in hande fast gan me spede, As I coude in my translacioun, In this labour ferther to procede, My lord cam forthbi, and gan to taken hede; This mighti prynce, right manly & right wis, Gaff me charge, in his prudent avis, That I sholde in euery tragedie, Aftir the processe, made mencion, Atte the ende set a remedie, With a lenvoye conveied by resoun, And aftir that, with humble affeccioun, To noble pryncys, lowli it directe, Bi othres fallyng hemself to correcte. And I obeied his biddyng and pleasaunce, Vndir support off his magnificence. As I coude, I gan my penne auaunce Albe I was bareyn off eloquence, Folwyng myn auctour in substaunce & sentence: For it suffised, pleynly, onto me, So that my lorde my makyng took at gre.

(FP, Prologue II, 141–61)

At a distance of almost six hundred years, we have no way of knowing whether this is a realistic account of Lydgate’s compositional process. It is entirely within the bounds of possibility that Humphrey was interested in the progress of the project, and made suggestions

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about how it might be improved (by the insertion of the openly didactic envoys) during the actual writing. Lydgate might then choose to dramatize this encounter some way into the text, at the beginning of book II and not I, while going back and inserting the envoys in the appropriate places in the first book. However, we cannot exclude the possibility that Lydgate may simply be dramatizing the patron-poet relationship in one of the liminal spaces of the poem that are open to this kind of intervention. The arrival of Humphrey in the diegetic space of the poem is another rewriting of Boccaccio’s chief narrative device: this time, the new arrival is not a vision, however, but a real visitor within the fiction of the poem. Lydgate in some ways is Boccaccio’s ideal reader, as well as translator: he imitates not the form of the work, which in any case has a somewhat distended shape due to the interventions of Laurent, but its “substaunce & sentence,” its content and meaning; his reading is sophisticated enough so as not simply to render the words into English but also to make original additions. Lydgate’s creative expansion takes place on both the narratological and moralistic level: he dramatizes his own creative process and the demands of his patron in exactly the same way as Boccaccio does in his original text, and inserts it in exactly the right part of the structure; likewise, he can follow Boccaccio’s “comendaciouns” and “compleynts” with a moralizing paratextual superstructure of his own in the shape of the envoys. It is an obliquely deferential relationship, much like that which Lydgate sets up with Chaucer: one in which he can imitate his esteemed literary forebear, but in such a way as to highlight his deliberate differences. Conclusion The first work of Boccaccio’s to be translated into English and named as such is unusual in comparison to the majority of the later translations of other works, in that it has undergone dramatic modifications to its form, changing from Latin prose to Middle English Chaucerian stanzas. Furthermore, the text has undergone an intermediate transformation into the French language, in which it was greatly amplified. The translational shifts (both linguistic and stylistic) evident in this process are surely significant, and this conclusion will seek to offer some suggestions about possible meanings and functions of this transformation within the fifteenth-century context. Until quite recently, such sweeping remodellings have often been the target of (unselfconscious) literary criticism, which would highlight their shortcomings as translations or literary compositions according to the arbitrary norms of “now”; in

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addition, the writings of John Lydgate and other fifteenth-century authors have been considered something of a literary low point for generations, and recent revisionary scholarly work is only now beginning to tip the balance back towards a less loaded appraisal of his achievements.142 However, it is much more productive to focus, as David Wallace does, on the “strangeness, the unlikeliness, the historical peculiarity, of medieval compositional practices.”143 What this chapter has shown, above all else, is that in the medieval period, the text is transmission, and transmission is the text. “Translation” as we know it today is merely one facet of the movement (translatio) from one reader, in one place, to the next. As Wallace has shown, medieval textuality can only be expressed in great part through the manipulation and articulation of individual texts: Medieval literature cannot be understood (does not survive) except as part of transmissive processes – moving through the hands of copyists, owners, readers and institutional authorities – that form part of other and greater histories (social, political, religious and economic).144

When we wonder why neither Laurent nor Lydgate chose to produce a workmanlike, word-for-word French or English prose rendering of Boccaccio’s De casibus for their local readers, we are in fact betraying the prejudices of our time and assuming, first of all, that fidelity is the only criterion for translation, and second, that prose should be the natural medium for this translation, based on the assumption that, perhaps subconsciously, prose is by far the most familiar textual form for us. In fact, verse permeated oral and written culture in fifteenth-century England, serving as the most appropriate vehicle for everything from elite literary production, through middle-brow narrative, for educational or devotional purposes: “Recourse to poetry, in medieval schoolrooms and

142 Petrina argues for a re-evaluation of fifteenth-century cultural production in Cultural Politics, while for re-appraisals of Lydgate, see, for example, Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, and Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power; Sue Bianco offers some reasons for Lydgate’s fall from popularity in “New Perspectives on Lydgate’s Courtly Verse,” in Nation, Court and Culture: New Essays on Fifteenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Helen Cooney (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), 95–115. 143 David Wallace, “General Preface,” The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), xxi. 144 Wallace, “General Preface,” xxi.

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pulpits, often served a pre-eminently practical objective [...]. Bad poetry (bad by post-medieval standards) was written in the interests of biblical paraphrase; poetical tags and fillers fleshed out metres primed for ready memorization.”145 In a culture saturated in verse forms, Lydgate’s choice of rhyme royal to render Boccaccio’s tragic histories then demonstrates a further generic refinement in its deployment of the received form associated with grandeur and tragedy by Chaucer’s own use of it. If, then, we situate Laurent and Lydgate in their historic communities, we find that their translation practice speaks volumes about their particular textual cultures. In both cases, the target text privileges its readers over the source text (what is called “domestication” in modern translation studies), and thereby produces translations that above all conform to the expectations of the receiving culture.146 For Laurent, the most appropriate generic vehicle for his French rendering of Boccaccio’s text was the amplified prose narrative, accompanied by extensive paratextual writings that could organize and reframe the work for his French readers. (Indeed, we know that his more “traditional” and less digressive 1400 version, which followed closely Boccaccio’s Latin, did not work in the receiving context, leading him to redo it in the new style in 1409). Lydgate, likewise, produced his translation in the predominant and most prestigious vernacular genre of his period, the narrative poem in Chaucerian stanzas, a decision that further loosened Boccaccio’s authority over the text in favour of Lydgate’s own. While the English translator is keen to acknowledge Boccaccio’s primacy as first author, and to situate his poem as the end point of the creative continuum that extends from Boccaccio, via Laurent, to Chaucer, his deliberate move into the English rhyme royal form, and away from the verbatim matter of the source text(s), underlines the unassailable supremacy of Lydgate in this transformative process. After all, there was no pressing need to translate the De casibus into English in terms of information transfer, since it was already known and read in both Latin and French in England; the linguistic and generic shift must thus express a more complex purpose, one that seeks to appropriate important “foreign” (learned, humanist) writings into a new English canon. When Lydgate claims to follow his author “in substaunce & sentence,” he also dignifies

145 Wallace, “General Preface,” xxi. 146 For medieval translation practice in England, see Roger Ellis and Liz OakleyBrown’s entry “British Tradition” in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker (London: Routledge, 1998), 335–6.

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his version with an equivalently sententious narrative form, and one that satisfactorily colonizes the translation subject. Boccaccio is thus “Englished” in both language and poetic form. Although much changed by its textual adventures from Italy to England, Boccaccio’s De casibus thus had a long-lasting (if idiosyncratic) presence in English literary culture. The success and influence of Lydgate’s Fall cannot be disputed: in England, at least, it becomes instantly institutionalized as the primary model for Boccaccio translation, as seen by the subsequent partial translation of the De mulieribus claris, the subject of the next chapter. And, as will be shown in chapter 3, it would continue to convince and attract English readers until well into the sixteenth century, even earning its own continuation in the Mirror for Magistrates. Taking on a life of its own within English literature, this first example of Boccaccio in England exemplifies the domesticating process of textual assimilation.

2 The De mulieribus claris in English Translation, 1440–1550

This chapter will focus on the second of Boccaccio’s works to be translated into English, the De mulieribus claris (Concerning famous women), and the two English versions of it made in the mid-fifteenth century and in the early 1540s. It will examine the production contexts and material features of these two English manuscripts, in order to consider the ways in which this second Latin text of Boccaccio’s was remade for two specific (and very different) English readerships in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Whereas Lydgate’s version of the De casibus was very widely known, and survives in multiple copies, both these translations exist in only a single manuscript witness, making them a virtual “dead end” in Boccaccio’s English reception; their marginal status within the English corpus can be seen by their extremely restricted subsequent publication history, which comprises only an extract of the second translation published in the late eighteenth century, and a scholarly edition apiece in the 1920s and 1940s.1 The fate of the famous 1 “‘De Preclaris Mulieribus, That is to say in Englyshe, Of The Ryghte Renoumyde Ladyes.’ Translated from ‘Bocasse,’ and Dedicated to King Henry VIII. By ‘Henry Parcare, Knight, Lord Morley.’ From a Manuscript on Vellum, Which appears to have been the Presentation-Copy to that Monarch” (London: Printed for the Editor, 1789), in The Literary Museum; Or, A Selection of Scarce Old Tracts, ed. Francis Godolphin Waldron (London: Printed for the editor, 1792), i–8; Die mittelenglische Umdichtung von Boccaccios De claris mulieribus, nebst der lateinischen Vorlage, ed. Gustav Schleich, Palaestra: Untersuchungen aus der deutschen und englischen Philologie und Literaturgeschichte, 144 (Leipzig: Mayer & Müller, 1924); Forty-Six Lives translated from Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus by Henry Parker, Lord Morley, ed. Herbert G. Wright (London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1943). For a summary of the history of the De mulieribus claris (henceforth DMC) in English, see my review article of V. Brown’s Famous Women in Heliotropia, I.1 (www.heliotropia.org).

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women in the late medieval and early modern period is thus instructive not only in terms of the development of English translation practice between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but also for what it tells us about the English reception of the querelle des femmes, the suitability of female biographies as an English genre, and the very different textual histories of these works in comparison to the versions of the De casibus. This chapter will therefore consider whether their textual fates can be seen to derive from their originating production contexts, or whether they are also intimately linked with their female subject matter. As in the previous chapter, this one will begin with a brief consideration of the Boccaccian source text, highlighting aspects of its textual history, organizational structures, and Boccaccio’s framing strategies. I then consider the first English translation, the Middle English verse version of this text, British Library MS Additional 10304, which has been dated to c. 1440–60.2 The following section will focus on the second English translation of the De mulieribus, made approximately one hundred years later by Henry Parker, Lord Morley, as a gift to be presented to King Henry VIII. The conclusion to this chapter will review the change in translation practice evidenced by the two English versions of this source text between the mid-fifteenth and mid-sixteenth century, and will show how Morley’s translation anticipates the more “modern” norms of intercultural transmission that will prevail in the other sixteenth-century translations of Boccaccio, the subject of the third chapter. The Production Context of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (1361–1375) Boccaccio probably began the De mulieribus after making the first redaction of the De casibus in 1361, and he continued to revise it until the end 2 The conventional dating for this text has been c. 1440s (first offered in Raith, Boccaccio in der englischen Literatur von Chaucer bis Painters Palace of Pleasure: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der italienischen Novelle in England, Aus Schrifttum und Sprache der Angelsachsen, 3 [Leipzig: Universitätsverlag von Robert Noske, 1936], 74), although Janet Cowen has recently expanded it to 1440–1460 on the basis of the scribal hand: “An English Reading of Boccaccio: A Selective Middle English Version of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris in British Library MS Additional 10304,” in New Perspectives on Middle English Texts: A Festschrift for R.A. Waldron, ed. Susan Powell and Jeremy J. Smith (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000), 129n2.

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of his life in 1375.3 Via a reconstruction of the manuscript tradition, either seven or nine different stages of composition have been traced.4 A single autograph manuscript of Boccaccio’s still survives (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS 90 sup. 981, known as “L1”), dated to 1370–3, which provides the two final compositional stages: “la VIII nel testo, la IX nelle postille e nelle correzioni marginali” (the eighth [stage] in the text itself, the ninth in the annotations and marginal corrections”).5 However, we also know that the earlier redactions of the text were circulating while Boccaccio worked on his multiple revisions, and so the textual history of this work remains highly complex.6 Despite the broad similarities between the De casibus virorum illustrium and the De mulieribus claris suggested by their titles and their chronological proximity, the two books are distinctly diverse in form, concerns, and perhaps even readership. Zaccaria has suggested that, despite these similarities, the De mulieribus is not a continuation or companion piece to the De casibus, but instead a catalogue of biographies, which draws on the same classical sources to create a work whose primary aim is literary rather than moralistic.7 Scrutiny of the organization 3 All references to the De mulieribus claris are taken from Vittorio Zaccaria’s edition in the series Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, vol. 10, which is based on Boccaccio’s late autograph manuscript of the text. Virginia Brown’s recent English translation reproduces the text established by Zaccaria and offers a facing-page English translation and useful introduction to the text and its textual tradition. All English translations are taken from this edition: Famous Women, ed. and trans. Virginia Brown (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 4 The MS was first identified by Pier Giorgio Ricci, in his article “Studi sulle opere latine e volgari del Boccaccio,” in Rinascimento, 10 (1959), 1–21: “1. Un autografo del De mulieribus claris” (3–12); “2. Le fasi redazionali del De mulieribus claris” (12–21). Reprinted, with some modifications, in P.G. Ricci, Studi sulla vita e le opere del Boccaccio (Milan: Ricciardi, 1985), 115–35. For an overview of the manuscript history, see Zaccaria’s notes to his edition (455–9); Brown, Famous Women, xii–xiv (summarizing the nine redactional stages xiii–xiv); and Daniels, Boccaccio and the Book: Production and Reading in Italy, 1350–1520 (Oxford: Legenda, 2009), 137–9. Ricci argues for seven compositional stages, while Zaccaria prefers nine. 5 Zaccaria, DMC, 458. 6 “At least some of the changes Boccaccio made to his texts are reflected in manuscripts copied by other scribes, suggesting that more than one autograph was used as a fair copy”: Daniels, Boccaccio and the Book, 138. 7 “Essa [il DMC] non è una sorta di appendice o di supplemento al De casibus, né il riflesso modesto di un’opera di più vaste dimensioni (Hauvette). Non si trattò piuttosto per il Boccaccio di utilizzare materiali già raccolti per il De casibus, o di postillarli con riflessioni moralistiche o con variazioni aneddotiche; si trattò piuttosto di raccogliere, con qualche ordine e gusto, materiali derivati dalle

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of the De mulieribus and its internal narrative justifications show that this is indeed the case: while the illustrious dead of the De casibus are presented via the portentous, almost oneiric, framing device, no such nobilitating structure mediates the women of the De mulieribus to the reader. The language may be Latin, but the genre is resolutely middlebrow (and eminently appropriate, of course, to the relatively lower status of the exclusively female subject matter).8 As we have already seen for the De casibus, once again the Neapolitan context is critical for Boccaccio’s publishing strategy for the text. During his brief move to Naples in 1362–3, he dedicated and presented this work to Andrea Acciaiuoli, the sister of the seneschal of the Kingdom, Niccolò; the autograph manuscript of this version is now lost, but this intermediate redactional stage is represented by the manuscript “Vu” (Vatican City, MS Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cod. Urbinate lat. 451).9 The dedication to Andrea, originally grounded in the historical context of the manuscript’s earliest circulation, remains part of the supporting framework of the text through Boccaccio’s subsequent authorial revisions and additions, and, as we will see, is transmitted along with the female biographies themselves into the eventual English

letterature antiche, e in parte comuni al De casibus, con un fine più letterario che moraleggiante, o almeno in egual misura letterario e moraleggiante, senza una precisa impostazione pedagogica, ma con l’intento di far conoscere, attraverso le ricostruite biografie femminili, la funzione morale e educativa della cultura” (It [the DMC] is not a kind of appendix or supplement to the De casibus, nor the modest reflection of a work of greater dimensions) (Hauvette). It was not the case that Boccaccio used material that he had already amassed for the De casibus, or intended to gloss it with moralistic reflections or with anecdotal variations; instead, it was more his intention to gather together, with some order and enthusiasm, material deriving from ancient sources, in some cases sources which were also common to the De casibus, with an aim that was more literary than moralizing, or at least quite as literary as moralizing, without a precise pedagogical structure, but with the intention to make known, via these reconstructed female biographies, the moral and education function of culture): Zaccaria, DMC, “Introduzione,” 4. 8 Although promoting the idea of a fundamental division between Boccaccio’s Italian and Latin production, Glenda McLeod offers an interesting angle on the links between the DMC and the rest of Boccaccio’s oeuvre: “By compiling a scholarly catalogue of women, Boccaccio united the subject of his vernacular works with the form and language of Latin ones, thereby developing the one and providing some connection with the other”: Virtue and Venom: Catalogues of Women (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 63. 9 Zaccaria, DMC, 459.

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receiving context. As this gift manuscript is now lost, we have no evidence about its physical features or layout, but can extrapolate in general terms about its format from the later autograph and Boccaccio’s other autographs of his own works. As discussed in chapter 1, Boccaccio’s own autograph manuscripts were characterized by a parchment rather than paper support; written in a semi-gothic bookhand, and embellished with decorated and coloured initials. The De mulieribus extant autograph (L1) shares all these features, and also contains rubrics.10 It is a medium-size manuscript, roughly comparable to the autographs of the Teseida and the two redactions of the Trattatello; indeed, Daniels notes that “a relationship between the three Latin autographs (De mulieribus, Genealogia and Buccolicum carmen) cannot be forged on size,” although she also observes that it is possible that all four of the “medium” manuscripts could have started out at the same size and been subsequently trimmed in the binding.11 Daniels has also shown that Boccaccio’s choice of parchment support for this text is shared by 40 per cent of the extant manuscript exemplars, which suggests that this text was perceived as being suited to the most costly and durable container. This thereby distinguishes it from the majority of copies of the Teseida and the Decameron, which are on paper.12 (The continued importance of a parchment support can be seen in the two English translations of the text discussed in this chapter: the fifteenth-century translation is of mixed paper and parchment, while Morley’s gift manuscript is entirely made of parchment.) Despite Boccaccio’s scholarly aspirations for this text, a study of the material features of the Italian manuscripts of its fourteenth- and fifteenth-century readerships suggests that it found a mixed audience, including courtly readers, scholars, and perhaps even mercantile readers, to judge by some marks of reading left in some manuscripts of the

10 Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Cod. Pluteo 90 sup. 98I. On Boccaccio’s autograph of the DMC, see Evi Ianni, “Elenco dei manoscritti autografi di Giovanni Boccaccio,” Modern Language Notes, 86 (1971), 107–8, and Daniels, Boccaccio and the Book, 139–40. 11 Daniels, Boccaccio and the Book, 139. According to Marco Cursi’s reckoning of manuscript book sizes, the autograph De mulieribus manuscript is “medio-piccol[o]”: Cursi, Il Decameron: Scritture, scriventi, lettori. Storia di un testo (Rome: Viella, 2007), 145. 12 Daniels, Boccaccio and the Book, 140.

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De mulieribus.13 Strikingly, however, the Latin text of the De mulieribus does not seem to have been particularly popular in Italy, and this is perhaps due to the Italian humanists’ criticism of Boccaccio’s Latin; the text flourished instead via vernacular translations and imitations in the “famous women” genre.14 Structurally, the organization of the text shows marked similarities to Boccaccio’s best-known work, the Decameron. In its final form, the De mulieribus comprises the dedication to Andrea Acciaiuoli, the proemio, one hundred and six biographies, and an authorial conclusion. Given Boccaccio’s fondness for formal architectural schemes, we can surmise that the De mulieribus was envisaged at one time as a collection of one hundred biographies, which would reflect the narrative scheme he employed in the Decameron and in other lesser-known works such as the Amorosa visione.15 (Although containing 159 chapters, the De casibus, too, roughly conforms to this loose model.) Given the correspondences in form and stylistic “level,” it is not surprising to discover that several of the biographies show narrative similarities with tales from the Decameron.16 Finally, the authorial paratexts regularly serve the same function (and address the same topics) as those of the Decameron.17 Recent scholarship has underlined the sophistication of Boccaccio’s narrative invention within the confines of the self-imposed architectural constraints of the text. Kolsky has highlighted the presence of what he terms the “moralizing narrator,” which he differentiates from 13 On the ownership and readership of the De mulieribus in Italy, see Daniels, Boccaccio and the Book, chap. 4; on mercantile marginalia and other signs of reading, see 150–4 (152). 14 Daniels, Boccaccio and the Book, 154–5. 15 In fact, a study of the various editorial phases of the composition of the text shows at no stage a grouping of exactly one hundred chapters; nonetheless, the importance of this model can be seen in the fact that the autograph manuscript contains one hundred and six lives, exactly one hundred of which are women from the ancient or classical world, and with only six moderns. See Zaccaria, DMC, “Note,” 458–9, and Ricci, “Studi sulle opere latine,” 12–21. 16 This can be seen most clearly in the biography of Paulina (XCI) and the tale of Lisetta and Frate Alberto (Dec., IV, 2), where both the gullible female protagonists are tricked into having sex with a mortal who claims to be a supernatural being. For further discussion of the narrative similarities between the two texts, see Guido Guarino’s introduction to his translation, Concerning Famous Women (Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963), xvi–xxii. 17 E.g., in his conclusion to the De mulieribus, Boccaccio anticipates the arguments of his supposed detractors in order to refute their criticisms, just as he does in the authorial conclusion to the Decameron.

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the usual Boccaccian authorial persona, while Franklin has recently shown how Boccaccio uses the prefatory material to address himself to two different, and differently gendered, audiences.18 It is certainly clear that the text of the De mulieribus, like the De casibus before it, contains a considerable amount of both “historic” and “authorial” paratextual material within it, and these framing texts are both crucial to the presentation of the text in its original context and, when remade, equally essential to the reproposal of it to both the English fifteenth-century and sixteenth-century audiences. The text in the autograph manuscript begins with a dedication to Andrea Acciaiuoli, countess of Altavilla and the younger sister of Boccaccio’s long-term acquaintance Niccolò Acciaiuoli. This dedication is thus in some ways analogous to the De casibus’s dedication to Mainardo Cavalcanti, in that the dedicatee is known to the author; however, whereas Mainardo was selected for the dedication of the De casibus because of his status as close friend and fellow scholar, Andrea seems to have been chosen for a mixture of reasons that encompassed expediency (the occasion of Boccaccio’s visit to the Neapolitan court requiring the personalizing of the gift book to his hosts at the court), literary fittingness (the appropriateness of a female dedicatee for a book of famous women), and perhaps even the happy accident of her name.19 The dedication in fact highlights a dual readership: in the titular rubric, we find the official dedicatee, yet the opening phrase reveals the target audience for which it was written, Boccaccio’s fellow scholars: Iohannes Boccaccius de Certaldo mulieri clarissime Andree de Acciarolis de Florentia Alteville comitisse. 18 Margaret Franklin, Boccaccio’s Heroines: Power and Virtue in Renaissance Society (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); on this, see especially chap. 1, “Authorial Intent” (23–9); Stephen D. Kolsky, The Genealogy of Women: Studies in Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (New York: Peter Lang, 2003). 19 On the dedication, see Brown, “Introduction,” Famous Women, xiv–xvi, and Franklin, Boccaccio’s Heroines, 23–7. Boccaccio commends Andrea’s name as an expression of her essentially masculine excellence: “advertem videremque quod sexui firmiori natura detraxerit, id tuo pectori Deus sua liberalitate miris virtutibus superinfuserit atque suppleverit, ed eo, quo insignita es nomin, designari voluerit – cum andres Greci quod latine dicimus homines nuncupent” (§5) (as 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]).

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Pridie, mulierum egregia, paululum ab inerti vulgo semotus et a ceteris fere solutus curis, in eximiam muliebris sexus laudem ac amicorum solatium, potius quam in magnum rei publice commodum, libellum scripsi. (De mulieribus, 1) Giovanni Boccaccio of Certaldo to the illustrious Lady Andrea Acciaiuoli of Florence, Countess of Altavilla A short time ago, gracious lady, at a moment when I was able to isolate myself from the idle mob and was nearly carefree, I wrote – more for my friends’ pleasure than for the benefit of the broader public – a slim volume in praise of women.

Unusually for Boccaccio, the pragmatics of the dedicatory relationship are laid out alongside the literary motivations in this dedication: since he believes that his book would not reach the public without a helping hand from a distinguished person (§2), he sets himself to find a worthy female dedicatee who would serve this function. Queen Giovanna was his first choice, but since his book is not worthy of her, he decided to set his sights rather lower and dedicate it instead to Andrea.20 (It should be noted that the biography of Giovanna, the final Life in the book [106], is added at a later stage, after the compilation of the redaction to be dedicated to Andrea.)21 Although the book was explicitly written to interest his humanist friends, he uses the first prefatory paratext to make some suggestions about how it should be read by Andrea and, by extension, other noble ladies. (It is notable, in fact, how closely Boccaccio’s dedicatory intentions are reflected in what we now know of 20 Although this might nowadays be considered to betray “a certain tactlessness” (xiv), Virginia Brown urges us to find “an intended compliment” in this hierarchizing of dedicatees: “While such frankness seems clumsy to the modern reader, there is doubtless an intended compliment in Boccaccio’s ranking of Andrea as second only to the Queen; this was a compliment that Andrea, as a member of Joanna’s court, would have been obliged to accept gracefully” (Famous Women, xv); Franklin suggests that Andrea was a “screen dedicatee through whom Boccaccio hoped to recommend himself to a substantially more powerful and illustrious personage: Queen Joanna” (Boccaccio’s Heroines, 23). 21 Giovanna’s life is added at stage 6, according to Zaccaria; the 1362 compilation (of MS “Vu”) being stage 4: Zaccaria, DMC, “Note,” 458–9. It should be noted, however, that Franklin believes the Giovanna chapter was added at the time of the visit to Naples: “a number of lives (including that of Joanna herself) were added to Famous Women in the interval between Boccaccio’s receipt of the invitation [from Acciauoli] and his visit to Naples” (Boccaccio’s Heroines, 23–4).

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his historic readerships among the women of the Neapolitan court, as evidenced by the oldest manuscript of the De casibus [“Vo”], discussed in chapter 1.) Boccaccio therefore constructs a mixed audience of both men and women, “real” and fictional. For the female audience, the author promotes its diversionary features and hopes that it will inspire emulation: “suis quippe suffragiis tuis blandietur ociis, dum feminea virtute et historiarum lepiditate letaberis. Nec incassum, arbitror, agitabitur lectio si, facinorum preteritarum mulierum emula, egregium animum tuum concitabis in melius” (its counsels will sweeten your leisure, and you will find delight in the virtues of your sex and in the charm of the stories. Nor will the perusal have been vain, I believe, if it spurs your noble spirit to emulation of the deeds of women in the past; §§7–8). This is then followed by a defence of the inclusion of some lascivious material in the collection via a favourite horticultural metaphor, and the recommendation that “she” (i.e., female readers) should exercise discretion, ignore the offensive, and select only the good: “quin imo perseverans, uti viridarium intrans, eburneas manus, semotis spinarum aculeis, extendis in florem, sic, obscenis sepositis, collige laudanda” (As on entering a garden you extend your ivory hands towards the flowers, leaving aside the thorns, so in this case relegate to one side offensive matters and gather what is praiseworthy; §9).22 Furthermore, Andrea is instructed to feel shame if these examples of pagan virtue surpass her, a Christian woman, in their qualities (§9); this shame should be a spur for her to strive to outdo all other women in excellence, from antiquity to the present day. She should also, incidentally, avoid makeup and focus instead on polishing her inner beauty, so as to be assumed into heaven at her death (§9). In conclusion, the author urges her to accept this book, so she may protect it from “malicious criticism” (“ab insultibus malignantium tutus”). In return, the book will preserve her name and those of the other famous women contained within, ensuring her eternal posterity: “et posteritati servabit eternam” (and will preserve you forever for posterity; §11). 22 There is a clear relationship with the horticulturally metaphorized defence of mixed topics and language in the authorial conclusion to the Decameron: “Niun campo fu mai sí ben coltivato, che in esso o ortica o triboli o alcun pruno non si trovasse mescolato tra l’erbe migliori” (No field was ever so carefully tended that neither nettles nor brambles nor thistles were found in it, along with all the better grass; 18). (All translations from the Decameron are taken from G.H. McWilliam’s translation [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972].)

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The authorial proem that follows the dedication, however, addresses itself to the original “real” target audience, Boccaccio’s circle of (male) fellow scholars. It was, in all likelihood, written before the dedication, if we are to believe the chronology proposed in the self-same dedication, a conclusion reinforced by the redaction history of the work.23 Here, as in the De casibus proem, the focus is entirely literary-historical: Boccaccio introduces his text within the literary tradition, situating it within the genre of biographical writing and through reference to authorities ancient and modern: Scripsere iamdudum nonnulli veterum sub compendio de viris illustribus libros; et nostro evo, latiori tamen volumine et accuratiori stilo, vir insignis et poeta egregius Franciscus Petrarca, preceptor noster, scribit; et digne. (Proemio, §1) Long ago there were a few ancient authors who composed biographies of famous men in the form of compendia, and in our day that renowned man and great poet, my teacher, Petrarch, is writing a similar work that will be even fuller and more carefully done. This is fitting.

(The “books of illustrious men” may even signal a reference to Boccaccio’s own preceding historical work, the De casibus virorum illustrium, although the focus of that work is arguably the fall, rather than the illustriousness, of its subjects [§§1–2].) Boccaccio has, however, identified a gap in the market, and wonders why women have never been afforded the same kind of literary treatment: Sane miratus sum plurimum adeo modicum apud huiusce viros potuisse mulieres, ut nullam memorie gratiam in speciali aliqua descriptione consecute sint, cum liquido ex amplioribus historiis constet quasdam tam strenue quam fortiter egisse nonnulla. (Proem, 3) What surprises me is how little attention women have attracted from writers of this genre, and the absence of any work devoted especially to their

23 Franklin sees this as a systematic progression from female to male addressees: “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” (Boccaccio’s Heroines, 27).

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memory, even though lengthier histories show clearly that some women have performed acts requiring vigor and courage.

Boccaccio is never one to miss an opportunity to “complete” the literary canon, or even invent a genre if need be, and so this sequence suggests one of his own motivations for writing. From the very beginning of his literary career, this was a well-documented trait of his (e.g., the Caccia di Diana composed to “replace” in some way Dante’s “missing” serventese in praise of the sixty most beautiful women of Florence; or the Teseida as the first vernacular verse martial epic).24 The rest of the proem builds according to a careful rhetorical development. Since men are praised for their achievements, women deserve it even more so, because their deeds are even greater than men’s when one takes into account their feeble bodies and worse minds (§3). So that these virtuous women are not defrauded of their rightful praise, the author had the idea of compiling a book of the most famous of these women. Boccaccio then announces the subjects of his work: it will be dedicated to the most famous of these women, and will include both those famed for their deeds and prowess and those who were not agents themselves but were associated with the deeds of great men (§4). The women presented here are not all virtuous, but since many men are still renowned despite their unvirtuous behaviour, it is not fair to exclude notorious women (§6). He then moves to the exemplarity of his subjects and the attendant exhortative power of this work: the good deeds and crimes reported here will inspire the virtuous towards their emulation and may also restrain the evil impulses of the bad (§7). With this in mind, highlighting the potential moralizing effect of his work through reference to the components of its structure (as was also done in the De casibus), he will include “lepida blandimenta virtutis et in fugam atque detestationem scelerum aculeos” (pleasant exhortations to virtue and [...] incentives for avoiding and detesting wickedness; §7). Boccaccio then uses the second half of the proem to expand on the form of his collection, couching it as usual in terms of generic suitability and a concern for his readership both male and female. Rather than giving an abbreviated account (and thereby breaking with tradition), he tells us these lives will be longer, and will be based on authoritative sources: “Et ne more prisco apices tantum rerum tetigisse videar, ex 24 The missing serventese is mentioned by Dante in Vita nuova, VI, 2, while he bemoans the lack of a martial epic in De vulgari eloquentia, II, 2.

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quibus a fide dignis potuero cognivisse amplius in longiusculam hystoriam protraxisse non solum utile, sed oportunum arbitror” (To avoid the time-honoured custom of dwelling only superficially on events, I think it will be useful and appropriate to deal with the stories at somewhat greater length, learning where I can from trustworthy authors; §8). He believes that this work will be of interest to both male and female readers, and since women tend not to know much of history, the extra details will be both enjoyable and useful for them (8). The concern for the female readership that masks the address to the main, male audience is a commonplace in other works of Boccaccio, and is especially visible in the Decameron. He then goes on to explain his reasons for mixing Christian and pagan subjects, and the disproportionate amount of space given to heathens, by again stressing the exceptional achievements of women who did great deeds without the promise of everlasting life (10); there are also good literary reasons for not dwelling too much on the Christian women, as their deeds have already been authorized and recorded by “piis hominibus, sacris literis et veneranda maiestate conspicuis” (pious men outstanding for their knowledge of sacred literature and revered for their dignity; §11). Therefore, in order that these famous pagans are not forgotten and, indeed, get their just reward, it is necessary to write this book. Although Boccaccio’s tortuous line of reasoning might seem a very roundabout way of justifying his decision to create another work of classical imitation, this time on the subject of women, his attention to the degree of “Christianity” of the subjects, and their effect on a Christian (and female) readership becomes one of the main themes of the English version of the text, as we shall see. After the prefatory material the text is divided into a hundred and six chapters, each numbered in roman numerals and with a short summary title (e.g., I. De Eva parente prima). The individual lives follow a fairly constant scheme: first of all the woman’s name, parentage, and rank are given, followed by a short summary of her fame. This is followed by a generally longer narrative sequence that details how her reputation was acquired, often authenticated through reference to other sources. In some cases, Boccaccio will then add in a moral lesson or philosophizing reflection, which is either inserted into the life or placed at the end (as seen for example in chapter V [Ceres], §§6–13). In terms of structural and narrative complexity, the De mulieribus is thus much simpler than the De casibus, with no attempt to situate the narrative units within a temporal or mimetic frame. Instead, it is strongly modular, perhaps more so than any other of Boccaccio’s works, and thus

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lends itself particularly well to a utilitarian, exemplary function, a feature that is picked up by its reproposal in its two English translations. As will be shown, the first anonymous English translator closely follows the structure of Boccaccio’s individual Lives, modifying the moral reflection to a more typical Lydgatian envoy, while for Henry Parker, Lord Morley, the translation process and its presentation to the king is a moral performance in itself. The Middle English Translation of the De mulieribus claris (c. 1440–1460) In its originating Italian context, Boccaccio’s De mulieribus was produced for courtly and scholarly readers, but its wider diffusion exposed the text to a more mixed audience, and its subsequent reception demonstrates a desire and indeed need for vernacularization. A similar dynamic is visible in its first English receiving context. We know, for example, that the De mulieribus was known in England relatively early on in its diffusion: the text is mentioned by Lydgate in his Siege of Thebes (completed 1422), and it may even have been read some decades earlier, since it is sometimes suggested as a source for Chaucer.25 Humphrey of Gloucester owned a copy in the original Latin, donating it to Oxford in his third gift of 1443, and there is evidence that manuscripts of the French translation were also circulating in England by the mid-fifteenth century.26 One of these exemplars, still extant, is British Library manuscript Royal 20 C.V., of the French Cleres et nobles femmes, which has been dated to the second quarter of the fifteenth century, and which is titled in a fifteenth-century hand “The booke of the nobles ladyes in french.”27 We can thus imagine that this text had a readership and reach 25 See Nick Havely, “Britain and Italy: Trade, Travel, Translation,” in A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c. 1350–c. 1500, ed. Peter Brown (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 222. See also H.G. Wright, Boccaccio in England from Chaucer to Tennyson (London: Athlone Press, 1957), 33. 26 An example of an English fifteenth-century Latin manuscript of the De mulieribus is Dublin, Trinity College, MS 343 (MS “Du” in Zaccaria’s edition, 455). It is a small (177 by 132 mm) vellum manuscript, and the DMC is the second of two manuscripts in the book, the other being Johannes Nider’s Consolatorium timoratae Conscientiae. I am grateful to Kenneth Clarke for bringing this ms to my attention. 27 This manuscript is described in Carla Bozzolo, Manuscrits des traductions françaises d’oeuvres de Boccace: XVe siècle, Medioevo e umanesimo, 15 (Padua: Antenore, 1973), 153–4, and is also discussed in C. Reynolds, “I codici del Boccaccio illustrati in Inghilterra,” in Boccaccio visualizzato, ed. Vittore Branca (Turin: Einaudi, 1999), 3:267.

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in fifteenth-century England that was similar to, if perhaps more limited than, that of the De casibus before Lydgate’s translation. Indeed, Lydgate’s English rendering (written 1431–9) may even have spurred a further interest in Boccaccio’s “companion volume” of famous women, but one that was met almost entirely by books in the original Latin or in French translation. Unlike the massively popular English translation of the De casibus, however, the manuscript evidence suggests that this translation of the De mulieribus did not enjoy the same popularity, since only one copy is extant. A possible reason for this lack of interest may be that the translation was made by an unknown author, and so did not benefit from the prestige associated with a highly esteemed author such as Lydgate.28 We can perhaps extrapolate that the translator did not move in the same courtly circles as Lydgate and Humphrey; otherwise the text would have presumably circulated more widely and would probably also have been textually and materially associated with Lydgate’s Fall (as seen on the continent, where the De casibus and De mulieribus were often contained in the same manuscripts or bound together).29 It seems clear, though (if somewhat regrettable), that the biographies of famous women were less compelling to the English reading public than the

28 Wright presumes that the translator was a male scholar and possibly an ecclesiastic (Boccaccio in England, 29–30). Given the absence of firm evidence to the contrary, in this chapter I will thus use “he” to refer to the anonymous author, but we should not rule out the possibility that the author was a highly educated woman (a noblewoman or female religious), given the description of the behaviour of women imploring Mary for help during childbirth (ll. 540–6), a space that was almost exclusively the province of women. (Wright argues that this means he has “a female audience in mind”; 31.) Discussing the French 1401 translation of the De mulieribus, Jane H.M. Taylor makes a similar point: “I am anxious not to assume a priori that the translator was a man – apart from the fact that ‘anon’ may often be a woman, we know of at least two famous French medieval woman translators (Christine de Pizan herself and Marie de France), as well as other, less well-known translators such as Eleanor Hull” (“Translation as Reception: Boccaccio’s de Mulieribus claris and Des cleres et nobles femmes,” in “Por le soie amistié”: Essays in Honour of Norris J. Lacy, ed. Keith Busby and Catherine M. Jones (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 492n6). The adoption of a male subject as the governing analogy in the conclusion may, however, provide final evidence of a male author. 29 Wright, Boccaccio in England, 28. Daniels has shown how the De mulieribus was “usually accompanied by other works” in Latin, and notes five manuscripts that contain it alongside the De casibus (Boccaccio and the Book, 148–50 [148]). The association in France may have arisen from the usual French title given to Laurent’s translation of the De casibus, Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes.

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misfortunes of ruling-class men. Only this one translation has survived, and the fact that it did not circulate further may also be an accident of history and technology: the manuscript may have been commissioned for a high-ranking individual and kept privately, or it may have been made by someone purely for their own personal interest or purposes.30 Nonetheless, whatever the reason for its limited circulation, the text was not taken up by the early printers (or later – the first and only edition was published in 1924), and no further English translation or manuscript that we know of was produced until Morley’s version a century later in the 1540s. In comparison with what we know about the commissioning process of Lydgate’s rendering of the De casibus, very little can be said about the production context of the English De mulieribus. It seems to have been composed about ten to twenty years after Lydgate’s verse paraphrase, between 1440 and 1460, and shows strong formal similarities with it.31 Like Lydgate’s Fall, this translation is a verse paraphrase rather than what we would recognize as a more strict word-for-word rendering, and is written in seven-line rhyme royal–type stanzas; the rhyme scheme is very regular, following an ABABBCC scheme in every stanza. However, this text is very much shorter than the Fall, with only 1,792 lines of verse in 256 stanzas.32 Only 21 of the 106 lives are translated, along with parts of the authorial prologue.33 The manuscript also contains two significant paratextual additions, in the form of two Latin poems in elegiac couplets, which frame the proemial section.

30 I was made aware of some new evidence regarding this manuscript at a very late production stage of this book, and intend to publish this in a jointly authored article with David Rundle. 31 The most detailed study of the manuscript, with additional bibliography, is Janet Cowen’s article “An English Reading,” and see also Cowen, “The Translation of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris in British Library MS and The Forty-Six Lives Translated from Boccaccio by Henry Parker, Lord Morley,” Notes and Queries, 243 (1998), 28–9, and “Women’s Wit in the Middle English Translation of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris: British Library MS Additional 10304,” in Lexis and Texts in Early English: Studies Presented to Jane Roberts, ed. Christian J. Kay and Louise M. Sylvester (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), 89–104. The translation is also discussed in Wright, Boccaccio in England, 28–32. 32 Raith, Boccaccio in der englischen Literatur, 73. 33 Wright, Boccaccio in England, contends that parts of the authorial conclusion are also translated, but this does not actually seem to be the case.

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Given the singularity of the artefact, the material form of this translation is particularly significant when attempting to reconstruct “authorial” (or perhaps “translational”) intentions and the historical context. Schleich’s transcription, while very useful in terms of the text and its sources, gives no sense of the expressive form of the book nor its social context. The manuscript itself is quite small, a quarto volume only fifty leaves long (forty-six of which are the text itself), and measuring approximately 204 by 135 mm. The book is made of a mixture of supports, both paper and parchment. The parchment leaves are used in particular at the beginning and end of the book and as the outer leaves of the individual gatherings, so as to strengthen them, while the first and last parchment leaves are paste-downs. The manuscript is bound in a binding of blind-tooled leather over wooden boards. Holes in the binding indicate that the book was originally held closed with a clasp. A number of different inks and scripts are used to signal different parts of the book. The English text is written in black ink (now brown) in cursive script, while all Latin text is rubricated throughout, and written in a humanistic script.34 In addition, blue ink is used intermittently with a decorative function for the large initial capitals that begin each Life, and each of these decorated capitals is accompanied by a marginal decorative flourish in red. In size, decoration, and cultural capital, this manuscript is very different from the Rylands manuscript of the Fall of Princes that we saw in chapter 1, which suggests that the two books were directed towards different functions and audiences. (And, moreover, that perhaps the cultural capital of the Rylands Fall of Princes is as invested in its Lydgatian provenance as in its ultimately Boccaccian derivation.) The English De mulieribus manuscript was clearly prepared as a whole book in itself. The layout of the text is very regular, which suggests that the overall layout is premised on the unit of the stanza on the page. For the most part, the book is organized with three complete stanzas per page, although this basic organizing rhythm is modified for the prefatory part of the text by the presence of the framing Latin poems (which in itself underlines its paratextual and introductory function). The marginal ruled lines by which the scribe/author laid out the text can also still be seen on each page. Interestingly, Latin text is used throughout for both the ordering structures (rubricated chapter headings) and two major authorizing statements in the form of the 34 Cowen, “An English Reading,” 29.

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explicatory poems that frame the proemial verses (1–31 in Schleich’s ordering, which I will use throughout).35 It seems likely, therefore, that although this work is translated into English, its source language of Latin and its source Latinate culture are acknowledged, and are in fact necessary to the understanding of the document in a way that is not relevant to Lydgate’s version of the De casibus. The presence of Latin rubricated titles at the head of each life may even suggest a desire to cross-refer this translation with the source text. I follow Cowen in assuming that the Middle English rendering is made from the Latin source text rather than from a French intermediary.36 The structure and organization of the English translation are no less suggestive of authorial intention than its material expression. It contains barely a fifth of the material in Boccaccio’s source text, comprising only a prologue and twenty-one Lives, and Cowen has suggested that the selection of subjects falls into discernible groups.37 The first ten subjects follow the order of Boccaccio’s original text in its later redactions, and all but the first two are goddesses: Eve, Semiramis, Ops (Opis), Juno, Ceres, Minerva, Venus, Io (Isis), Europa, and Libia. After these, the translator announces that he will abandon Boccaccio’s ordering and go on to make a selection of the most commendable or famous: Hyderforward, folowynge John Bochas, I haue described thies goddessys notable In lyke orderr, as he in Latyne hase. Now wyll I chese swyche, as were commendable Next them most by their dedys laudable. (stanza 141, lines 981–5)38

Cowen has noted that the selection is “arguably directed to some extent by a thematic interest in the skills of government, prophecy and technical and literary invention.”39 The first of the second sequence of

35 Fols. 2r–8r. 36 Cowen bases her conclusions on a comparison of the English text with two early French mss of the De mulieribus, which “has revealed nothing corresponding to the apparently distinctive features of the Middle English text, thus far bearing out the translator’s claims to Latinity”: “An English Reading,” 138. 37 For a detailed discussion of the ordering principles, see Cowen, “An English Reading,” 131–3. 38 Cowen, “An English Reading,” 132. 39 Cowen, “Woman’s Wit,” 90. For a detailed discussion of the attributes of the twentyone subjects, see also “An English Reading,” 133–5.

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individuals is Camilla, whose Life is entitled “De Camilla virgine, Volscorum regina,” and who is described as “a quene and a virgyne” in the English text (originally chapter XXXIX in the original text). She is followed by the two sibyls Erythrea and Almathea, who are separated in the original (XXI and XXVI) but brought together in the English text. The next group are the three enchantresses, Circe, Medea, and Mantho (XXXVIII, XVII, and XXX), who are succeeded by two female authors, Sappho and Carmenta (XLVII and XXVII). The final grouping consists of two warrior queens and a painter: Tamyris queen of Scythia (XLIX), the second Tamyris, the famous painter (LVI), and Arthemisia queen of Caria (LVII). Cowen notes that the two queens represent the only other point when the English translator returns to Boccaccio’s order, and suggests that the second Tamyris is included because “[p] erhaps the coincidence of names caught his attention and led him to his final pair.”40 Although the selection criteria for these twenty-one figures remain obscure, we can note that they are all taken from the first fifty-seven Lives of the De mulieribus, and hence are subjects who were included in Boccaccio’s compilation from its earliest publication stage. Since the source text for this translation is also unknown, it is hard to say whether the translator was working from an abridged or incomplete exemplar of the De mulieribus, or whether this represents a deliberate editorial strategy. The translator does, however, talk in the closing stanzas about his or her intention to suspend the translation temporarily, to gauge whether public interest is enough to make it worth his or her while to proceed.41 I will now consider each of the parts of the translated book in turn, in order to analyse how its visual, structural, and voicing strategies interplay to modify the content and “shape” of the Boccaccian source text. As we have seen in the discussion of the De casibus, one characteristic feature of medieval translation practice is the use of additional paratextual frames to authorize both the new text and its translator, and simultaneously to control the source text so as to make it serve its new context. While this rendering is not on the same scale as Lydgate’s monumental poem, it too shows similar reframings at the margins.

40 Cowen, “An English Reading,” 133 and n. 19. 41 Cowen believes that the translator “may have been feeling his way into the work,” “to a certain extent [...] was working in a piecemeal fashion, and at the outset may not have known exactly what his source contained” (“An English Reading,” 133).

Figure 1. John Lydgate, Fall of Princes. Manchester, John Rylands Library, English MS 2, fol. 1r. Reproduced by courtesy of the University Librarian and Director, The John Rylands Library, The University of Manchester.

Figure 2. Middle English translation of De mulieribus claris. London, British Library, Additional MS 10304, fols. 7v–8r. © The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved, 29 May 2012.

Figure 3. Henry Parker’s translation of the De mulieribus claris. Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, Devonshire Collection, “Of the ryghte renoumyde ladyes,” fol. 1r. © Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees.

Figure 4. Title page of Amorous Fiammetta (1587). London, British Library, shelfmark C. 57. b. 46. © The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved, 29 May 2012.

Figure 5. Title page of A Famous tragicall discourse (1597). Oxford, Worcester College, LR 4: 7 (7). Reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Worcester College, Oxford.

Figure 6. Title page of Le Nymphal Flossolan (1556). London, British Library, shelfmark 637. a. 31 (2). © The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved, 29 May 2012.

Figure 7. Title page of The Decameron (1620). University of Leeds, Brotherton Collection H de W BOC. Reproduced with the permission of Leeds University Library.

Figure 8. Frontispiece of Contes et nouvelles de Bocace Florentin (1697). University of Manchester, John Rylands Library, R51755. Reproduced by courtesy of the University Librarian and Director, The John Rylands Library, The University of Manchester.

Figure 9. Title page of Contes et nouvelles de Bocace Florentin (1697). University of Manchester, John Rylands Library, R51755. Reproduced by courtesy of the University Librarian and Director, The John Rylands Library, The University of Manchester.

Figure 10. First frontispiece of Il Decamerone: Or, Decads (1712). University of Leeds, Brotherton Collection Lt BOC. Reproduced with the permission of Leeds University Library.

Figure 11. Second frontispiece of Il Decamerone: Or, Decads (1712). University of Leeds, Brotherton Collection Lt BOC. Reproduced with the permission of Leeds University Library.

Figure 12. Title page of Il Decamerone: Or, Decads (1712). University of Leeds, Brotherton Collection Lt BOC. Reproduced with the permission of Leeds University Library.

Figure 13. Back-wrapper of serial Decameron (1821). University of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Harding A 1343 (1). Reproduced with the permission of the Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford.

Figure 14. Censorship of Dec., III, 8: The Decameron (1822), University of Manchester, John Rylands Library, R49737, vol. II, 150–1. Reproduced by courtesy of the University Librarian and Director, The John Rylands Library, The University of Manchester.

Figure 15. Frontispiece and title page, Decameron (1845). Private collection. Image © The John Rylands Library, The University of Manchester.

Figure 16. Title page, Decameron of Giovanni Boccacci (1886), University of Manchester, John Rylands Library, R217444. Reproduced by courtesy of the University Librarian and Director, The John Rylands Library, The University of Manchester.

Figure 17. Illustration of Dec., X, 10: Decameron (1893), British Library, General Reference Collection, K. T. C. 22. c. 1, vol. II. facing page 366. © The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved, 29 May 2012.

Figure 18. Jean de Boschère, illustrated dust jacket, The Decameron, Garden City Publishing Company (1930). Private collection. Image reproduced by kind permission of Alain Bilot, copyright holder for the literary and artistic works of Jean de Boschère.

Figure 19. Title page, The Decameron, Limited Editions Club (1930). Private collection. Image © MBI Inc. Reproduced with the kind permission of MBI Inc.

Figure 20. Chaucer’s Troylus and Cryseyde (from the Harl. MS 3943) compared with Boccaccio’s Filostrato (1873–83), p. 1. University of Manchester, John Rylands Library, R4667. Reproduced by courtesy of the University Librarian and Director, The John Rylands Library, The University of Manchester.

Figure 21. M. Leone, “Fiammetta speaketh to her Booke,” Amorous Fiammetta (1929), p. 157. Private collection. Image © The John Rylands Library, The University of Manchester.

Figure 22. Colophon, Amorous Fiammetta (1929). Private collection. Image © The John Rylands Library, University of Manchester.

Figure 23. Title page, Thirteene Most Pleasaunt and Delectable Questions (1927). University of Manchester Library, 853.15/ B58. Reproduced by courtesy of the University Librarian and Director, The John Rylands Library, The University of Manchester.

Figure 24. Alexander King, vignette, The Most Pleasant and Delectable Questions of Love (1931), p. 115. Private collection. Image © The John Rylands Library, University of Manchester.

Figure 25. Alexander King, frontispiece and title page, The Most Pleasant and Delectable Questions of Love (1931). Private collection. Image © The John Rylands Library, University of Manchester.

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One striking feature of this translation, in comparison with all the other premodern translations of Boccaccio in manuscript and print, is the lack of a formal dedication, or any other statement of authorial identity. However, the author-translator is certainly aware of the conventions and, indeed, meditates on his lack of a dedicatee in the place that might be given to a patron in the prefatory sequence (e.g., in stanza 4, discussed below). The lack of these elements, though, may again support the view that this is an “unpublished” manuscript, a work in progress or one made for personal use, which was nonetheless prepared to a very high standard with decorative elements and an attractive and regularized layout (perhaps akin to one of Boccaccio’s own desk copies of his works). The first leaf of the manuscript bears on its verso a six-line English verse inscription in a sixteenth-century hand, which is attributed to Lady Elizabeth Darcy (1581–1651) in a later note on its recto.1 While we do not know the maker or original owner of this translation, there is at least secure evidence of its being in the ownership of an aristocratic English female reader a century later. A further unnumbered vellum leaf is bound between fols. 1 and 2, and the text of the fifteenth-century document begins on fol. 2r, with a proemial Latin poem written in red ink: Anglica femineas resonancia carmina laudes 1 Ordine septeno dicere Musa iubet. Pene viris cunctos ueterum prudencia vatum 3 Intitulat libros; femina clara iacet. Et tamen in sexu fragili pollencia miro 5 Virtutem radio gesta notare datur. Quod-si femineo sollers natura dedisset 7 Ingenium generi et robora, quanta uiris, Vidisses forsan gestarum pondere rerum 9 Sepius illustres preterijsse uiros. 1

The inscription reads: “Wrong not thi frend whom thou | hast proved just: so mayst thou | Lose that rarely now is found | thi onse knowne foe resane not | in to trust. beleve me none | that fayths be never sound,” while the note states “The following Mss is a translation | of John Bochas in praise of Women | & once belonging to Lady Elizabeth | Darcy, whose handwriting is in the next page.” On the dating of the various hands, see Cowen, “An English Reading,” 29. On Elizabeth Darcy, see John Walter, “Elizabeth Savage, née Darcy,” in the ODNB. A further blank vellum leaf is interleaved between fols. 1 and 2.

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Ac nunc nonnullas, quas secula prisca dedere, 11 Egregie claras commemorare libet. Tuque, liber quondam mulieribus edite claris 13 Certaldi vatis, pande canentis iter.2 My Muse commands that I compose, in seven-line stanzas, English verses that sound the praise of women. The skill of the ancient poets can scarce list all the books about men: famous woman, though, lies neglected. And yet one can observe in the frail sex deeds resplendently powerful in valour. For if adroit Nature had granted the female gender as much intelligence and strength as men, you would perhaps have seen women more frequently surpass illustrious men in the importance of their achievements. Now I wish selectively to celebrate a few women whom the earliest centuries have given us. You, my book, originally derived from the De mulieribus claris of the bard of Certaldo, open the way for the poet.

This short Latin poem serves both to summarize the matter of the book to follow and to authorize it via its linguistic choice of Latin and the elevated verse form of the elegiac couplet; the poem thus provides a material and intertextual link to the originating context of Boccaccio’s work in its use of “authenticating Latin” for the mise-en-page.3 The rhetorical progression is simple and direct, following some of the key points from Boccaccio’s own proem that will be revisited again in the English verse. The first couplet is a conventional invocation of the Muse as primary agent of this translation, and also gives a description of its form, the seven-line stanza. Lines 3–6 paraphrase paragraph 3 of Boccaccio’s proem, while lines 7–12 summarize paragraph 4. The closing couplet addresses the book itself, and notes its genealogy between its Italian provenance (“Certaldi vatis,” the famous bard of Certaldo), as a text “quondam [...] edite” (formerly written) by Boccaccio. The opening poem thus shows a close attention to the Latin source, and a desire to inscribe (indeed, in red ink) the book-object with the status and authority of a foreign and renowned neoclassicist. The aims of the

2 In citing from this manuscript I follow Schleich’s text and reproduce his expansions, which are given in italics. 3 On the use of Latin marginalia in Middle English manuscripts, see Christopher Baswell, “Multilingualism on the Page,” in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), especially 46–9 (47).

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two authors are largely articulated in tandem in this opening statement, although there is perhaps a degree of divergence from Boccaccio in the  English author’s assertion that women would frequently exceed men if only they were equipped with comparable intelligence and strength; Boccaccio seems instead to claim that some – albeit rare – women are able to take on a “manly spirit” (“in virilem”; Proem, 4) and achieve accordingly. The title of the prologue follows beneath the poem, also rubricated, and describing the salient features of the work in the conventional order: the author, his place, the language into which his work is translated, and a two-line announcement that the prologue is about to begin: “Johannis Bochacij de Certaldo in Anglicum translati de mulieribus claris prologus incipit” (Here begins the prologue of the Famous Women of Giovanni Boccaccio of Certaldo translated into English).4 A scribal flourish marks the conclusion of the title at the bottom of the page, and the translated text itself then begins at the top of the verso to this leaf. This new beginning too is visually demarcated, marked out with a large decorated capital letter O (“Off noble men”) in blue and red ink, with an accompanying decoration along the top and left margin. The thirty-one stanzas of the prologue follow in plain undecorated layout, with three stanzas per page, with the final stanza of the prologue at the top of fol. 7v. This is followed by a Latin rubricated title, which reads “Explicit Prologus,” and another Latin poem in elegiac couplets, the last two lines of which run on to the top of the facing page (fol. 8r). The prologue to the poem is thus very clearly marked out by the scribe or author as a separate part of the book, framed by rubricated Latin couplets and with its own incipit and explicit. I will thus consider it as a discrete textual entity first, before moving on to the other sections. It takes up thirty-one stanzas of the poem, and therefore represents slightly more than one-eighth of the book in total (or six full leaves of the fortyfive written pages of the manuscript). It is the part of the text that is designed to welcome, situate, and direct the reader as to what lies ahead. This prologue, like Lydgate’s, is a subtle mix of original writing and paraphrase of Boccaccio’s authorial paratexts, and a close comparison of the source and target text can reveal exactly where the two texts and authors diverge. As we have seen, these discrete moments of divergence offer us a way into the mechanisms of translations, and are a way in 4

Schleich, Die mittelenglische Umdichtung, 2.

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which the dynamic development of the text can be measured; at the same time, they are the elements that reveal to us new uses and functions to which the text is now directed in its new receiving culture. The thirty-one stanzas of the prologue are highly structured in their progression. The first two stanzas act as a prologue to the prologue, summarizing the aims of the work as a whole and relating it to wider literary traditions: Off noble men – both kyngys and pryncys royall – Throught the world in euery nacyon For their artys and tryumphys marcyall Bookys be made in commendacyon Oder therin to haue their contemplacyon, As in a meroure cleerly to vndirstond, What noble pryncys haue ben in euery lond. But of wymen, the which haue ben – and are – Of noble artys in forne ঢrys [years] and dayes As gode as men or better, if I durst compare, In wytt, in werre, in crafte and odyre assayes, Thies olde wryters make but lytell prayse: For non autor wryteth synglerly Of famous women; but of men, many.

(fol. 2v, §§1–2, lines 1–14)5

Neither Boccaccio nor Lydgate is named, but their presence is strongly marked through intertextual allusion and implication. The sequence as a whole is loosely based on the first four paragraphs of the De mulieribus proem, which will be revisited again in closer paraphrase from stanza 10 onward, and restates the concerns of the introductory Latin poem that immediately precedes this on the recto of the leaf. The most obvious – and deliberate – allusions are, however, not to the source text but to Lydgate’s poem, which looms large over the whole undertaking, although it is not named until the third stanza. The mirror simile in lines 6–7 serves to underline the intended relationship between the two texts: as previously noted in chapter 1, the mirroras-utility topos does not occur in Boccaccio or Laurent, but was inserted as an English trope into the Fall by Lydgate (e.g., at FP, Prol., 55–6; II, 22–4). The second stanza recalls especially §3 of the De mulieribus (“Sane 5

In citing from this manuscript, I first give the reference to the folio, followed by stanza number and line, following Schleich, Die mittelenglische Umdichtung.

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miratus sum plurimum adeo modicum apud huiusce viros potuisse mulieres, ut nullam memorie gratiam in speciali aliqua descriptione consecute sint, cum liquido ex amplioribus historiis constet quasdam tam strenue quam fortiter egisse nonnulla”; What surprises me is how little attention women have attracted from writers of this genre, and the absence of any work devoted especially to their memory, even though lengthier histories show clearly that some women have performed acts requiring vigour and courage), but arguably has a less grudging tone (“as gode as men or better, if I durst compare”) regarding female excellence than the original text and the Latin verse on the previous page. The next section moves from the historical context to the present document, and the translator lets his own voice be heard. It is through the author’s own agency that Boccaccio is discovered, and, interestingly, he is presented as an ancient author alongside the international authors of the “bookys” invoked in the first stanzas: Saue oon I fynde emonge thies wryterss olde, John Bokase – so clepyde is his name – , That wrote the fall of pryncys stronge and bolde (And into Englissh translate is the same). An odyre he wrote vnto the laude and fame Of ladyes noble, in prayse of all wymen; But for the rareness few folke do it ken.

(fol. 2v, §3, lines 15–21)

By implication it is the author of this version who is learned, who knows not only Boccaccio’s most famous work and its English translation, but also this much rarer work. Continuing with his selfpresentation, he states his aim to make a translation despite the material problems of working as a poet without a patron: The whiche boke I haue had in purpose, If I in Englisshe cowde it clere expresse, To have translatyd. But euer I dydd suppose, Without grete ayde of sum noble pryncess All in veyne shuld be my besyness; For poetys ben of litell reputatcion, That of estatys haue no sustentacion.

(fol. 3r, §4, lines 22–8)

An interesting feature of this lament for the lack of aristocratic support is the assumption that the ideal patron would be female, a “pryncess.” There are no direct traces of Boccaccio’s original dedication to Andrea

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Acciaiuoli in this English version, yet this imagined appeal to a royal woman may indicate that the translator was aware of the original dedication, but chose to ignore it as being too closely aligned to the reading communities of the original text, and thus unsuitable for his or her specific circumstances in England.6 The translator may equally be seeking to continue the association of this work with Lydgate’s poem, and so alludes to the desirability of a high-ranking female patron analogous to Lydgate’s patron Humphrey of Gloucester. Nonetheless, even without a specific female patron, the translator continues to imply the presence of a benignly disposed female readership in the next stanza: Neuer the less with all my dilygence, Thof all I make full rude interpretacion, I shall intende brevely in sentence Of this boke to make a translacion, All ladyes besechynge with humylyacion, To kepe this werke from sclaundyr and envy; For som wyll allwey construe frowardly.

(fol. 3r, §5, lines 29–35, my italics)

The translator also makes clear their task, to translate Boccaccio’s text “in sentence,” that is, for meaning, rather than replicating the form. Having constructed a critical audience, he then elaborates his strategy to resist the “sclaundyr and envy” with “grete pacyence | that he [i.e., Envy] shall lytell peryssh of my boke.” There may be here a concealed allusion to the closing sentence of Boccaccio’s Latin text, which reads “ut potius alicuius in bonum vigeat opus, quam in nullius commodum laceratum dentibus invidorum depereat” (in this way, the work will live for someone’s benefit rather than perish, mangled by the teeth of envy, for service to no one; Conc., 5). After all, “Ovyde, Virgyle, Tully and Terence,” the “prencys of Latyn eloquence, | In their dayes with envyous talkynge | Detractours hadd, their poesys bakbytynge” (§6, lines 38–41); in the classic humility topos, this poet claims unworthiness in comparison to the giants of the past, while situating himself firmly alongside them.

6

Cowen wonders whether these lines may even be directed towards a specific individual: “How far this is a glance towards a specific potential patron, or how far simply an allusion to Boccaccio’s own dedicatee, Countess Andrea Acciaiuoli, is uncertain” (“An English Reading,” 131).

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As the author comes to the end of his first-person sequence, he appeals once again to his audience, broadening it out now beyond women to a mixed audience: All people I beseche vnyuersally, Men and wymen, that heron cast their ye [eye], To deme the best; for I thynk not disprayse, Men, thof noble wymen I shall prayse. Now, sythen ঢe know my purpose and intent, Of what matere my style shall procede, To John Bochase, lyke as I was bent, Tyme requyreth my jorney for-to spede, Which at the begynnyng, as I rede, Toforn [before] he speke of ony synglerly, Maketh a prologe, as dothe the more party Of all wryters.

(fol. 3r, §§8–10, lines 53–64)

The author insists that, although his stated aim in making the text is to praise women, he has no concomitant intention to criticize men. The final stanza of this section (§9) links his authorial presentation (“my purpose and intent”) to the real business, the “matere,” that is, the content of Boccaccio’s book. The translator-author therefore frames his translation performatively, deploying a present tense to describe a real-time engagement with the source artefact (the Latin text): “as I rede.” He provides a description of the organizational structures of the original, stating how before Boccaccio begins his account of the individual lives, he makes a prologue, as do most writers (and certainly this one, by implication). Boccaccio’s prologue – written in the first person in the original – has now been shifted into a third person; it is a narrative shift analogous to that found in Lydgate’s prologue, when Boccaccio himself becomes a character in the frame story. The effect is similar in this translation, although here Boccaccio does not actually appear before the English author as he does in Lydgate’s extension of the governing device by which the shades of the dead appear to Boccaccio-personaggio. The second part of the prologue (§§10–31) is given over to the paraphrase of Boccaccio’s own proem, and it follows the themes of the Latin source text fairly closely. Once again, we begin at the beginning,

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revisiting the opening paragraphs that formed the basis for the opening two stanzas of the English version: Maketh a prologue [...], […] wherein he doth expresse, Howe that autors – many more than oon – Toforn [before] his dayes, that were of grete sadnesse, Of pryncys noble in many a region Bokys had made in commendacyon; And in his tyme also – to hym full dere – Francyss Petrarke, his techer and maistre. A boke had made with style full eloquente (A large volume) of men famouse and grete In noble dedys for this cause and intente, That – lyke as they bothe in colde and hete Labouryd myghtily laude and prayse to gete, To excell odyre in vertu and provess And thereon spent their wyttys and lyvess – (fols. 3v–4r, §§9–11, lines 63–77)

Compare: Scripsere iamdudum nonnulli veterum sub compendio de viris illustribus libros; et nostro evo, latiori tamen volumine et accuratiori stilo, vir insignis et poeta egregious Franciscus Petrarca, preceptor noster, scribit; et digne. (De mulieribus, §1) Long ago there were a few ancient authors who composed biographies of famous men in the form of compendia, and in our day that renowned man and great poet, my teacher, Petrarch, is writing a similar work that will be even fuller and more carefully done. This is fitting.

Boccaccio’s first-person account is transmuted into the third person, and historicized into an anterior period. As Boccaccio becomes a character in this English-language account, the author presents him as analogous to Petrarch, the two of them locked in a joint enterprise to write their individual accounts of lives of famous men. Although Boccaccio himself makes no mention of his own De casibus in this proem, the

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English translator perhaps seeks to make apparent the generic connections and literary genealogies: the close friendship and shared purpose between Petrarch and Boccaccio may imply a similar relationship between Lydgate’s rendering and this one. The English translator’s version therefore imposes a dramatic dynamic on the piece, accentuated by its presentation as reported speech (“So, he seyth, worthy that they were,” l. 78). Indeed, the translator dramatizes Boccaccio’s emotions, which are implied in his original first-person account: “But sore he mervelyd – myn autour John Bochase” (l. 85).7 The prologue continues to follow the source text closely in stanzas 13–14, paraphrasing the argument that it is surprising that no work of this nature has ever been devoted to women, when these achievements are even more remarkable in a woman: But sore he mervelyd – myn autour John Bochase – Of thies old wryters all of men spekynge, Wymen with them to stonde in so smal grace, That they might have no manere remembrynge In ony specyall descripcioun or wrytynge, When they have doon, as storyes tellen pleyn, Many a noble and myghty dede, certyn. For, if that men be laude and prayse worthy, When their actys be grete and excellent, That haue muche more of strenght and witt, truely, How mykell more be veray right iugement Deserven wymen, to whom nature hath sent Body weykere and wittys not so stabyll, If they do thyngys, that be in men laudabyll! This is his reson, that he hym fyxed on; Therfor he seith, lest they defrawded be, Of their meryte, he wyll make mencyon Of them.

(fol. 4v, §§13–14, lines 85–102)

7 The author refers to Boccaccio using Lydgate’s conventional formula; compare John Lydgate, Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, ed. H. Bergen, Early English Texts Society, Extra Series, 121–4, 4 vols. (London: Published for the Early English Text Society by H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1924–7), Prologue, 230, 233.

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Stylistically, the English rendering is paced in a more explicative way than Boccaccio’s compressed periods, and seems to lack the insistent marvelling about female competency in the light of such insufficiency. Interestingly, the verse form – in the hands of this translator, as opposed to Lydgate – is turned to the end of careful paraphrase, with some excellent solutions, for example, “wymen, to whom nature hath sent | Body weykere and wittys not so stabyll” (“mulieres, quibus fere omnibus a natura rerum mollities insita et corpus debile ac tardum ingenium datum est,” “women [...] – almost all whom are endowed by nature with soft frail bodies and sluggish minds”; §4); “lest they defrawded be | of their meryte” (“ne merito fraudentur suo,” “lest such women be cheated of their just due”; §4). The translator then moves from reported speech to direct discourse in order to present the delicate matter of the inclusion of some women of less than perfect sexual morals. Boccaccio himself is given authority and responsibility for these words, although in fact the English version is more “explicit” about the problem than the Latin: “And let no man thynke incongruent,” Bochase seith, “thof with Penelope, Lucrece, Sulpyce, ladyes excellent, Chaste and goodde, mengelyd be Mede, Vnchaste Flora and also Semprone; The which hadd wittys odir excedyng, But neuer the less vnclene was their lyving.”

(fol. 5r, §17, lines 113–19)

Nec volo legenti videatur incongruum si Penelopi, Lucretie Sulpitieve, pudicissimis matronis, immixtas Medeam, Floram Semproniamque compererint, vel conformes eisdem, quibus pregrande sed pernitiosum forte fuit ingenium. (§5) Furthermore, I do not want readers to think it strange if they find such chaste matrons as Penelope, Lucretia, and Sulpicia in company with Medea, Flora, and Sempronia or others like them, who had strong, but as it happened, destructive characters.

Stanzas 18–21 rework the matter of paragraph 6, summarizing Boccaccio’s intention to include women who are famous for their deeds, even if they were in possession of dubious morals; after all, there are

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plenty of unvirtuous men in history. While always following Boccaccio’s order, this section seems to afford the English translator the opportunity to abridge and amplify the original text. Of the ten men or families named as counterexamples in Boccaccio, he mentions only three: Jugurtha, Hannibal, and “Scipyo, namyd Affrican.” For these individuals he then inserts short biographies in place of Boccaccio’s terse adjectives (stanzas 20–1). The translator himself is then foregrounded in stanza 22, when he epigrammatically acknowledges his cuts from the original, and restates his intention to carry on with the prologue: Many exemplys swyche I might rehersse Of pryncys noble, in bokys as we rede, Which autours wryte of both in proose and verse. But forward in my purpose to procede And to Bochas prologe brevely for-to spede. (fol. 6r, §22, lines 148–54)

In justification for the inclusion of unchaste women, the author argues (following Boccaccio) that the work will serve an exemplary function for its readers: Sum advauntage shall com of this boke to gode or badde, who so on it loke. He seyth: “To them, that vertuously demeene, Prayse therof shall stere vnto glory, And the rebuke of vicyous and vnclene Shall odyr withdrawe and feere from swyche foly. Therfor of bothe is medleyd this story As a meroure wymen in to se, The goode and badd, of old antiquyte.” (fol. 6r, §§22–3, lines 153–61) Verum, quoniam extulisse laudibus memoratu digna et depressisse increpationibus infanda nonnunquam, non solum erit hinc egisse generosos in gloriam et inde ignavos habenis ab infaustis paululam retraxisse, sed id restaurasse quod quarundam turpitudinibus venustatis opuscolo demptum videtur, ratus sum quandoque historiis inserere nonnulla lepida blandimenta virtutis et in fugam atque detestationem scelerum aculeos addere; et sic fiet ut, inmixta hystoriarum delectationi, sacra mentes subintrabit utilitas. (§7)

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An account that praises deeds worthy of commemoration and sometimes heaps reproaches upon crimes will not only drive the noble towards glory and to some degree restrict villains from their wicked acts; it will also restore to this little book the attractiveness lost as a result of the shameful exploits of certain of its heroines. Hence I have decided to insert at various places in these stories some pleasant exhortations to virtue and to add incentives for avoiding and detesting wickedness. Thus holy profit will mix with entertainment and so steal insensibly into readers’ minds.

The author now develops the paraphrase of Boccaccio with a stanza in his own voice, extemporizing on the theme of the demonstrative force of contrasts: Oon contrary euere sheweth anodyre: The daye is knowen clerere for the nyght; Swete and sowre – that on sheweth that odyre; Youthe by age, derkness is known by light; By vyce verture, by wronge appereth right. Flee the badd, the goode folowe and purchase, Here in this life whyle thow hast tyme and space!

(fol. 6r, §24, lines 162–8)

A specific function for this book is thus stressed: the examples of good and bad women alike are to serve as examples of behaviour for its readers, either to imitate or to avoid: life is short, so we must be virtuous. The next few stanzas paraphrase the final three paragraphs of Boccaccio’s proem (§§9–11), which justify the inclusion of pagan women in the collection. However, Boccaccio and his later translator turn this sequence to quite different narrative ends. Boccaccio’s argument is more descriptive and analytical; he argues that the lives of pagan and Judeo-Christian women should not be mixed (“Attamen visum est, ne omiserim, excepta matre prima, his omnibus fere gentilibus nullas ex sacris mulieribus hebreis christianisque miscuisse”; Nevertheless, it seemed advisable, as I want to make plain, not to mix these women, nearly all of them pagan, with Hebrew and Christian women, except for Eve; §9), and so he has chosen not to include the latter. The exception to this is Eve, who is unignorable for her historical pre-eminence while incidentally hugely problematic for her sin, and who thereby perhaps combines the attributes of both groups. Boccaccio argues that Christian women have endured and achieved greatness because of their knowledge of the prospect of eternal life after death, while pagan women’s achievements have resulted from their own resources or from

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a desire for earthly glory (“seu quodam nature munere vel instinctu, seu potius huius momentanei fulgoris cupiditate percite, non absque tamen acri mentis robore, devenere”; Pagan women, however, reached their goal, admittedly with remarkable strength of character, either through some natural gift or instinct or, as seems more likely, through a keen desire for the fleeting glory of this world; §10). In addition, highachieving Christian women have an assured heavenly and literary afterlife, since their deeds have already been recorded by pious male authorities; pagan women have no such prospects, since no one to date has compiled a collection of their lives (§11). (And there is the implication, of course, that they are excluded from the Christian afterlife.) The emphasis in the English version is quite different. Rather than Boccaccio’s disinterested argumentation and his usual apologia for generic experimentation, here we find an exhortation to the English Christian reader to be shamed by the excellence of these pagans: Many a meroure of vertue and kunnynge Emonge thies ladies ঢe [you] may rede and se, Thof thei were Gentyls, not of oure belevynge: For so John Bochase writeth that they be. Except Eva, first of oure natiuyte, Fewe or noon of Hebrewe ner Christen Are in his book, but olde Pagane wymen: And for thies cause in especyall, That Cristen wymen, where thei can espy In theis Gentyls, which we Pagans call, Ony vertue or dede, that is worthy In Cristen folke to be in memory, If thei haue not in them, that is laudable, Shame shall meve them – a cause resonable – , Their own self – iche [each] woman – to repreve With sory hert and myndys. (fol. 6v, §§25–7, lines 169–84, my italics)

This concluding sequence of the prologue is thus highly suggestive, and indicates a possible and specific use to which this book could be put: to enjoin women to be virtuous through the contemplation of the lives of others. The book is thus figured as being akin in purpose to more conventional and familiar collections of female excellence, such as the lives of the saints. These are, of course, mentioned in Boccaccio as

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providing his justification for not including Christian women; that is, because they are already covered in a different type of document. Here, however, the Christian English reader is instructed to use the example of virtuous pagans as a way to chastise herself for her own inadequacy and as a spur to better conduct.8 Further to this end, the English author inserts an unusual first-person speech, ventriloquizing on behalf of this imagined female reader as she repents: Shame shall meve them [...] Their own self – iche [each?] woman – to repreve With sory hert and myndys thus mornynge: “I, a woman of Cristes feith and byleve, See a Pagane in vertu more shynynge; Alas, for shame! This is my rebukynge To be muche wersse or else no thynge so gode As she, that neuer Cristes lawe vndirstode.”

(fol. 6v, §§26–7, 182–9)

This unusual voicing strategy highlights the performative function of the text itself, as well as its specific reading context, and may provide some clues as to how this work was – perhaps could only be – received amongst a female English readership of the mid-fifteenth century. Generically, the book is defined first by implicit analogy and then by specific intertextual reference to John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes; its contents and female focus are then justified through reference to another genre of vernacular writing directed towards a female readership, the lives of the saints. The presence of a first-person discourse, which seems to recall in form a prayer, simply adds to its clerical or spiritual positioning, and may also support its possible attribution to a female religious translator, or at least its direction towards a female lettered (and possibly religious) reading community. This implied relation to the lives of the saints can be seen in the next three stanzas, which expand upon Boccaccio’s brief note that Christian women’s deeds have already been recorded. The English translator returns in each stanza to the “doctours” who write these lives (“piis 8 Franklin suggests that Boccaccio intended his book to be used in much the same way as a spur – but only to male readers: “by identifying the deeds described in Famous Women as challenging even for males, Boccaccio goads men to strive to be among the best of their sex and certainly better than the best women” (Boccaccio’s Heroines, 29).

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hominibus, sacris literis et veneranda maiestate conspicuis”; “pious men outstanding for their knowledge of sacred literature and revered for their dignity”; §11). This textual expansion may have come about because he or she (and the intended audience) is already familiar with the writings of the doctors of the church and wants to display this knowledge, or wishes to situate Boccaccio’s text within a Christian tradition of devotional writing: A nodir cause, whi that he doth not wryte Of Crysten virgyns holy and notable: For diuers doctours their dedys haue endyte In synglere volumys with style full commendable; Wherfor hym semyd no thynge behoveable That to describe with new translacyoun, That is wele doon in olde compylacion. Who can amende the life of Saynt Kateryne Or be bolde to make a new descripcyon Of Holy Agnes, martyre and virgyne, After the noble doctours tradicyon, Saynt Ambrose, which with gode eloquucyon Wryten hath her life sufficiently, That in the church is redd openly? Therfor Bochace thought it labour veyne Thies nobyll virgyns to put in his storye Amonge the Gentyls; for it were, in certeyne, But superfluous and no prayse worthy And in a maner wronge and iniury Too holy doctours, if he shuld take their werkys, That were sum tyme so noble, famous clerkys.

(fol. 7r, §§28–30, 190–210)

The English translator is keen to absolve Boccaccio of any unintended insult to the doctors of the church, and so projects this in his thirdperson narrative of Boccaccio’s intentions. Interestingly, he or she also invokes the spectre of inappropriate borrowings that is still a commonplace of literary invention today, although here potential inappropriateness resides in the subject of female sexual behaviour, rather than in authorial ownership. It should also be noted that all the references to female saints, the doctors of the church, and their writings are inserted

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by the English translator, and are thus a peculiarity of the book’s receiving culture in mid-fifteenth-century England.9 The concluding stanza in this prefatory sequence (§31) summarizes the story so far: the translator re-enters the action, and provides a metacommentary on his task. He or she first states that they have covered the matter of the prologue. The auditory reference (“as ওe [you] have herd,” line 12) may be a conventional metaphor or may signal that the text was intended for aural consumption, and was intended primarily therefore to be read aloud. The translator will now go on to do his or her best to provide a plain version of Boccaccio’s text, avoiding colourful fancy constructions, in a sentence that recalls Lydgate’s own insistence on the plainness of his unadorned language as an appropriate vehicle in which to render the source text (FP, Prologue, 229–34); finally, returning to the closing phrase of Boccaccio’s prologue, the English author appeals to God for help in the task before him: This is the prologue in sentence brevely, As ঢe have herd; to Bochace, the autoure Of this booke, new will I spedily Conuerte my style rude, without coloure Of rethoryke, prayynge for socoure To Him, that is rewarder of gode deedys, In whom all helpe, comfort and gode spede is.

(fol. 7v, §31, lines 211–17)

The prologue is brought to its conclusion with this final stanza and the subsequent statement “Explicit Prologus” in red ink (fol. 7v). Beneath this we find the second Latin poem, also written in red (as is all the Latin material in the book), and which runs on for two lines to the top of fol. 8 (the full page opening is shown in figure 2). It is interesting at this point to note the differences between our modern sensibilities of textual layout and those found in this manuscript: the text here is conceived of as a sequential ordering of discrete units, but little attention is given to the placement of titular or other significant units at the head of 9

It is not clear to which St Katherine the author is referring, although it is likely to be St Katherine of Alexandria, who has been described as “the most important saint in late medieval England,” and who was the subject of no fewer than twentynine different Lives in this period: Katherine J. Lewis, The Cult of Saint Katherine of Alexandria in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2000), 2. St Ambrose, one of the four Fathers of the Church, uses St Agnes for the basis of his discussion of virginity in his De Virginibus, I, 2.

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a page as we would now. The governing semantic unit is the line, rather than the overview of the page as a whole, and the divisions between “parts” of the book are highlighted in red ink rather than by position. This is a salutatory reminder of how different modes of reading must be understood as historically situated and articulated by the bookobject for its specific reading context. Although the prologue is bookended by two rubricated Latin verses, the function of this second one is not to conclude the first section, but instead to look forward and introduce the next part of the text: Inter femineas volui dum querere turmas, A qua principium posset habere liber, Offert se nobis humani nobilis illa Prima parens generis irradiante gena. Non illam artificis nitidus circumdat amictus, Qualiter ornari femina nostra solet; Sed totum rutili corpus texere capilli Nec propria alterius forma poposcit opem. Quid tibi preclaram faciem laudare pararem, Cum decor ingenium transilit ille meum? Quicquid habet placide queuis nunc femina forme, Plantat in illius corpore diua manus. Illinc Tyndaridis facies deducta Lacene, Contrahit hinc speciem femina queque suam. Iusta Venus Frigio pastori uisa fuisset, Hec si iudicium sit subitura suum. Nec Jouis Europe mouisset forma medullas, Esset tunc regnis Eua decora suis.

(fols. 7v–8r)

I wished to seek, amongst the throngs of women, by which one of them the book could commence. That first “noble parent of mankind” offers herself with radiant countenance. No cloak resplendent with workmanship wraps her around, as our womenfolk are wont to deck themselves in; instead auburn hair covered all her body, nor did her beauty require any other assistance. Why should I try to praise her splendid appearance when her good looks themselves exceed my wit? Whatever any woman you like now possesses of pleasing beauty, a divine hand has planted in her body. It was from Eve that Helen of Troy’s face was derived, and from Helen in turn that every woman has drawn her own beauty. Venus might have appeared blameless to the Phrygian shepherd [i.e., Paris], if Eve were to be submitted

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to his judgement. Nor would the beauty of Europa have moved the heart [lit. marrow] of Jupiter, had Eve then been the very ornament to his realms.

The two Latin verses are unique to the tradition of Boccaccio in English, and as such represent a powerful statement of intention and positioning alongside their purely descriptive function. As we have seen with the first example, this one anticipates the next part of the text, the biography of Eve, which is introduced simultaneously with another paratextual item, the red Latin title “De Eva” situated towards the right margin below the end of the poem. The elegiac couplets this time give a brief eulogy to Eve, concentrating especially on her unusual beauty, and comparing it favourably to three other women included in Boccaccio’s source text: Helen of Troy (“Tyndaridis [...] Lacene”), the goddess Venus, and Europa (although only the latter two are included in the English selection). The poem thus anticipates the presentation of Eve’s beauty in paragraphs 4–5 of Boccaccio’s life of Eve. Continuing the visual coherence and ordering effect of the decoration, the recto leaf (fol. 8r) of this opening reproduces the same elements as the first page of the prologue (fol. 2v): below the two lines of rubricated Latin verse carried over from the verso, we find a large initial letter outlined in blue ink with red decoration along the left and top margins. In addition, the title of the Life (“De Eva”) is found towards the right margin in red ink. The opening of the next section seems to mimic the opening of Lydgate’s Fall, presumably deliberately, since it does not correspond to the source Latin text: Whan John Bochas determyned was in mynde Of noble wymen a volume to wrtyne, He bethought hym, emongys all mankynde With whom hys boke beste myghte begyne. At the laste he dyd concludyne Most accordynge, first of alle odyre To speke of Eve, our alders modyre. (fol. 8r, §32, lines 218–24, my italics)

Compare Lydgate: Whan Iohn Bochas considred hadde & souht The woful falle off myhti conquerours, A remembraunce entrid in his thouht, Reknyng the noumbre off our predecessours,

The De mulieribus claris in English Translation And first to mynde cam the progenitours Off al mankynde.

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(FP, I, 470–5, my italics)

Just as the Fall of Princes began with the first parents, so the “famouse wymen” can only begin with Eve, an eschatological connection that is reinforced by a number of shared or cognate lexical items (italicized here). The opening reference to Boccaccio also reveals another structuring element of this English version, since he is named in the opening or interstitial stanzas of most of the Lives.10 This narrative strategy keeps alive the link to (and authorizing function of) the source text, and also contributes to the ritual repetition of elements as the poem unfolds. Like Lydgate, the English translator does not number the individual lives, but maintains the division between them via the Latin rubricated titles. It is instructive to consider how the presentation of the individual lives compares with the English author’s translation practice in the proemial, “authorial” sections. This will be done by examining the life of Eve, in order to provide also a point of comparison with the opening sequence of Lydgate’s Fall, in which the narrator meets Adam and Eve. For the most part, Boccaccio uses a narrative third-person singular for these accounts, with a first-person plural for his generalizing statements that involve, for example, humankind, interspersed with an occasional first-person singular voice. The English translator tends to write in the third-person singular, but with occasional forays into an inclusive first-person plural. This can be seen if we compare the two versions of this sentence: She was not brought forthe in this vale Of wrecchydnesse and full of tribulacion, Where as odyre childere wepe and wale, Borne in labore and in grete vexacyon.

(fol. 8r, §34, 232–5)

Nam, non in hac erumnosa miseriarum valle, in qua ad laborem ceteri mortales nascimur (She was not brought forth in this wretched vale of misery in which the rest of us are born to labor; §2, my italics).

The translation paraphrases the original fairly closely for the majority of the Life, maintaining key nouns and the narrative order. However, 10 Only six of the twenty-one lives make no mention of Boccaccio either in the liminal structures or within the Life: the sequential lives of Io and Europa, Circe, Mantho, Carmenta, and the first Tamyris.

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it consistently seems to veer away from the source text in the final lines of each stanza, which may suggest a struggle with the constraints of the English versification scheme. These stylistic features can be seen clearly in those verses dealing with the creation of Eve: For, whan that Godd, the high artifycere, Adam firste of erth hadd fabricate With his owne honde, as Scripture dothe us leere [teach], Flowrynge in ঢouthe [youth] and in moste lusty state, In-to Paradyse after hadd translate Out from a felde, clepyd [called] Damascene, Without a felawe [partner], he sawe, he myght not been. A pleasaunt sleepe on hym he hathe icaste And with a crafte, that no man kan but he, From Adams syde brought vp at the laste The fayrest creature, that ony ye myght se: For in hirr[e] wantede non manere bewte, Euery parte so wele proporcyonate, That sight of hir all sorowys wolde abate. The tendyre weyknesse of oure infancy In hir was neuer ner ঢit the second age, Callyde chyldhode; but full rype and lusty (At thritti ঢere els mete vnto maryage), Of cowntenaunce right mery and vysage (For hirre makere she hadde intuycyon, Angelys joye in manere and fruycyon), Induyde also with immortalyte, That more hir bewte made for-to appere, Lady of all thyngys, that in erthe be, Hirre to obey and be vndir daungere, Whan Adam wakyde, made his felawe and feere [companion], Callyd Eva, that by interpretacyon As much to say is as life and viuifycacion. (fols. 8v–9r, §§35–8, 239–66) Quin imo – quod nemini unquam alteri contigisse auditum est – cum iam ex limo terre rerum omnium Faber optimus Adam manu compegisset propria, et ex agro, cui postea Damascenus nomen inditum est, in orto

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delitiarum transtulisset eumque in soporem solvisset placidum, artificio sibi tantum cognito ex dormientis latere eduxit eandem, sui compotem et maturam viro et loci amenitate atque sui Factoris letabundam intuitu, immortalem et rerum dominam atque vigilantis iam viri sociam, et ab eodem Evam etiam nominatam. (De mulieribus, 2) Instead (and this never happened to anyone else, so far as I know), after the most excellent Creator of all things had formed Adam from earthly clay with his own hand and had taken him from the field later called Damascene to the garden of delights, he made Adam fall into peaceful slumber. With a skill known only to himself, God brought forth a woman from Adam’s side as he lay sleeping. Adult, ripe for marriage, joyful at the beauty of the place and at the sight of her Maker, she was also the immortal mistress of nature and the companion of the man who, now awake, named her Eve.

The first stanza paraphrases closely the original text, with the sole addition of something that was only implied in Boccaccio, that Adam was youthful and lusty (line 242) (which may have the meaning either of vigorous or amorous), and thus might be in want of a wife (line 245). The English author inserts something of a parenthesis between lines 249 and 263 (“For in hirr[e] wantede non manere bewte [...] Hirre to obey and be vndir daungere”), extemporizing from Boccaccio’s single adjectives (“compotem [...] maturam”; adult and ripe for marriage) on the themes of Eve’s uncommon beauty (250–2), her miraculous creation as an adult (253–6), joyful temperament (257–9), her immortality and her God-given right to reign on earth and to submit to her husband (260–3). The passage may show evidence of the imposition of a popular understanding of Eve’s attributes, and possibly even an allusion to Lydgate’s rendering of the cognate passage in the De casibus in the detail of her age of thirty (“Parfit of age as man off thretti yeer,” FP, I, 505). The rhetorical questions that follow this description in the original find their equivalence in the next stanza, although this is more an equivalence of style than of content: What lady on-life hadd more formall shappe? What woman euer hadd more felicyte? What noblere fortune cowde or myght behappe To ony creature of lowe or hygh degre Thus to be born[e] withouten mysere,

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In all delycyse on the firste daye More, than I can owdyre wryte or saye?

(fol. 9r, §39, 267–73)

Quid maius, quid splendidus potuit unquam contigisse nascenti? Preterea hanc arbritrari possumus corporea formositate mirabilem. Quid enim Dei digito factum est quod cetera non excedat pulchritudine? (§3–4) Could anything greater and more glorious ever happen to someone at birth? We can imagine, besides, how marvelously beautiful her body was, for whatever God creates with his own hand will certainly surpass everything else in beauty.

In the next stanza the author again brings foreknowledge to bear on the rendering of the text, moving away from the source text to anticipate her future encounter with the snake: “she dydd folow and consent | To the serpentysse develyssh entysement” (lines 286–7). The English version of this sequence is rather more suspenseful than Boccaccio’s narration: Adam and Eve are here described walking hand-in-hand in Paradise, in their prelapsarian happiness, before the the serpent arrives on the scene: For, as she with Adam, hir husbonde, In Paradyse, a place full of plesaunce, Wylke [walk] vp and down, eydere in odyrs honde, Of that felicyte havynge suffysaunce, The olde enmy, autoure of dystaunce In his mynde, be malyce and envy Anon gan styrr hyrr[e] vnto veynglory.

(fol. 9v, §42, 288–94)

Compare Boccaccio: Dum una cum viro loci delitiis frueretur avide, invidus sue felicitatis hostis nepharia illi suasione ingessit animo, si adversus unicam sibi legem a Deo impositam iret, in ampliorem gloriam iri posse. (§5) While she and her husband were eagerly enjoying the garden’s pleasures, the Enemy, envious of her happiness, impressed upon her with perverted eloquence the belief that she could attain greater glory if she disobeyed the one law that God had laid upon her.

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The English text skips over the details of Eve persuading Adam to eat the apple, and instead inserts a lament, addressing Eve herself (§§43–7). This remarkable sequence tells Eve, and us, what she and we have lost as a result of this action: her beauty, her immortality, her children borne into bondage, and it predicts the death of her son even as he quickens in the womb. In a significant departure from both the source text and the biblical account, the English translator asserts that Adam’s sin was much greater than Eve’s, since he was supposed to be the intelligent one and should have understood better: Nevere the lesse muche more it wass greveable, That Adam dydd: he myght hym self refreyne, For ঢt he wass more stable of the tweyne. [...] The man wass more to blame, so Godd me amende, Than the woman; for he hadde more reson And vndirstode bettyre the trangressyon. (fol. 10r, §§45–6, 313–22)

This refreshing reapportioning of blame (albeit via the trope of female simple-mindedness) marks a distinct departure from the original, and may reveal a particularity of the receiving culture, for example if it was a clerical milieu. After this five-stanza address to Eve, the translator returns to the source text for the last five stanzas of this life, mixing close paraphrase with further description of Adam and Eve’s loss of innocence and their shame. The final stanza of this section (52) takes the form of an envoy, addressed specifically to female readers: Remembre thys, ঢe ladyes souereyne: Evys bewte, wytt and womanhede Excedyd Dido, Cryseyde and Helene; Thof they were famouse, as ঢe shall after rede, ঩yt she and they, all, now be idede. For Dethe no thynge spareth vpon-lyfe, But at the laste all he dothe down dryfe [drive].

(fol. 11v, §52, lines 358–64)

The stylistic resonances and warning tone are a clear echo of the Fall of Princes, although on the much reduced scale of a single stanza, proportionate to this much smaller enterprise. Moreover, “Dido, Cryseyde

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and Helene” are not included in the lives that follow, and so this envoy, specifically addressed to women, may well suggest an actual female readership, and one that had access to material where the stories of these women were told (for example, in the writings of Chaucer).11 The other twenty lives contained in the book demonstrate the same technique of close paraphrase with occasional descriptive additions. The Life of Eve is the joint longest, at twenty stanzas, and the hierarchy between this life and the rest is marked by a blank page with only two lines of header text to introduce the next subject, Semiramis (fol. 11v).12 The rest of the remaining Lives are introduced in the same way, but without the blank page, with their names and a short description, such as “De Ope, Saturni coniuge” (Opis, Wife of Saturn; fol. 14v) or “De Cerere, dea frugum” (Ceres, goddess of the harvest; fol. 16r). The twenty-first and final Life, that of Arthemysya (fols. 43r–46r) is as long as the first, of Eve, which may suggest a deliberately chiasmic structure to the collection as a whole. Interestingly, the concluding three lines on Arthemysya’s warrior prowess take up her example as a spur to male noblemen: “Thynke on this, bothe duke, erle and knyght, | And make no boste ageyns Quene Arthemyse, | Lest womanskyn bere awey the pryse!” (fol. 46r, stanza 254, lines 1776–8). This provocative final statement is ambiguous in its intention: is it evidence of a male noble readership, an ironic allusion to the dynamics of medieval misogyny, or even an aside to a female audience? Whatever the desired intention, it nonetheless serves as a concluding chiasmic counterpoint to the request to the female readership to protect the book from envious criticism in the third stanza of the prologue. The last two stanzas of the book, as previously noted, serve as a short conclusion in which the translator indicates his intention to suspend work. Protestations of authorial exhaustion and attention to one’s readership are common enough in concluding formulas, but it is  possible, and perhaps even likely, that this relates to the actual 11 Cowen notes that neither Dido, Criseide, nor Helen is included in the Lives that follow: “An English Reading,” 133. On medieval Englishwomen’s reading, see Carol M. Meale, ed., Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), especially Meale’s chapter “… alle the bokes I haue of latyn, englisch, and frensch”: Laywomen and Their Books in Late Medieval England,” 128–58, and Julia Boffey, “Women Authors and Women’s Literacy in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century England,” 159–82. 12 Semiramis is introduced by the descriptive title “Incipit Semiramydis, regine Assiriorum, descripcio” (fol. 12v; Schleich, Die mittelenglische Umdichtung, 18).

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production context of the book. The translator makes a distinct reference to the remaining material – the “residue of ladyes notable” – which is still to be translated: He, that hath a longe jorney to do And laboured hath ten or twenti myle, It is expedient, ferther or he go, To pause and stynt and rest hym there a whyle: In lyke wyse, er than I more compyle, Of thies ladyes cessynge the descripcion, With this wydow [i.e., Arthemysya] I shall make here conclusyon. If it fortune to be acceptable And please the herers, forth I wyll procede To the residue of ladyes notable; But fyrste of all, to se howe this shall spede, I will take counsell, er [before] it go on brede [far and wide], Leste that I eyre [wander] the bareyn se-banke [barren sea-shore] And get me more of laboure than of thanke. (fols. 46r–v, §§255–6, lines 1779–92)

Boccaccio’s own conclusion to his original text treats themes around women as a suitable subject for literary praise, rather than the specifics of its production and his target audience; this conclusion would therefore appear to be an original creation on the part of the English translator. Of course, if the translator has merely suspended the work, rather than bringing it to a formal conclusion, then he or she would not expect to translate the concluding passage at this stage, and so the lack of the Boccaccian conclusion is indicative of authorial intention in itself. Furthermore, the lack of a formal explicit at the end of the poem adds weight to this argument: the book ends rather simply, with only the final rubricated words under the last stanza, which read “Conclusio libri.” This small, forty-six page manuscript offers a tantalizing glimpse into another aspect of Boccaccio’s medieval English reception, but remains ultimately silent on the specific agents involved in its production. We do not know where it was produced, nor by whom, or for whom. The translator must have been a scholar, able both to translate from Latin and to compose in it; she or (more likely) he is learned enough to include the names of other literary authorities in the text, and skilled enough in English poetic composition to be able to extemporize from

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Boccaccio’s source narratives and sustain highly regular versification. The attention given to the private female sphere, in matters such as childbirth, may suggest an intended female audience, and even a possible female involvement in its production, although historic levels of literacy must mean that this is very much less likely than its being the work of a male author. In fact, we may be seeing here a reversal of the gendered dynamics of the originating context. Whereas Boccaccio’s text was dedicated to a woman and was written for his male scholarly circle, here the author bemoans the lack of a female patron but nonetheless writes in such a way as to include an actual female readership. On the why, we are on firmer ground: both the form and the content (Lydgate’s “substaunce & sentence”) stress the intended genealogical relation between this rendering of Boccaccio and its widely known predecessor, the Fall of Princes; the status of Boccaccio and the success of Lydgate’s translation may be reason enough to bring another, cognate work to an English audience. However, some of the literary devices and authorial concerns of this English version suggest a private and perhaps even devotional readership: one in which “Cristen wymen” (line 177) are invited to be “shamed” by these virtuous pagans, and even provided with a first-person prayer to help them articulate their position (lines 182–9). The function of this translation may thus be very far removed from that of Lydgate’s Fall, commissioned and made as part of the determinedly public cultural policy of Humphrey of Gloucester. What is also clear is what happens next: simply, the near-total neglect and effective disappearance of this book until the nineteenth century. A hundred or so years after it was made the book was in a private library, that of the Darcy family, apparently in the possession of their daughter Elizabeth. It reappears in the sale catalogue of Richard Heber’s library in 1836, and is then listed as a new acquisition of the British Museum in the 1843 catalogue of new additions. There is therefore surely some correlation between its “female” subject matter, its limited circulation, and lack of academic interest or status. After all, as Carol Symes writes “the mechanisms which assure the survival and promotion of some cultural artefacts and not others are complex, contingent, chancy, and chauvinistic.”13

13 Carol Symes, “Manuscript Matrix, Modern Canon,” in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature, 7–22 (19). Symes uses the example of two Anglo-Saxon texts that were copied together in the same manuscript, the Nowell Codex: one of them is the only surviving text of Beowulf, the other a version of Judith, but whereas Beowulf is adopted as the foundational text of English literature, Judith is barely known (11–12).

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The relative fifteenth-century publishing fates of the English versions of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium and De mulieribus claris are highly instructive in this regard. Henry Parker, Lord Morley’s Of the Ryghte Renoumyde Ladies (c. 1543) The next English-language version of the De mulieribus claris was written by Henry Parker, Lord Morley, an attendant lord at the court of Henry VIII.14 Morley’s text, entitled “Of the ryghte renoumyde ladyes,” was dedicated and presented to the king as a New Year gift, probably on New Year’s Day 1543.15 The original manuscript is still extant, and is now held in the Devonshire Collection at Chatsworth House.16 Although Morley, unlike the earlier English translator, produces a close prose translation from an authoritative Latin source text, his text is not a translation of the whole book, and in fact comprises only the first 46 of the one hundred and six chapters of the original text.17 The translation therefore concludes with the biography of Lucrece, the epitome of female purity, who, after being raped by Sextus, committed suicide rather 14 The complete text of Morley’s translation has been published as Forty-Six Lives translated from Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus by Henry Parker, Lord Morley, ed. H.G. Wright (London: Early English Texts Society, 1943). The dedication, preface, and lives of Eve and Semiramis were previously published in The Literary Museum; Or, A Selection of Scarce Old Tracts, ed. Francis Godolphin Waldron (London, Printed for the editor, 1792), i–8. 15 Internal evidence about the reign of Henry suggests that the translation must have been made between 1542 and 1546/7, and by relating the gift of the manuscript to historical events, James P. Carley has suggested this as the most probable date for its presentation to the king: see Carley, “The Writings of Henry Parker, Lord Morley: A Bibliographical Survey,” in “Triumphs of English”: Henry Parker, Lord Morley, Translator to the Tudor Court: New Essays in Interpretation, ed. Marie Axton and James P. Carley (London: British Library, 2000), 27–68 (31, 43). 16 Chatsworth, Phillipps MS 10416. Carley describes the ms thus: “Chatsworth, Devonshire Collection MS ‘Of the ryghte renoumyde ladyes.’ [...] i + 47 + i leaves. 245 x 195 (185 x 138) mm. Ruled for 31 ll. per page. Vellum. 1542–46/7 (Henry is ’of ... Irelonde Kynge’). Heavily cropped. Leaf missing between fols 3 + 4. Written in anglicana format by C. Strapwork initials with scrollwork and grotesques, animals or flowers on almost every folio. The royal monogram HRVIII is found in the scrollwork of the capital T on fol. Ir; the scrollwork of the capital M on fol. 12v contains the first words of the Angelical Salutation: aue maria gratia. Text ends fol. 47r 10.” Carley, “Writings,” 31. 17 The translation extends up to chapter 48 according to Brown’s ordering of the text, which counts as two both chapters of joint lives, Marpesia and Lampedo (XI–XII) and Orithrya and Antiope (XIX–XX). Wright concludes that Morley used as the

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than dishonour her family by the act (Morley’s intentions by concluding the translation with this figure will be discussed later in the chapter). Apart from the truncation of the main text, there is a further substantial editorial change, when Boccaccio’s dedication to Andrea Acciaiuoli is replaced with Morley’s own dedication to King Henry; Boccaccio’s own preface to the work is, however, preserved. If we are to try and situate this translation in the history of Boccaccio’s reception, then we must first situate it within the historical context in which it was made. To all intents and purposes, this is the last English translation of Boccaccio made with the intention of scribal publication, and its physical characteristics and – more importantly – its presentational context are highly significant. Of course, other translations in manuscript were made after this one (and certainly every Boccaccio translator would have had to write by hand until the late nineteenth century and the invention of the typewriter), but the authorial intentions of these subsequent translations are quite different, since they were all produced as a staging post on the way to print. In order to understand what Boccaccio might signify in the English court of the 1540s, we must therefore situate Morley’s translation in the elite scribal culture of the period. Lord Morley was a prolific writer and translator, Englishing texts from Latin, French, and Italian, yet his translations were always made with specific recipients and occasions in mind rather than for his own personal interest. It was customary at Henry’s court for the nobility and the clergy to exchange annual New Year gifts with the monarch and his family, and over the course of a quarter-century Morley presented many books to Henry himself, his daughter Mary, and Thomas Cromwell.18 It seems as though the selection of books to be translated and presented was governed in large part by their suitability for the recipient, with a clear consideration of their implied usefulness in the cycle of basis for his translation the 1487 Latin text published at Louvain by Aegidius van der Heerstraten (GW 4485), and supplies the parallel Latin text of this edition alongside Morley’s translation: Wright, Forty-Six Lives, lxx. 18 See Carley, “Writings,” 27, 40–5. More generally on Morley’s giving of books as gifts, see Carley, “Writings”; Jeremy Maule, “What Did Morley Give when He Gave a ‘Plutarch’ Life?,” in Axton and Carley, Triumphs of English, 107–30; and James Simpson, “The Sacrifice of Lady Rochford: Henry Parker, Lord Morley’s Translation of De claris mulieribus,” in Axton and Carley, Triumphs of English, 153–69.

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patronage and favour that lubricated all courtly relations. The investment of effort and money in the making of a translation combined with the cost of the preparation of a de luxe decorated copy for presentation meant that this type of gift was not only a valuable index of the donor’s respect for the recipient but a performance and materialization of that esteem. As Jason Scott-Warren has noted, “Dedications are performative; their words, like the words of a promise or a bet, are deeds. But they are also often performed, at the point when a single copy of the text is presented to its dedicatee.”19 Morley’s translation activity is an intimate part of his targeted gift-giving; so, for example, in 1539 Morley would present gifts of two printed Italian books to Henry’s counsellor Thomas Cromwell, Machiavelli’s Istorie fiorentine and Il Principe, while at other times he gave translations of selections from Plutarch’s Lives to the king or devotional material to Mary Tudor.20 Morley’s translation of the De mulieribus claris should therefore be seen in terms of its potential function in the cultural and political economy of Henry’s court, rather than as a simple literary exercise; the controversial subject matter of this text – the “renoumyde ladyes” – in a murderous culture of spousal execution, means that its creation and presentation to the king must surely reveal a deliberate agenda. James Simpson has made a persuasive argument that the translation should be seen first and foremost as a response to the adultery and execution of Henry’s wife Catherine Howard in 1542; Morley’s own daughter, as one of Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting, was executed alongside her for the crime of abetting her adultery.21 His translation can thus be seen as a highly political, not to say personal, document. To present such a collection of biographies of famous and infamous women to the cuckolded king was an act of considerable bravery, and one that manifestly demonstrated the superiority of the homosocial bond between king and courtier over the blood bond between father and daughter, as will be shown in the discussion of specific parts of the text. By concluding the translation with the example of Lucrece – a woman who killed herself rather

19 Jason Scott-Warren, Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 2. 20 Morley urges Cromwell to read Machiavelli in order to advise the king on his struggle with the pope; see Wright, Forty-Six Lives, xxix–xxxi. 21 See Simpson, “Sacrifice,” 154. On the dating of the manuscript relative to the executions, see Carley, “Writings,” 43.

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than dishonour her family – Morley explicitly uses Boccaccio’s text to underline his approval of Henry’s action in executing his wife and Morley’s daughter for the (apparently) political good of the realm.22 In addition to the social context of the gift-book, however, the selection of this work for translation and presentation is also expressive of the cultural penetration of Boccaccio in this period. In his dedication to the king, Morley provides short biographies of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and mentions a range of Boccaccio’s writings in Italian and Latin: The last of thies three, moste graciouse souereigne lorde, was John Bocas of Certaldo, whiche in lyke wyse as tother twayne, Dante and Petracha, wer moste exellent in the vulgare ryme, so thys Bocas was aboue all others in prose, as it apperythe by his hundrith tayles and many other notable workes. Nor he was noo lesse elegaunte in the prose of his oune tunge then he was in the Latyne tunge, wherin, as Petrak dyd wryte clerkly certeyn volumes in the Latyne tunge, so dyd this clerke. And fyrst “Of the fall of Princes,” “Of the Geonelogye of the Goddes,” and emonge other thys booke namede “De preclaris mulieribus,” that is, of the ryght renomyde ladies. (fol. 2)

The range of texts invoked is telling, since it shows a much greater knowledge of Boccaccio than that evidenced by either Lydgate or the anonymous translator of the De mulieribus; in scope, it is very similar to Humphrey of Gloucester’s Oxford donations of a century earlier. Just as in Humphrey’s royal milieu, Morley’s dedication suggests that among the elite, Boccaccio was read and well known in either his original languages (“his oune tunge”) or in French translation, since only one of these named works, “Of the fall of Princes,” was easily available in English at the time (unless Morley had by some coincidence come across the fifteenth-century De mulieribus).23 However, the use of Lydgate’s title for the De casibus is surely indicative of its penetration into the culture: the Fall of Princes had been highly popular and widely read for over a hundred years by the 1540s, with a new folio edition printed relatively re-

22 Simpson, “Sacrifice,” 164–5. 23 For Morley’s reading and the libraries to which he may have had access, see Julia Boffey and A.S.G. Edwards, “Books Connected with Henry Parker, Lord Morley, and His Family,” in Axton and Carley, Triumphs of English, 69–75.

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cently by Richard Pynson in 1527. Here, then, as in the fifteenth-century translation of the De mulieribus, we find a deliberate attempt to relate the two texts for the reader in a proemial passage. Moreover, it is also known that Henry VIII possessed several other books by Boccaccio, inherited from relatives: a French illuminated manuscript of the De mulieribus dating from the early fifteenth century was recorded as being at the palace at Westminster in 1542, while the superb illustrated manuscript of Laurent de Premierfait’s translation of the De casibus made for Edward IV (British Library, Royal MS 14. E. V) was also held in the royal collections.24 The royal library also included an extensive collection of printed books, including Henry VII’s hybrid vellum edition of the French translation of the De mulieribus, the Nobles et cleres dames, printed by Antoine Vérard in 1493.25 The source text for Morley’s gift manuscript is thought to have been a printed edition of the De mulieribus, and Wright has suggested that this was the 1487 Louvain edition of the text, printed by Aegidius van der Heerstraten (GW 4485).26 The printed source edition is clearly a very different beast from the handmade gift manuscript, and it is useful to consider its features before focusing in more detail on the English manuscript translation, in order to illustrate the implications of Morley’s choice to present the work to the king in this form. The Louvain edition was the third edition of the De mulieribus to be published, following the editio princeps printed in Ulm by Johann Zainer in 1473 (GW 4483) and Georg Husner’s Strasbourg edition of c. 1474–75 (GW 4484). Like

24 The French De mulieribus manuscript may have belonged first to the mother of Henry VII, Margaret Beaufort, who was a translator in her own right: see James P. Carley, The Books of Henry VIII and His Wives (London: British Library, 2004), 49. On Edward’s De casibus, see Carley, Books of Henry VIII (London: British Library, 2004), 40; the manuscript is described in Bozzolo, Manuscrits, 136–7. 25 On Henry VII’s “standing order” with the French publisher Vérard, see Carley, Books of King Henry VIII, 44–8; on the printed paper and hybrid (hand-illuminated vellum) copies of the Nobles et cleres dames, see Cynthia J. Brown, “Paratextual Performance in the Early Parisian Book Trade: Antoine Vérard’s Edition of Boccaccio’s Nobles et cleres dames (1493),” in Cultural Performances in Medieval France: Essays in Honor of Nancy Freeman Regalado, ed. Eglal Doss-Quimby, Robert L. Krueger, and E. Jane Burns (Cambridge: Brewer, 2007), 255–64. 26 Wright, Forty-Six Lives, lxix–lxxi. Wright bases his conclusions on the presence of both paratextual elements such as titles and textual subdivisions, and textual variants common to the Louvain edition and Morley’s manuscript, but does not discuss the implications of elements such as the mise-en-page and material form.

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the princeps it contained a substantial sequence of seventy-six woodcuts illustrating the various biographical subjects, copied from those of the Ulm edition.27 The Louvain volume is a folio of seventy leaves, which begins with the dedicatory letter to Andrea Acciaiuoli (fol. A2r), followed by the prologue on the verso (“Incipit Prologus Johannis Bocacij | in librum de claris mulieribus”; fol. A2v); the lives then begin at fol. A3v. The printed edition also contains the colophon (fol. L3r) and concluding “Tabula operis precedentis” (fol. L4r–L5r), which lists the parts of the book with folio references. Despite being based on a printed edition, Morley’s translation, by contrast, maintains the textual, visual, and organizational forms of the manuscript book, and contains none of the specific paratextual elements found in the new medium of the printed book such as biographical illustrations, or indexing devices like the list of contents. Even among Morley’s fine gift manuscripts, the Chatsworth book is considered especially impressive, being “by far the most elaborate and lavishly produced [of the post-1541 books], with particularly delicate decorated capital letters on almost every folio.”28 The book in its present state has been heavily cropped for its later binding, to the extent that some of the edges of the calligraphic decorations and illustrations have been lost. The manuscript itself is vellum, forty-seven leaves long, with an extra leaf bound in at the beginning and end, and a single leaf is missing between leaves 3 and 4.29 Decorative and calligraphic features delineate the various parts of the text and the hierarchies between them, a form of visual organization that of course also serves to beautify the book for its royal destinee. The key marker for each section of the book is a large strapwork initial letter, often decorated with fine drawings of human and grotesque

27 For an introduction to the illustrated incunable editions of Boccaccio, see Gianvittorio Dillon, “I primi incunaboli illustrati e il Decameron veneziano del 1492,” in Branca, Boccaccio visualizzato, 3:291–318. The three editions are also described in the recent incunable catalogue of the holdings of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford: Alan Coates et al., A Catalogue of Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1:603–4. 28 Carley, “Writings,” 42. 29 Wright has shown that the translated text of the preface stops abruptly, and the next page begins with the heading for the first life (lxv). The break occurs at the point that would be §9 in the modern edition (with §§10–11 therefore omitted).

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heads, animals, or flowers and fruit.30 In the prefatory parts of the book (the dedication and author’s preface), important parts of the text are written in a larger, thicker script, while for the individual lives the layout is simpler, comprising a title, decorated initial and the first word in a larger script. The logical disposition of these visual and textual elements thus means that the structural hierarchies of the text are very clear, and, to judge by the amount of extra graphic elements, the most important and prestigious part of the manuscript book is manifestly its first page with the royal dedication.31 The book begins with an ornate dedicatory title to the king, which takes the form of a large strapwork initial letter T at the top of the page, with a unified block of text to the right (figure 3). The initial capital contains the royal monogram “HR VIII” in the scrollwork encircling a Tudor rose, while the first line of text is the largest and darkest script on the page, with a handwritten capital O following the decorated T. The next fourteen lines of text after the first line are written in smaller but still markedly darker anglicana script, and the whole title reads: To the moste hygh, moste puysaunte, moste exellent and moste Chrysten Kynge, my moste redoubtede souereygne lorde Henry th’Eighte, by the grace of Gode, of Englonde, Fraunce and Irelonde Kynge, Defender of the Feythe, and in erthe, vndre Gode, suppreme heede of the Churche of Englonde and Irelonde, your moste humble subiecte Henry Parcare, knyght, Lorde Morley, desyreth thys Newe Yere, with infyntye of yeres to your imperiall Maieste, helthe, honoure and vyctory.32

Morley’s dedicatory letter (fols. 1–2v) itself begins below this title, and once again the beginning is marked by another, even larger strapwork initial. The first line of text is again written in a large, dark letters, but for the subsequent thirteen lines is written in a much smaller script, the basic anglicana in which the main text of the book is written.33 Although the identity of the scribe is unknown, he has been identified 30 For a list of the various decorated initials, see Carley, “Writings,” 57n29. 31 A reproduction of the first leaf of the manuscript can be seen as the frontispiece plate of Wright’s edition of the text. 32 All quotations from the manuscript are taken from Wright’s edition, in which spelling and punctuation are modernized and contractions are expanded. On the spelling and punctuation of the manuscript, see Wright, Forty-Six Lives, lxvi–lxviii. 33 See Carley, “Writings,” 45–6.

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as the writer of six of Morley’s presentation manuscripts, and is thus a crucial figure in the production of Morley’s gift books. The main thrust of the dedication is to trace an intellectual lineage between the supreme Roman empire and Henry’s own court, with the implication that Henry himself is the new Augustus, ruler of his own empire:34 In the tyme the hoole worlde was obediente to the Romaynes, moste victoriouse and graciouse souereigne lorde, not onely by armes they were renoumede aboue all other naciones, but also in eloquens and goode lernynge, as it appearethe by thyes oratours and poetes in the greate Augustus days; that is to saye, Varro, Tullius Cicero, Virgill, Orace and Ouyde, with diuers others. (fol. 1)35

Learning declines dramatically from the fall of Rome, until the yere of our Lorde God, a thousand foure hundrith, in the tyme of the flowre and honour of prynces, Kynge Edwarde, the thyrde of that name, holdynge by ryghte the septre of thys imperiall realme, as your Grace nowe dothe, there sprange in Italy three excellente clerkes. (fol. 1v)36

First amongst the tre corone is Dante, “for hys greate learnynge in his mother tunge surnamyde dyuyne Dante.” Dante’s genius was such that it seemed a miracle, and to reinforce this statement, Morley repeats what he claims is the epitaph on Dante’s tomb, the first verse of the sonnet formerly attributed to Boccaccio: It is manyfest that it was true, whiche was grauen on hys tumbe, that hys maternall eloquens touchede so nyghe the prycke that it semyde a myracle of nature. And forbecause that one shuldnot thynke I do feyne, I shall sett the wordes in the Italiane tunge, whiche is thys: Dante Alighieri son, Minerua oscura D’intelligenza e d’arte, nel cui ingegno

34 “This standard recitation of humanist literary ideology quietly insinuates (as it usually does) that Henry is the new Augustus; that cultivation of literature and imperial power are mutually sustaining; and that the renovation of imperial letters is about to begin in England”: Simpson, “Sacrifice,” 161. 35 Wright, Forty-Six Lives, 1. 36 Wright, Forty-Six Lives, 2.

The De mulieribus claris in English Translation L’eleganza materna aggiunse al segno Che si tien gran miracol di natura.

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(fol. 1v)37

These lines are now no longer thought to be by Boccaccio, although they were first attributed to him in Ludovico Dolce’s 1555 edition of the Commedia; in fact, they appear for the first time in Wendolin de Spira’s 1477 edition of the Commedia. Presumably Morley did not believe that these lines were the work of Boccaccio, otherwise he would have made more of it in his preface; however, it is an interesting coincidence, and the first instance in which these lines are associated with Boccaccio and repeated in an English translation of his works. (On this, see chapter 5, when they reappear in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Early Italian Poets and in editions of the Trattatello.)38 This page (like all the others in the book) is ruled lightly in red for 31 lines of text, with the text written across the width of the page in the smaller script size. However, the Italian poem in praise of Dante is demarcated visually by the use of the larger, darker, script of the dedication, indented approximately four centimetres into the page, with the effect of highlighting it very effectively. The choice to leave this poem untranslated again flatters the intended recipient of this manuscript in his dedicatory role as the heir to the Roman empire and Italian letters (perhaps elevating Henry’s own command of the Italian language), and its visual presentation serves to underline its epigraphic function; this is the only instance of such a textual device in the whole book. After Dante comes Petrarch, of course, and an opportunity for Morley to plug his own translation of the Trionfi:39 37 Wright, Forty-Six Lives, 2. The poem is number 32 in part 2 of Branca’s edition of the Rime (112). On the textual history of the sonnet, see Rime, 322n1, and E.H. Wilkins, “The Sonnet ‘Dante Alighieri son...,’” Modern Language Notes, 26.5 (1911), 137–9. 38 Morley is also said to have presented a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy to King Henry VIII, in the Matteo Capcasa edition (Venice, 1493), which is now held in the John Rylands University Library in Manchester. The “Boccaccio” sonnet, however, does not appear in this volume, appearing only in the 1477 edition of those editions published before Morley’s translation was made, and so we must presume that Morley had also had access to that edition of the Commedia at some stage. (It should also be noted, however, that this distinguished provenance history is not fully attested, being recorded only within the volume and in a booksellers’ catalogue.) 39 On Morley’s translation of Petrarch, see Marie Axton, “Lord Morley’s Tryumphes of Fraunces Petrarcke: Reading Spectacles,” in Axton and Carley, Triumphs of English, 171–211. Axton argues for an early dating for when this translation was made, perhaps for New Year 1521/2 (174–5); it would thus substantially precede the Boccaccio translation.

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The next vnto thys Dante was Frauncis Petrak, that not onely in the Latyne tunge, but also in swete ryme, is so extemyde that vnto thys present tyme vnnethe is ther any noble prynce in Italy, nor gentle man, withoute hauynge in hys handes hys sonnetes and hys “Tryhumphes” or hys other rymes. (fol. 1v)40

Petrarch is both the chronological and thematic linking figure between Dante and Boccaccio, esteemed as one who has mastered both the vernacular and Latin. Boccaccio, meanwhile, in this humanist narrative of literary recovery is still esteemed primarily for his Latin works, although his excellence in “the vulgare ryme” is as assured as his illustrious companions’. The reference to Boccaccio’s emerging sixteenth-century Italian reputation as pre-eminent prosifier is interesting, and reveals Morley’s wide culture and access to contempory Italian intellectual currents. However, Morley’s mission with this dedication is not to bring contemporary Italian literary fashions to the English court but to draw on Boccaccio’s established English reputation as the Latin scholar and compiler of compendious works of classical reference. The final part of Morley’s dedication is given over to the contextualization of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus for its English recipient. Interestingly, Morley attempts this by an explicit presentation of his editorializing work with the dedications: just as Boccaccio dedicated his original text to “Quene Jane,” the gracious ruler of the Kingdom of Naples, so Morley will make his version for the greatest prince of his country. This deft analogy unfortunately is not quite based in fact, since as we know Boccaccio actually dedicates his text to Andrea Acciaiuoli. It thus betrays either a fundamental misreading of Boccaccio’s preface or, perhaps, more likely, a deliberate misprision of the text in order to better reframe the work for the king.41 The ostensible aim of both dedications, however, is to ask the esteemed recipient to go on to direct the work to female readers of their acquaintance: Which sayde booke [the De mulieribus], as in the ende he wrytethe, he dyd dedicate the same to Quene Jane, in hys tyme Quene of Naples, a

40 Wright, Forty-Six Lives, 2. 41 Wright believes that Morley was in error here. “It is probable, as Mr. Victor Scholderer suggests, that Morley’s error arose from a confused recollection of this passage and another in the Conclusio, where the ‘tam clara regina’ is mentioned in passing”: Wright, Forty-Six Lives, 191, note to p. 3, l. 4.

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pryncesse enduede with all vertues, wysdome and goodenes. And for asmuche as that I thoughte howe that your Hyghnes, of youre accustomede mekenes and pryncely herte, woldenot disdayn it, so dyd I imagyne that if by chaunce it shulde cum to the handes of the ryght renoumyde and moste honorable ladyes of your Highnes moste tryhumphante courte, that it shulde be well acceptyde to theym to se and reede the meruelouse vertue of theyr oune sexe, to the laude perpetuall of them. (fol. 2)42

The crucial difference here is that while Boccaccio and his first English translator maintained the pose that this book was dedicated to and about women, here Morley makes explicit its direction to a specifically male reader. By asking the king to promote it to the women of his court – even if it is for them a paean of praise – Morley demonstrates the essentially male agency of this transaction. Having asserted the ultimate authority of the king as governor of reading material and morality, Morley can now delicately address the problematic nature of the subject matter, specifically those women who are not virtuous: And albeit, as Bocas wrytethe in hys proheme, he menglyssheth sum not very chaste emongste the goode, yet hys honeste excuse declarethe that he dyd it to a goode entent, that all ladyes and gentlewomen, seynge the glorye of the goode, may be steryde to folowe theym, and seynge the vyce of sum, to flee theym. (fol. 2)43

Morley falls back on the classic translator’s defence, that if there is a problem, it is the fault of the source author and not the well-intentioned translator: here, as in the previous translations, “Bocas” himself is invoked in a prefatory frame to authorize the work that follows (and in a construction that has the effect of looking forward to and introducing the next part of the book). The last part of the dedication now comes to the subject of the translation itself and the context of its production, with a final plea for divine support for Henry’s reign: Whiche saide worke, my moste noble and gratiouse souereygne lorde, as farr as it gothe, I haue drawne in to our maternall tonge, to presente the same vnto your imperiall dignyte thys Newe Yeres Day, praynge to Chryste Jhesu to teche that right Christen hande of yours to batell

42 Wright, Forty-Six Lives, 3. 43 Wright, Forty-Six Lives, 3.

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agaynste youre auncyente ennemyes, that they may knowe that He whiche is the way and the truethe, helpythe your Exellencye in your truethe, so that they may fall and youe to ryse in honour, victory and fame, aboue all jynges that is, hathe bene, or shalbe. Amen. (fols. 2–2v)

The translation of Boccaccio’s own preface begins on the next leaf of the book, with another richly worked page that again follows the same visual and textual hierarchies: a large detailed worked initial letter at the start of each major section, the text of the rubric in a larger script, and the main text in a smaller script below. Like the translator’s dedication, this section has an ornate rubric-title that introduces the material, with the title text differentiated by being written in a larger, darker script. The rubric reads: The preface of th’exellent clerc, John Bocasse, of his booke, intitlede in the Latyne tunge “De preclaris mulieribus,” that is to say in Englysshe, of the ryghte renoumyde ladyes, wherein he dothe excuse hymself why, emongste theym that were moste vertuouse and nonorable women, he dothe often put in theym that were vicyouse. (fol. 3)44

Clearly, Morley is taking some pains to justify the inclusion of the “vicyouse” women, to the extent of flagging up the author’s defence in the rubric to the section. The translation of the preface itself follows Boccaccio’s prose quite closely, with none of the narrative or voicing shifts that we saw in the two previous English “translations.” This in itself signals a marked shift in translation practice over the hundred years between the first and second translations of the De mulieribus: the shift from overt formal refashioning, as seen in both Laurent’s prose amplifications of the De casibus in his 1409 version, and the subsequent English choice to render this text and the De mulieribus in English rhyme royal. However, we should not forget that Laurent’s first translation of the De casibus showed a similar willed stylistic and lexical equivalence to the Latin source text, and so what we may be seeing here in a sense is the persistence, or perhaps rediscovery, of a vernacular prose style informed by and in imitation of the Latin proto-humanists. What did not work for Laurent’s receiving community in 1400 is now entirely appropriate for the 1540s English courtly context.

44 Wright, Forty-Six Lives, 3.

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Morley’s prose is ornate, and demonstrates the high-register stylistic traits of an elaborate, “artificial” style. This is now entirely congruous with the pacing and systematic rhetorical development of the Boccaccian source text, as can be seen by an examination of the opening statement (presented here first in Morley’s version, then in the modern Latin text, and finally in its contemporary English translation): There be of the olde auncyent wryters, and also of late, of right famous clerkes that haue breuely wrytten the lyffes of the illustriouse noble men. Emonge others, the ryghte exellent poete Frauncys Petrark, my maister, hathe endytyd and gathrede theyre actes in a compendiouse volume, and well worthy. For, to th’entent that they myghte be aboue others by theyr notable and hardy actes, they not oonely put to theyr study, but also their substaunce and their bloode, when the oportunyte of tyme semyde theim so for to do, to noone other entente, but to deserue therby of theyr posteryte a name and fame for ever. Surely, I have not a litle meruelyde of theym that haue thus wrytten, why they haue not sumwhat touchede the gloriouse actes of women, when it is euydente that dyuers and sundry of theym haue doone ryghte noble thynges. (Morley, fol. 3)45 Scripsere iamdudum nonnulli veterum sub compendio de viris illustribus libros; et nostro evo, latiori tamen volumine et accuratiori stilo, vir insignis et poeta egregius Franciscus Petrarca, preceptor noster, scribit; et digne. Nam qui, ut ceteros anteirent claris facinoribus, studium omne, substantias, sanguinem et animam, exigente oportunitate, posuere, profecto ut eorum nomen in posteros perpetua deducatur memoria meruere. Sane miratus sum plurimum adeo modicum apud huiusce viros potuisse mulieres, ut nullam memorie gratiam in speciali aliqua descriptione consecute sint, cum liquido ex amplioribus historiis constet quasdam tam strenue quam fortiter egisse nonnulla. (Proemio, §§1–3) Long ago there were a few ancient authors who composed biographies of famous men in the form of compendia, and in our day that renowned man and great poet, my teacher Petrarch, is writing a similar work that will be even fuller and more carefully done. This is fitting. For those who gave all their zeal, their fortunes, and (when the occasion demanded it) their blood and their lives in order to surpass other men in illustrious deeds have certainly earned the right have their names remembered forever by 45 Wright, Forty-Six Lives, 4.

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posterity. What surprises me is how little attention women have attracted from writers of this genre, and the absence of any work devoted especially to their memory, even though lengthier histories show clearly that some women have performed acts requiring vigor and courage.46

Even from this short passage, it is possible to see the essence of Morley’s style as a translator: his emphasis is on the “sense,” and he attempts to follow the same order of phrases as his source, even if it is impossible to render the word order the same way.47 He is willing to break up the longer Latin periods into shorter English sentences, but attempts to preserve a similar lexical field as the source, sometimes even at the expense of the meaning (as can be seen, for example, in his rendering of the phrase “studium omne, substantias, sanguinem et animam,” where he substitutes “study” and “substaunce” (and omits “animam”). A similar approach can be seen in the individual lives themselves, which now tend towards the “factual” rather than offering an opportunity for independent authorial digression as they did in the earlier English verse rendering. Each life is presented in the same way, with a short title in the centre of the page (e.g., “Of Eue, oure fyrste mother | The ffyrst chapitre”), then with a large strapwork initial capital letter for the first word of the main text, with only the first word of this written in a larger script. As in his treatment of Boccaccio’s proem, Morley follows the Latin carefully throughout, as can be seen in this sample from the life of Eve (selected to provide a comparison with the fifteenthcentury rendering of the same passage): Hauynge intencion to wryte the exellent glory that the noble women in tyme passyd haue obteyned, it semethe to me that it is not incongruente to begynne at the commune mother of vs all. Eue, than, that most auncyent mother, as she was the fyrst of all women, so is she decorate with woundres excellent praysys. For she was not, as other be, brought forthe into this lacrimable vale of mysery, in whiche we be borne in to labour and to payne, nor so formyd, nor as we shulde say, shapyn, with that hammar, nor cryinge and bewaylynge hyr cummynge into the worlde, as the maner of al that be borne is. (Morley, fol. 4)48

46 Brown, Famous Women, 9. 47 Wright shows how, in his prefaces, Morley often claims to translate “according to the sens,” or “not moche altered from the sence”: Forty-Six Lives, ciii. 48 Wright, Forty-Six Lives, 8.

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Scripturus igitur quibus fulgoribus mulieres claruerint insignes, a matre omnium sumpsisse exordium non apparebit indignum: ea quippe vetustissima parens, uti prima, sic magnificis fuit insignis splendoriibus. Nam, non in hac erumnosa miseriarum valle, in qua ad laborem ceteri mortales nascimur, producta est, nec eodem malleo aut incude etiam fabrefacta, seu eiulans nascendi crimen deflens, aut invalida, ceterorum ritu, venit in vitam. (§§1–2) As I am going to write about the glories for which women have become famous, it will not seem inappropriate to begin with the mother of us all. She is the most ancient of mothers and, as the first, she was singled out for special honors. She was not brought forth in this wretched vale of misery in which the rest of us as born to labor; she was not wrought with the same hammer or anvil; nor did she come into life like others, either weak or tearfully bewailing original sin.49

Morley’s sonorous high-register English is thus able to register the stately syntax and portentous subject matter of Boccaccio’s Latin prose, finding lexical equivalence in phrases such as “not incongruente” (non apparebit indignum), “this lacrimable vale of mysery” (hac erumnosa miseriarum valle), or “formyd, nor as we shulde say, shapyn, with that hammar” (producta est, nec eodem malleo aut incude etiam fabrefacta). The Life of Eve is followed by forty-five more lives, which follow the sequence established in Boccaccio’s final version of the work. It can therefore be argued that Morley does not use the selection of subjects as an overt means by which to comment on female behaviour, beyond one significant element, already mentioned: the choice of an end point, which is here the life of Lucretia. As previously noted, this Roman matron was the epitome of female modesty, who was raped at knifepoint after being threatened with death and (more importantly) dishonour by her attacker, Sextus: “inquit se allam secus servum ex suis occisurum; et cunctis eam a se ob adulterium cum adultero cesam dicere. [...] timens, si eo occideretur pacto, purgatorem sue innocentie defunturum; et ob id aspernanti animo corpus permisit adultero” (He said that he would kill her, along with one of her male servants, and tell everybody that he had killed them because they had committed adultery. [...] Fearing that, if she died under these circumstances, there would be no one to clear her innocent name, Lucretia unwillingly gave her body to the adulterer; 49 Brown, Famous Women, 15.

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De mulieribus, XLVIII, 5). The next morning, Lucretia informs her family (but chiefly her father and husband) that she has been raped, saying “Ego me, si peccato absolvo, supplicio non libero; nec ulla deinceps impudica Lucretie vivet exemplo” (Although I absolve myself of the sin, I do not exempt myself from the punishment, and in future no woman will live dishonorably because of Lucretia’s example; De mulieribus, XLVIII, 7). The implication is straightforward: Lucretia, unlike Morley’s daughter Jane, Lady Rochford, and her adulterous mistress, Queen Catherine (Howard), acknowledges the enormity of female sex outside marriage (even forced sex, undertaken against her will), and thus prefers to kill herself rather than be dishonoured and to thereby set a bad example to other women. In this way, the social order is maintained, and indeed, Rome’s freedom is enhanced by her noble sacrifice.50 Morley’s book in fact closes with the last lines of Lucretia’s life, underlining the compact between fathers and husbands, female honour, and the good governance of the state: But hyr chastitie can neuer be to muche commendyde and praysede. And all though the fowlle acte of Sextus was after well reuengyde, yet this was not all, but for thys acte of Lucres, Rome, that was in boundage before, by hyr obteynede for euer fredome and lyberty. (fol. 47r)

Simpson has noted that the respective end points of the two texts signal two quite distinct “trajectories” for the reader on completion.51 The Boccaccian original ends with the life of a contemporary illustrious woman, Queen Giovanna of Naples, who must mark the end of the compilation since, as Boccaccio states, there are so few contemporary illustrious women after her. However, Morley, by truncating his collection well before the single modern subject, and stopping instead with Lucretia, the apotheosis of the honourable wife and daughter, in fact “leaves his royal reader to follow the trajectory of infamous classical women into the ‘infamous’ women of Henry’s contemporary experience.”52

50 On the significance of closing with the life of Lucrece, see Simpson, “Sacrifice,” 164–5. 51 Simpson, “Sacrifice,” 159. 52 Simpson, “Sacrifice,” 159.

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Conclusion Conditioned by the circumstances of its composition and presentation, Morley’s translation of the text therefore promotes a more negative view of female conduct than the earlier Middle English version. Whereas Morley maintains a closer formal relationship between source and target text than his predecessor – as seen in the overall “shape” of the text, its composition in prose, and close adherence to even the clausal periods of the source text – the earlier translator has more scope to digress and edit in his verse paraphrase. We do not know anything about the original production context of the fifteenth-century version, but one way of approaching the strikingly different approach to women in the two manuscripts is to see them in performative terms. The agents involved in the making and reading of the Middle English version are anonymous, and the book may have been conceived of as private, and perhaps even devotional, in use. The presence of elements such as the prayer and its suggested exemplary function as a moral spur to Christian women, along with the notable sympathy for the female experience in childbirth, child loss, and marriage, for example, suggest a more intimate reading sphere in which female readers would play a part.53 Morley’s translation, by contrast, is a very public event in and of itself: a translation produced to assert loyalty and submission to the king at a dangerous time in the author’s political life, presented publicly to the recipient at the New Year gift ceremony; a translation that seeks urgently to establish shared values between two aristocratic men. Morley’s fidelity to his king is paralleled by the fidelity of his translation, where “humanist respect for the integrity of the text can be redescribed as the expression of both literary and political subservience.”54 The medieval translator is a co-author, whose equality of agency is inscribed in the divergent form and deliberate authorial manipulation of the source text. Such an active remaking is not possible a century later, where the translator seeks instead a close lexical, syntactical, and generic equivalence with the source text, with the intention of bringing

53 Simpson notes that the “narrator [of the Middle English version] does disrupt the decorous detachment of Boccaccio’s narration sympathetically to apostrophize female victims or sinners,” and that many of the “negative sequences” are cut out (“Sacrifice,” 158). 54 Simpson, “Sacrifice,” 162.

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Italian proto-humanistic writing into the repository of English-language writings.55 Warren Boutcher has characterized humanistic translation practice in England between 1527 and 1570 as operating in a condition of “confinement,” in terms of agents (generally confined to those involved in court, political, and academic circles), in translation practice (confined within Ciceronian principles of translation), and in source material (confined to classical sources and modern court humanism).56 Morley’s translation of Boccaccio thus exemplifies English translation production in the mid-sixteenth century. Temporally, his work provides a link between the late medieval and early modern conception of Boccaccio as a Latin historian and moralist and the English discovery of the “romance,” vernacular Boccaccio in the latter half of the sixteenth century. However, in terms of reading medium, he represents the last hurrah of scholarly manuscript culture in the reception of Boccaccio, and thus has arguably more in common with figures of the previous century such as Laurent and Humphrey of Gloucester than with the producers and consumers of this new Boccaccio in print.

55 Simpson writes of Morley “disappear[ing]” into his target text (“Sacrifice,” 161–2), in what should be seen perhaps as an early example of Venuti’s “translator’s invisibility.” 56 Warren Boutcher, “The Renaissance,” in The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, ed. Peter France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 52.

3 Boccaccio in Print in the Sixteenth Century

The sixteenth century is a crucial and dynamic moment in Boccaccio’s English reception history, a time in which the widest range of his works was available in translation to a variety of anglophone audiences until the twentieth century. Unlike the fifteenth century, in which only two Latin biographical compendiums acquired English renderings, those works of Boccaccio that can be found in sixteenth-century literary culture are taken from the whole spectrum of his Latin and Italian production, and from all genres. The wide-ranging aspect of his source texts is replicated – and arguably amplified – in the variety of textual productions in the target language and culture, in their various readerships and physical formats. In medium, Boccaccio’s English incarnations in this period range from the gift manuscript (as discussed in the previous chapter), through the printed book, to texts that circulated primarily orally; print production – the focus of this chapter – was also notably varied, and ranged from pamphlets of extracts from Lydgate’s Fall of Princes published in the early sixteenth century, through mid-century folio editions of the same text, to smaller-format Elizabethan romances. In terms of source language, the translated Boccaccio emerges as both Latin and Italian; in genre, we find translations of biographies (the De mulieribus and Lydgate’s version of the De casibus), courtly romances (Fiammetta), epic adventure stories (Filocolo), pastorals (Ninfale fiesolano), and Decameron novellas, anthologized in story collections or circulating as individual tales. However, despite the wide range of Boccaccian material in English literature, some broad trends are discernable over this period: there is a slow but marked shift from Latin source texts to Italian; there is a clear interest in the second half of the century in what might be termed the

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“romance” end of Boccaccio’s production; and there is equally in this period an overt editorial effort to refashion Boccaccio’s works to fit the needs of the English “receiving” culture. In chapter 2, we saw the striking closeness of Morley’s version of the De mulierbus to its Latin source text, which may be explained by its production in an elite scribal culture not so very far away from its originating context in Trecento, Italy. By contrast, the new medium of print – and its developing visual and editorial codes – permits a much freer remaking and repackaging of the Boccaccian source text for the English audience. For Boccaccio’s reception history, the move into the print medium has two significant aspects. First of all, the new technology throws open the publication process to a new constituency of text-producers. No longer are the translations merely the work of individuals, intimately engaged with the production of the text-object itself, as embodied, for example, in translator-authors such as Lydgate, Morley, or the anonymous maker of the first English De mulieribus. Now, we find other individuals involved in the book-making: editors and printers, who themselves act as agents in the movement of texts across linguistic boundaries. However, the coming of print culture to England – again, viewed in microcosm via its effect on Boccaccio’s reception in translation – does not produce unexpected reversals or revolutions: if anything, it merely amplifies fundamental trends that were already evident in the manuscript transmission processes. One of these is the relatively limited presence of Boccaccio in English translation in comparison with other European vernaculars, and the other is the enduring importance of the French connection in the transmission route, which we have already seen in the transmission of the De casibus from Naples to England. It is crucial that Boccaccio’s presence in English translation be understood within the transnational context of European print culture, and not just as a localized phenomenon in which the source Italian text is simply imported into England, and English. The transmission and circulation of Boccaccio’s works in the romance vernaculars across Europe is complex, self-referencing, and virtually impossible to describe according to a linear model, but it is this “continental” dissemination that shapes the English Boccaccio of the period. Moreover, just as we have seen for the De casibus in chapter 1, it is the French reception that dominates. We are only now coming to realize the extent of – and reliance on – French print culture in English literary culture of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Anne Coldiron has been instrumental in showing

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us the foundationally French underpinnings of English vernacular print culture, in terms of both the individuals involved and the texts translated.1 She notes that early English printers such as Caxton, Pynson, de Worde, and others all printed works translated from the French, that many of them worked as translators themselves, being bilingual or having lived in francophone territories, and not least, that the technologies and forms of the book came to the British Isles from the continent.2 More than ever before, in the sixteenth century Boccaccio’s works form part of a vigorous and plurilingual European literary culture, in which they move to, from, and – most importantly – through various linguistic cultures. The translational flow that brings these individuals, texts, and techniques into anglophone literary culture therefore allows similar transmissive processes to those which had been seen between, for example, the francophone courts of England and France in the earlier fifteenth century, but on a much greater scale, as the quantity of both print production and translation from foreign languages increases. Perhaps the most significant finding of Coldiron’s, and one that is also borne out by this research, is the sheer quantity of French source material translated into English relative to other languages: she suggests that about six times as much verse was translated from the French as from Italian, a finding that challenges the conventional master narratives of the Italian influence on English literature in the early modern period.3 Coldiron’s assertion of the predominance of translation activity from the French over all other source languages is supported by the recent findings of the Renaissance Cultural Crossroads project, which has mapped more than four thousand translations from thirty different languages, printed in Britain in the period.4 By the mid-sixteenth century, the proportions have shifted somewhat, but French continues to dominate: almost half of the translated books printed between 1550 and 1660 in English are translated from the three Romance languages, French

1 On this, see her English Printing, Verse Translation, and the Battle of the Sexes (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); and “Translation’s Challenge to Critical Categories: Verses from French in the Early English Renaissance,” Yale Journal of Criticism, 16.2 (2003), 315–44. 2 Coldiron, “Translation’s Challenge,” 316. 3 Coldiron, “Translation’s Challenge,” esp. 315–16, 320–1. 4 Renaissance Cultural Crossroads: An Analytical and Annotated Bibliography of Translations, 1473–1640: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ren/projects/culturalcrossroads/ (accessed 10 July 2012).

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(less than 30 per cent), Italian (about 10 per cent), and Spanish (about 7 per cent); for the rest, about 40 per cent of translation into English in the period is from Latin, with Greek accounting for a further 8 per cent.5 It therefore seems necessary to reappraise the fundamental embeddedness of translation as a generative practice within the literary culture of the period, and the challenges this raises to the established – and largely monolingual – master narratives of English literary history. From the advent of print onward, translated texts have a substantial presence within English literary culture that extends far beyond elite readerships and the most prestigious genres (as defined by later scholarship). They range from the classical works that epitomize the translatio studii to the lowliest news-sheets full of sensational happenings, from scientific treatises to gardening guides or recipe books. Even if the analysis is restricted, as here, to the literary works of a single imported author, we find an enormous range of literary productions. Different reading communities – or even non-reading communities – will make different use of the source text, which in turn creates a spectrum of responses (or target texts), each with a different focus on the text’s function. At one end of the scale, we have a translation such as Morley’s De mulieribus, an English rendering of a Latin source text made for a single elite reader. At the other, there are the popular versions of tales from Boccaccio’s Decameron that circulate as verse retellings, songs, or plays.6 This kind of popular production is generally concerned mostly with the “content,” with plot and character and exemplarity. The point of contact with the source text is so far removed as to be practically untraceable, and all that really remains are the names of characters (such as Griselda) and the bare bones of the narrative. In terms of the paratextual framing, Boccaccio’s name is rarely attached to these types of adaptations, even when they make it into print (as seen, for example, in the verse retelling of Decameron, V, 8, described as A Notable Historye of Nastagio and Traversari, no lesse pitiefull then pleasaunt Translated out of Italian into 5 Gordon Braden, “An Overview,” in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English: Vol. 2: 1550–1660, ed. Braden, Robert Cummings, and Stuart Gillespie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3–11 (9). 6 For a detailed description of these, see H.G. Wright, Boccaccio in England from Chaucer to Tennyson (London: Athlone Press, 1957), chap. 3, “The Decameron in the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth Centuries.” A more critically informed and wide-ranging discussion can be found in Peter Stallybrass, “Dismemberments and Re-memberments: Rewriting Decameron IV. 1 in the English Renaissance,” StB, 20 (1991–2), 299–324.

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Englishe verse by C.T.).7 In between these two poles are the middle-brow printed translations of Boccaccio’s vernacular works, which are the focus of this chapter: those Decameron tales which are included in William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1566–7), the Thirteen Questions sequence of the Filocolo (1567), Amorous Fiammetta (1587), and the Famous Tragicall Discourse of Two Lovers: Affrican and Mensola (1597).8 While more of Boccaccio’s texts are translated into English in this period than at any other time to date, this is none the less certainly not a representative sample of his total output. These new works enter English from around the year 1560, which suggests the emergence of a specifically romance-inflected reception in England at this time, with a particular focus on certain vernacular texts on courtly or erotic themes. And this romance-inflected reception is directly defined from earlier trends in his European reception history, especially that of the French. As in previous chapters, I will begin with a review of the originating context for the translated texts, which continues in this period to be essentially French, and not Italian. I will then discuss in detail these English translations from Boccaccio made in the second half of the century, and how the book-objects themselves reveal their transmission histories. European Romance and the French Sending Culture A snapshot of Boccaccio’s translation fortune outside Italy in the late 1550s reveals a striking contrast between England and the continent. In English, the only works of Boccaccio’s that could be said to have penetrated contemporary literary culture by this time were the biographical reference works, De casibus and De mulieribus, and of these, Lydgate’s adaptation of the De casibus was the only work that had had a broad readership in print.9 The popularity and sustained interest in Lydgate’s text (and the de casibus genre itself) is shown both by its relatively early transmission into print and by the development of an entire subgenre derived from this in the second half of the sixteenth century, 7 STC 3184. 8 Here and elsewhere I distinguish between the non-italicized ‘Thirteen Questions,’ which refers to the whole sequence extracted from the Filocolo, and the italicized Thirteen Questions, which refers to specific editions bearing this title. 9 On Lydgate’s print fortune, see Alexandra Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and Their Books 1473–1557 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

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which culminated with the publication of an English continuation of Boccaccio’s work, the Mirror for Magistrates (1559).10 The English editio princeps of Lydgate’s Fall was published by Richard Pynson in 1494, and “reproduced [...] exactly” the manuscript that is now John Rylands Library English 2, discussed in chapter 1.11 Two editions of extracts from this edition, alongside several poems, were then published by Wynkyn de Worde as the Proverbes of Lydgate in the first part of the sixteenth century.12 A second folio edition of the full text of the Fall was printed by Pynson in 1527, which would be the last until 1554.13 Recent work has suggested that Lydgate’s dramatic dip in popularity at the Reformation is due to his popular and print characterizations as a clerical author, the “monke of Bury,” and certainly no translations of this text were published during Henry VIII’s Reformation, between his Act of Supremacy in 1534 and the accession of the Catholic Queen Mary in 1553.14 However, Mary’s short reign witnessed a final flurry of interest in Lydgate, with the publication of three separate editions of the Fall in 1554, one by Richard Tottel (STC 3177) and two by John Wayland (STC 3178 and 3177.5). Wayland was a well-known Catholic sympathizer, 10 See, for example, D. Lawton, “Dullness and the Fifteenth Century,” ELH, 54 (1987), 761–99 (788). On Boccaccio and the Mirror for Magistrates tradition, see Wright, Boccaccio in England, 22–8, 143, 146–7; on the Fall’s continuation as the Mirror for Magistrates, see Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes: Narrative Tragedy in Its Literary and Political Contexts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 266–7. 11 “Here begynnethe the boke calledde Iohn bochas descriuinge the falle of princis princessis & other nobles tra[n]slatid i[n]to englissh by Iohn ludgate, etc. Emprentyd by Richard Pynson: London, the xxvii day of Ianyuere, 1494” (STC 3175). On the source text for this edition, see Alexandra Gillespie, “The Lydgate Canon in Print from 1476 to 1534,” Journal of the Early Book Society, 3 (2000), 59–93 (68). The Manchester manuscript was identified as Pynson’s copy-text by Margery Morgan in “A Specimen of Early Printer’s Copy: Rylands English MS 2,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 33 (1950), 194–6. 12 The editions are described in the British Library catalogue as: “The p[ro]uerbes of Lydgate. Enprynted at London: In Flete strete at the sygne of the sonne by Wynkyn de Worde, 1510” (STC 17026); “The p[ro]uerbes of Lydgate Imprynted at London: In Flete strete at the sygne of the Sonne by me Wynkyn de Worde, 1520” (STC 17027). On these editions, see Gillespie, “The Lydgate Canon,” 67–8. 13 “Here begynneth the boke of Iohann Bochas, discryuing the fall of prҮces, princesses, and other nobles: Translated into Englysshe by Iohn Lydgate, monke of Bury. Richarde Pynson: London, 1527” (STC 3176). 14 Gillespie, “The Lydgate Canon,” 64. See, for example, James Simpson, “Bulldozing the Middle Ages: The Case of John Lydgate,” in New Medieval Literatures, ed. Wendy Scase, Rita Copeland, and David Lawton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997–), 4:213–42.

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and his publishing house was noted for the publication of religious material such as prayer books.15 Tottel, meanwhile, was best known for his publication of elite courtly lyrics by Surrey and Wyatt, and of their literary translations (of Petrarch and Virgil), all targeted firmly at the upper echelons of the Tudor court, first that of Mary, then of Elizabeth.16 Whether for its close association with Catholic recusant culture, or for its archaic language, Lydgate’s Fall fell into obscurity after this date, and was not printed again until 1924. During the same period, various versions of tales from Boccaccio’s Decameron were circulating in print. Verse renderings of two Decameron tales by William Walter had been published in c. 1525 (Tytus & Gesyppus; Dec. X, 8) and 1532 (Guystarde and Sygysmonde; IV, 1), although they were not designated as “Boccaccio” texts in their paratexts.17 In a similar transmissive mechanism to that seen for the De casibus, these texts are not translated from Boccaccio’s original language, but arrive instead via intermediate translations.18 The source text for Tytus is the very popular Latin version of this text by Filippo Beroaldo, first printed in 1491, while Guystarde is translated from Leonardo Bruni’s Latin version, from one of the many editions published by Kornelius von Zieriksee in Cologne after 1490.19 (Interestingly, Decameron X, 8 had previously been translated into English in the fifteenth century by Gilbert Banester, that time via a French intermediary text.)20 However, although ultimately Boccaccian in origin, the reception of these translations in England in

15 CHBB, 3:603. 16 On Tottel’s intended readership, see W.A. Sessions, “Literature and the Court,” in The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, ed. David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 230–2. 17 STC 3184.5 and STC 3183.5. On these, see Anna Strowe, “The Auctour, the Translatoure, and the Impressoure: Translating Boccaccio’s Authorship in Early Modern England,” Textus 24 (2011): Between Italy and the British Isles: Dialogue and Confrontation from the Dawn of Vernacular Literatures to the Seventeenth Century, ed. Alessandra Petrina and John E. Law, 477–90. 18 On the reception history of these tales in England, see H.G. Wright, Early English Versions of the Tales of Guiscardo and Ghismonda and Titus and Gisippus from the Decameron (London: Oxford University Press for EETS, 1937), 205, and Stallybrass, “Dismemberments.” The multiple transmission routes are discussed in Stallybrass, 300–2. 19 Wright has shown that Walter’s source text was one of the editions published by Kornelius von Zieriksee in Cologne: cited in Stallybrass, “Dismemberments,” 301. 20 The translation survives in two witnesses: British Library MS Add. 12524 and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C. 86: Stallybrass, “Dismemberments,” 301.

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this period is more evocative of their “independent” fortune as exemplary or tragic tales than of their function as emblematic works of Boccaccio. Apart from the works discussed above, access to Boccaccio’s other writings, both “fictional” and “non-fictional,” was limited to those people who could read Latin, French, or Italian, which until the midsixteenth century at least meant the elite and the professional classes.21 This is a remarkably restricted picture in comparison to other countries.22 For example, German translations had been printed of the De mulieribus claris (1473–5, 1474, 1479, 1488, 1541, 1566), the Decameron (1476, 1490), the Filocolo (1499), and the De casibus (1545); Spain had three printed translations of the De casibus (1495, 1511, 1552), as well as the Fiammetta (1497, 1523, 1541), De mulieribus (1494, 1527–8), and Decameron (1496, 1524, 1539, 1543, 1550), while the Corbaccio and Decameron had even been translated into Catalan, and the Decameron into Dutch (partial translation, printed 1564).23 The Teseida was translated into modern Greek and printed in Venice in 1529.24

21 See Blank, “Languages of Early Modern Literature in Britain,” in The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, 141–69. 22 I discuss Boccaccio’s European reception in translation in more detail in my forthcoming essay “Translation Trajectories in Early Modern Print Culture: The Case of Boccaccio,” in Translation and the Book Trade in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jose Maria Perez Fernandez and Edward Wilson-Lee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). A good general survey of the early modern period can be found in Mirella Ferrari, “Dal Boccaccio illustrato al Boccaccio censurato,” in Boccaccio in Europe, ed. Gilbert Tournoy (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1977), 111–33. See also H.G. Wright, The First English Translation of the Decameron (1620): Essays and Studies on English Language and Literature (Uppsala: Lundequistska Bokhandeln, 1953), 8–10. 23 Joaquín Arce, “Boccaccio nella letteratura castigliana: Panorama generale e rassegna bibliografico-critica,” in Il Boccaccio nelle culture e letterature nazionali, ed. Franco Mazzoni (Florence: Olschki, 1978), 63–105 (73). On the Catalan translations see Martín de Riquier, “Il Boccaccio nella letteratura catalana medievale,” in Il Boccaccio nelle culture e letterature nazionali, ed. Franco Mazzoni (Florence: Olschki, 1978), 107–26, and David Romano, “L’edizione (1498) ed i codici del Corbaccio catalano,” Studi sul Boccaccio, 11 (1979), 413–19, which discusses a now-lost edition of the Corbaccio. 24 On the Greek edition of the Teseida, see Enrica Follieri, “Su alcuni libri greci stampati a Venezia nella prima metà del Cinquecento,” in Byzantina et Italograeca: Studi di filologia e di paleografia (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1997), 67–110, previously published in Contributi alla storia del libro italiano: Miscellanea in onore di Lamberto Donati (Florence: Olschki, 1969), 119–64.

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The limited nature of the English reception is most striking, however, in relation to England’s close neighbour France, where no fewer than eleven of Boccaccio’s works had been translated into French by 1600, and several retranslated. The majority of these translations had also been printed, many in multiple editions.25 As French Boccaccio translations make their way into the print medium towards the end of the fifteenth century, we can observe interesting publication trends for the francophone markets, many of which themselves can be seen (much later) in the English receiving context. While the Latin works in translation dominate the incunable period, a distinct shift in focus can be seen between 1500 and mid-century, as multiple editions are published of those works of Boccaccio’s that are concerned with erotic themes, courtly disputation, and sentimental romance. These intersect particularly profitably with French narrative genres, and more broadly with transnational notions of romance that were developing through the period. While the most popular work of Boccaccio’s in print throughout this period was the Decameron, there is a noticeable spike in the 1530s with new translations published in multiple editions of two vernacular

25 The French translations, in order, are as follows: De casibus (1400, 1409, both Premierfait; partial translation, 1431, Jean Lamelin); De mulieribus claris (1401, anonymous); Decameron (1414, Premierfait; 1543 Le Maçon); Filostrato (Louis de Beauvau, c. 1453–5); Teseida (c. 1460, anonymous); Genealogia (partial translation, c. 1471, Jean Miélot; editio princeps, 1499, anonymous). Lionello Sozzi records the following early print editions of translations to 1600 in his article “Boccaccio in Francia nel Cinquecento,” in Il Boccaccio nella cultura francese, ed. C. Pellegrini (Florence: Olschki, 1971), 211–356: De mulieribus, Paris, 1493; Paris, 1538; Lyon, 1551 (227–8); Genealogia (anonymous), Paris, 1498, 1531 (236–7); De casibus (Premierfait), Bruges, 1476; Lyon, 1483; Paris, 1483/4, 1494, 1503, 1515, 1538; (Witart), Paris, 1578 (252); Filocolo: “thirteen questions” sequence (anonymous), three Paris editions c. 1531; Paris, 1541; full text: (Adrien Sevin), Paris, 1542 (258–9); Fiammetta (anonymous), Paris, 1532; Lyon, three different editions, 1532; Paris, 1541; (Gabriel Chappuys), Paris, 1585; Ninfale fiesolano (Antoine Guercin du Crest), Lyon, 1556 (266); Corbaccio (François de Belleforest), Paris, 1571 (267); the Epistola consolatoria to Pino (Marguérite de Cambis), Lyon, 1556 (270–1); and the Decameron (Premierfait), Paris, 1485 and eight further editions 1500–41; (Le Maçon) Paris, 1545 and twenty further editions to 1600 (eight between 1550–60) (274–5). See also Sozzi, “Per la fortuna del Boccaccio in Francia: I testi introduttivi alle edizioni e traduzioni cinquecentesche,” Studi sul Boccaccio, 6 (1971), 11–80. For a tabular summary of the early fortuna of Boccaccio in French translation, see Franco Simone, “Giovanni Boccaccio ‘fabbro’ della sua prima fortuna francese,” in Il Boccaccio nella cultura francese (Florence: Olschki, 1971), 58–9.

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works, the Thirteen Questions section of the Filocolo and the Fiammetta.26 Initially, the Filocolo was not translated entirely; only the “Thirteen Questions of Love” sequence from book IV was published in 1530 under the title “Treize elegantes demandes damours premierement composees par le tresfaco[n]de poete Jehan Bocace & depuis translatees en Francoys: lesquelles sont tresbien debatues/iugees et déffinies ainsi que le lecteur pourra veoir par ce que sensuyt.”27 A second, very similar edition of this abridged text was published shortly afterwards, and a third edition was published in 1541 by Denis Janot (who had published his own edition of the Decameron in 1537). Janot would go on to publish the first French translation of the whole Filocolo, by Adrien Sevin, a year later in 1542.28 The French taste for Boccaccian romance can also be seen in the remarkable popularity of the Fiammetta during the same years. Four separate versions of the same translation were published in Paris and Lyons in 1531 and 1532, and there is evidence of a fifth, now lost, probably published in Lyons in 1535.29 A sixth edition of this translation was printed in Paris by Denis Janot in 1541, and later in the century a new translation would be made by the renowned translator Gabriel Chappuys in 1585.30 Once again, the French prints are emblematic of

26 Sozzi notes eight further Decameron editions between 1500 to 1541 after Vérard’s editio princeps of the Premierfait text in 1485: “Boccaccio in Francia,” 275n178. 27 Paris: G. Du Pré, 1530. The copy consulted is British Library 12403.aaaa.5. The colophon reads “Cy finest les treize questions damour nouuellment imprimees a paris pour Galliot du pre libraire iure de luniversite. Et furent acheuees dimprimer le.vvie iour de fevrier Mil cinq cens trente auant pasques.” On these three editions, see Henri Hauvette, Les plus anciennes traductions françaises de Boccace (XIVe–XVIIe siècle), Extrait du Bulletin italien de 1907, 1908 et 1909 (Bordeaux: Feret et fils, [1909?]), 3–4. Previous to this, the first incarnation of this sequence outside the integral text occurred in Italy in the mid-fifteenth century, when the Sienese poet Giacomo di Giovanni di Ser Minoccio remodelled the text after the example of the Ameto, translating it into terza rima and retitling it Il Libro delle Difinizioni: Pio Rajna, “L’episodio delle questioni d’amore nel Filocolo del Boccaccio,” Romania, 31 (1902), 28. 28 Further editions of the Filocolo translation were published in 1555 and 1575. On these translations, see Hauvette, Les plus anciennes traductions, 2–18. 29 On the early French editions of the Fiammetta, see William Kemp, “Les éditions parisiennes et lyonnaises de la ‘Complainte de Flammette’ de Boccace (1531–1541),” Studi francesi, 33 (1989), 247–65. 30 On Chappuys’s role in the transmission of Italian literature into the French literary context, see Jean Balsamo, “Traduire de l’italien: Ambitions sociales et contraintes éditoriales à la fin du XVIe siècle,” in Traduire et adapter à la Renaissance, ed. Dominique de Courcelles (Paris: École des chartes, 1998), 95–8.

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wider European interest in the work.31 The Fiammetta was particularly popular in Spain, so much so that it gained its own Spanish continuation with Juan de Flores’s Grimalte y Gradissa, which was composed around 1485 and printed in Lérida by Heinrich Botel c. 1495.32 This specifically “Spanish” engagement with Boccaccio would then itself be transmitted into the French reception in the 1530s, when Grimalte y Gradissa was translated into French by Maurice Scève (La déplourable fin de Flamete), and published in 1535 in Lyons, then republished by Denis Janot in Paris in 1536, presumably in response to the enormous success of the French Fiammetta editions.33 Janot would then go on to exploit the burgeoning Fiammetta and Boccaccio market by publishing his own edition of the Fiammetta in the same year as his Treize élégantes demandes d’amours (1541) followed by his Filocolo in 1542.34 The material formats of the French Boccaccio editions indicate the editorial and generic positioning of these works within French print culture of the time. All but one of the editions of the Thirteen Questions and the Fiammetta printed during the 1530s are in octavo format (as is Janot’s edition of the Fiammetta continuation), a size that was customarily deployed for prose romance.35 Janot’s 1541 Treize élégantes demandes d’amours and Complaincte très piteuse de Flammette are both published in sixteenths, a more portable size that could be used as a selling point to differentiate these editions from the previous ones. The 1542 Filocolo 31 On Boccaccio’s place within early modern transnational publishing trends, see my forthcoming article “Translation Trajectories.” 32 On the relationship between the Fiammetta and Grimalte y Gradissa, see Louise M. Haywood, “Gradissa: A Fictional Female Reader in/of a Male Author’s Text,” Medium Aevum, 64.1 (1995), 85–99. Two years later, in 1497, the first Spanish translation of the Fiammetta was printed in Salamanca, the first printed translation of this text anywhere in Europe: La Fiometa (Salamanca: Printer of Nebrija’s “Gramática,” 1497). See Franco Simone, Umanesimo, Rinascimento, Barocco in Francia (Milan: Mursia, 1968), 68–9. 33 La déplourable fin de Flamete (Lyons: Francoys Juste, 1535); (Paris: Janot, 1536). 34 At roughly the same time, the first Spanish translations of the Thirteen Questions sequence began to appear, under the title Laberinto de Amor in 1541 and 1546, and then as the Treze Questiones muy graciosas sacadas del Philoculo (1546, 1549, and 1553). On these, see María de las Nieves Muñiz Muñiz, “Sobre la traducción española del Filocolo de Boccaccio (Sevilla 1541) y sobre las Treize elegantes demandes d’amours,” Criticón, 87-88-89 (2003), 537–51, and my “Translation Trajectories.” See also Hauvette, Les plus anciennes traductions, 5–8, 12, for a discussion of the transmission of titles between the Italian and translated versions of the text. 35 The 1532 Lyons Complainte très piteuse de Flammette is in a smaller format, 12mo. Kemp, “Les éditions parisiennes,” 256–7.

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edition, meanwhile, was produced in a distinctly different format than Janot’s usual “romance” narratives: it was printed as a folio, set in roman type, not black-letter, and contained a sequence of high-quality woodcuts. The format recalls that of Janot’s prestigious editions of Nicholas de Herberay’s translations of the Spanish chivalric romance Amadis de Gaule, and thus suggests its marketing as an Italian chivalric romance of comparable subject matter and importance.36 The significance of this move to the folio size can be seen in the publication of further large-scale – and larger format – translation projects from the Italian that followed shortly afterwards, with the 1543 Roland Furieux, a prose translation of Ariosto’s ottava rima Orlando Furioso, published in Lyons, and Antoine Le Maçon’s Decameron translation of 1545.37 The ongoing influence of these 1540s landmark chivalric translations from the Italian in French literary culture can still be detected in the French prose rendering of Boccaccio’s Ninfale fiesolano, which would be published in Lyons a decade later in 1556. It combines the prose form of the 1543 Roland translation with the salacious translation solutions of Le Maçon’s 1545 Decameron, in a tiny sixteenth format, and will be discussed in more detail in the second part of this chapter. Just as we saw for the De casibus, it is Boccaccio’s French reception, rather than his Italian origins, which is taken up in the English context. Most of all it is the French taste for his courtly Neapolitan works in the 1530s and 1540s – and the material forms in which these translated texts are expressed – that is transmitted into English in the second half of the sixteenth century. One of the principal concerns of this new French vernacular literature is the articulation and contestation of courtly love themes: the medieval texts upon which the tradition was based are rediscovered and reframed through a sixteenth-century veneer of Platonic dialogue, and, later, the constructions of conduct derived from the Italian humanists. The great French enthusiasm for the Decameron, too, is bound into this courtly reading, as exemplified in Marguerite de Navarre’s own Boccaccian-influenced collection of tales, the Heptaméron, first published in 1558. All of these cultural trends (and the books by which they travel

36 On Herberay’s Amadis, see Andrew Pettegree, The French Book and the European Book World (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 206–8. 37 For a more detailed discussion of the linguistic debates in France around these landmark translations, see Jean Balsamo, Les rencontres des Muses: Italianisme et anti-italianisme dans les lettres françaises de la fin du XVIe siècle (Geneva: Slatkine, 1992), chap. 2, “Traduttore – traditore,” 93–131 (108–9).

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into England) should be borne in mind when considering Boccaccio’s revival in English in the later part of the sixteenth century. The 1560s: Pleasant Reading (The Palace of Pleasure and A Pleasaunt Disport of Diuers Noble Personages) The 1560s are a crucial decade in this history, as they mark the first point at which we find a pronounced cluster of Boccaccio-derived publications appearing in English at around the same time. Even more significantly, these English productions are taken from parts of the Boccaccian corpus that had not been systematically translated before, namely the Decameron and the Filocolo. Within the space of five or so years, we see in print two verse renderings of Decameron tales, published without a Boccaccian attribution: the Pleasant and delightfull history, of Galesus Cymon and Iphigenia (c. 1565; STC 3183), and A notable historye of Nastagio and Trauersari no lesse pitiefull then pleasaunt (1569; STC 3184).38 Sixteen tales from the Decameron were also included in William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, which was first published in 1566– 67 in two volumes, where Boccaccio’s authorship is noted (and which appear alongside other tales translated from Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron).39 Finally, the Thirteen Questions sequence from the Filocolo is translated and published in 1567. We can trace the factors in Boccaccio’s renewed popularity in translation to the previous decade. The 1550s, and especially the accession of Elizabeth to the English throne in 1558, had marked a new and vigorous English engagement with Italian literary culture, and a similar Scottish engagement was of course also underway at the court of James VI. The self-glorification of Elizabeth’s court and the desire to adopt continental models of courtly love and courtly manners led aspirant courtiers to look to the Italians as the masters of these genres. Literary

38 Wright, Boccaccio in England, 142–9. 39 The palace of pleasure beautified, adorned and well furnished, with pleasaunt histories and excellent nouelles, selected out of diuers good and commendable authors. By William Painter clarke of the ordinaunce and armarie. Imprinted at London, by [John Kingston and] Henry Denham, for Richard Tottell and William Iones [1566] (STC 19121); The second tome of the Palace of pleasure, conteyning store of goodly histories, tragicall matters, and other morall argument, very requisite for delighte and profit. Chosen and selected out of diuers good and commendable authors: by William Painter, clerke of the ordinance and armarie. Imprinted at London: in Pater Noster Rowe, by Henry Bynneman for Nicholas England [1567] (STC 19124). See Wright, Boccaccio in England, 156–61.

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Petrarchism was in its ascendence, beginning with the 1555 printing of Henry Parker, Lord Morley’s translation of the Trionfi, which was followed in 1557 by Tottel’s Miscellany, incorporating Surrey and Wyatt’s translations of Petrarch’s sonnets.40 Thomas Hoby’s 1561 translation of Castiglione’s Cortigiano likewise led to a craze for the Courtier.41 Boccaccio’s vernacular works are thus incorporated into this broader wave of Italian literary and cultural imports: the new English Boccaccio is made up of a hybrid of new attributes, culled from various literary traditions. His previous incarnation as the moralizing author of serious reference works remains, but is increasingly sidelined by his new characterization as Petrarch-esque poet laureate. (Boccaccio was never actually awarded this honour, although Petrarch was.) A further factor in Boccaccio’s developing presence in English print (and probably also derived from new cultural impulses towards Italianate and courtly models) is that the Italian and French languages were beginning to be studied for their own sakes around this time.42 The publication in this period of several Italian grammars, geared towards an anglophone readership, suggests that sixteenth-century English readers were indeed puzzling their way through the Italian canon.43 In fact, accessing the writings of Boccaccio – alongside those of the other two of the tre corone – was sometimes presented as the primary objective, as in the first of these grammars, William Thomas’s 1550 Principal Rules of the 40 The tryumphes of Fraunces Petrarcke, translated out of Italian into English by Henrye Parker knyght, Lorde Morley. The tryumphe of loue. of chastitie. Of death. Of fame. Of tyme. Of diuinitie. Printed at London: In Powles church-yarde at the sygne of the holy Ghost, by Iohn Cawood, prynter to the Quenes hyghnes, 1555 (STC 19811); Songes and sonettes written by the right honorable Lorde Henry Haward late Earle of Surrey, and other. Apud Richardum Tottel. Cum priuilegio ad imprimendum solum, 1557 (STC 13862). 41 The canonical study on this is Peter Burke, Fortunes of the Courtier (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). 42 See my article “Paratexts and Their Functions in Seventeenth-Century English Decamerons,” MLR, 102 (2007), 42–4. On French-language learning and the relative status of French and Italian in this period, see D.A. Kibbee, For to Speake Frenche Trewly: The French Language in England, 1000–1600: Its Status, Description and Instruction (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1991); an essential study of Italian-language learning is Jason Lawrence’s “Who the Devil Taught Thee So Much Italian?” Italian Language Learning and Literary Imitation in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). 43 For a detailed study of these instructional texts, see Lucilla Pizzoli, Le grammatiche di italiano per inglesi (1550–1776): Un’analisi linguistica (Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 2004).

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Italian Grammer with a Dictionarie for the Better Understandyng of Boccace, Petrarca, and Dante (STC 24020).44 The publication of Painter’s compilation in 1566 and 1567 must therefore be seen within this new context of cultural openness towards Italian and French models. It is an anthology of short stories of French and Italian origin, and a milestone in the English reception of Boccaccio: in addition to the tales from the Decameron, there are tales from other Italian novellieri such as Bandello and Straparola, French authors such as Marguerite de Navarre, Belleforest, and Boaistuau, and various classical authors. Painter’s translational practice demonstrates a development in the English engagement with the imported source text: like earlier translators, he used an intermediary text (Le Maçon’s 1545 French translation of the Decameron) but also consulted an Italian source text, in this case Ruscelli’s 1552 edition for Valgrisi.45 Wright has shown that Painter tends to rely more on the French version, again underlying the fundamental role that the French printing plays in English literary culture. Painter himself provides his sources in Volume 1 in a list of “Authors out of whome these Nouelles be selected, or which be remembred in diuers places of the same,” divided into first “Greek and Latine authors,” then “Italian, French and English” (vol. 1, fol. ¶¶¶2v); in Volume 2 this becomes “Authorities from whence these Nouels be collected: and in the same auouched” (vol. 2, fol. ***2v). The choice of tales is revealing, and can be seen to articulate a new positioning of Boccaccio. In volume 1 (1566) we find Day I, 3, 8, and 10; Day II, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8; Day III, 9; and Day IV, 1. Volume 2 (1567) contains Day I, 5; Day VIII, 7; Day X, 3, 4, 5, and 9. Taken together, the tales are largely instructive or exemplary in focus, with protagonists who overcome their misfortunes or antagonists through clever wordplay, quick thinking, or 44 T.G. Griffith, Avventure linguistiche del Cinquecento (Florence: Le Monnier, 1961), 53–80; John L. Lievsay, The Englishman’s Italian Books 1550–1700 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969), 6. 45 Wright has shown in a meticulous analysis that the French text was in fact the principal source for Painter: “The Indebtedness of Painter’s Translations from Boccaccio in ‘The Palace of Pleasure’ to the French version of Le Maçon,” MLR, 46 (1951), 431–5. It should be noted, however, that Robin Kirkpatrick believes Painter used the original Italian as his source, but makes no reference to Wright’s findings: English and Italian Literature from Dante to Shakespeare (London: Longman, 1995), 228, 242. On sixteenth-century translation practice and the use of multiple and intermediary translations, see Gordon Braden, “Translating Procedures in Theory and Practice,” in the Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, 89–100 (esp. 96–7 for Painter).

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noble behaviour. There is also a strong focus on virtue, generosity, and liberality, as seen, for example, in the final four tales taken from Day X. The selection also includes several tales with courtly love themes, although nothing too controversial or transgressive. (There are no tales of extramarital affairs, for example.) Of the tales previously in circulation, Painter includes only that of Ghismonda (IV, 1). Painter clearly felt that the Decameron was a potentially scandalous text whose dangers were best managed through his selective editorial hand: “Certayne haue I culled out of the Decamerone of Giouan Boccaccio wherein be contayned one hundred Nouelles, amongs which there be some (in my iudgement) that be worthy to be condempned to perpetuall prison, but of them suche haue I redemed to the liberty of our vulgar, as may be best liked, and better suffred” (fol. ¶¶3). Despite the nefarious tendencies of some parts of the Decameron, Boccaccio for him remains a scholar and great authority, who deserves to be read in England as elsewhere, since “the whole works of Boccaccio for his stile, order of writing, grauitie, and sententious discourse, is worthy of intire provulgation” (fol. ¶¶3). Painter’s Boccaccio, itself derived from the importation of the French cultural taste for the Italianate conte, thus represents a significant development in the English reception, which will govern the English translations that follow in his wake. The first of Boccaccio’s vernacular works to be translated and published as an independent entity appears in the same year as the second volume of Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, and is in fact published by the same printer, Henry Bynneman. This is the Thirteen Questions sequence from the Filocolo, which was published as A pleasaunt disport of diuers Noble Personages in 1567, with further editions in 1571, c. 1575, and 1587.46 The Filocolo is one of Boccaccio’s earliest works, written

46 STC 3180, reprinted in 1571 (STC 3181) and 1587 (STC 3182). On these editions, see Wright, Boccaccio in England, 101–3 and his article “The Elizabethan Translation of the ‘Questioni d’Amore’ in the ‘Filocolo,’” MLR, 36 (1941), 289–303. For the textual variants between these editions, see Wright, “Elizabethan Translation,” 294–5. The fundamental study on the sources and history of this sequence remains Pio Rajna, “L’episodio delle questioni d’amore nel Filocolo del Boccaccio,” Romania, 31 (1902), esp. 28–36. The existence of a further edition, probably printed around 1575 (STC 3181.5), has been conjectured from the printer’s device on a single leaf remaining from this copy, held at the British Library. Wright was not aware of the existence of this 1575 edition, although he suggests that an intermediary version was printed between 1571 and 1587, due to the number of additional errors in the final edition: see “Elizabethan Translation,” 296n1.

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probably between 1336 and 1338 when he was in his early twenties and living in Naples.47 It is a sprawling romance adventure in five books, a complex construction of multiple narrative levels and shifting temporalities that retells the story of Florio and Biancifiore, a romance originally of French derivation (Floire et Blanchefleur) that had flourished and circulated Europe-wide for two centuries. Boccaccio’s text is framed by the love story between the narrator and Fiammetta, set in present-day Naples; within that we find the major narrative of Florio and Biancifiore, whose enforced separation provides the principal plot as Florio travels in search of his lost beloved. The Thirteen Questions sequence is embedded within book IV, and corresponds to book IV, chapters 9, 3 to 72, 3 in the modern critical edition.48 Florio, now having renamed himself Filocolo, meaning “labour of love,” to better reflect his quest (IV, 5), is shipwrecked with his companions and forced to spend a winter near Naples. One day in spring, they overhear voices in a garden, and are invited by Fiammetta herself to join her court for a debate on the theme of love.49 Fiammetta is elected queen of the proceedings, and each member of the group takes it in turn to propose a question for debate on the subject of love; these questions range from the chaste (generally centred on how to distinguish between two or more potential lovers) to the racy (such as whether a young man should attempt to seduce a virgin, a married woman, or a widow). Several of the questions even take the form of short stories, which are related as a preface to the question for debate. As a small part of Boccaccio’s giant prose romance, this sequence is therefore structurally very distinct from the original. Like the macrotext, it is comprised of a frame narrative, within which are situated the individual microtexts: the thirteen questions asked of the queen by the 47 Two major studies on the Filocolo have been published in recent years: Victoria Kirkham’s Fabulous Vernacular: Boccaccio’s Filocolo and the Art of Medieval Fiction (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), and Roberta Morosini, “Per difetto rintegrare”: Una lettura del Filocolo di Giovanni Boccaccio (Ravenna: Longo, 2004). For an overview of the reception history of the text, see Kirkham, Fabulous Vernacular, 14–20, and for a discussion of the underlying structures of the Thirteen Questions, see her “Reckoning with Boccaccio’s Questioni d’Amore,” MLN, 89 (1974), 47–59, now reprinted as chap. 4 of Fabulous Vernacular. 48 Filocolo, ed. Antonio Enzo Quaglio, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca (Milan: Mondadori, 1964–98), 1:45–675. 49 Kirkham has highlighted the deliberate temporal inconsistency when Florio (ostensibly living in the sixth century) collides with contemporary fourteenth-century Naples: “Reckoning,” 50.

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members of her court in turn. The self-contained nature of this particular part of Florio’s endless adventures, and its inherent “extractability,” probably contributed to its publishing fate independent of the Filocolo, as Rajna was only the first to note.50 Furthermore, in a European receiving context that was increasingly dominated by the view that the Decameron was Boccaccio’s defining work, this episode, with its youthful noble court telling stories and enjoying a philosophically informed yet sometimes sexually explicit discussion, would conform very well to  the Boccaccian “horizon of expectation.” Indeed, two of the topics for  discussion in the Thirteen Questions also occur in the Decameron: Question IV, by Menedon, which is reprised as Dec., X, 5, and Question XIII, by Messalino, reprised as Dec., X, 4.51 If lettered English readers were accessing the Decameron in French and Italian editions, then they might already be presumed to have a taste for this material (although it should be noted that nowhere in the paratexts of the English Pleasaunt Disport is there any mention of the Decameron). More significant, perhaps, is the fact that the tale of the magic garden (X, 5) is included in Volume 2 of Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, published in the same year. (Indeed, the tale had a presence even earlier, albeit heavily adapted, as the source for Chaucer’s Franklin’s tale.) The two publications should therefore be understood to have a similar function as compilatory works made up of discrete narrative units on romantic themes. Moreover, the dialogic debate was a long-established and popular genre in both the French and, more recently, Italian literary traditions. The dialogic form is a sure point of convergence with more contemporary Italian texts, such as Castiglione’s Cortegiano, whose first English translation by Thomas Hoby had been published only a few years earlier in 1561. A more fundamental model for the Thirteen Questions sequence, however, can be found in French vernacular traditions, as we have seen, especially the courtly disputes upon erotic themes of the jeux partis.52 The dissemination of that sequence from its originating context in francophone Naples across the continent therefore exemplifies a truly transnational and multilingual romance (language) literary culture. As we saw in the first part of this chapter, the Thirteen Questions sequence was popular first in French, then in Spanish translation, published three

50 Rajna, “L’episodio,” 28. 51 Rajna, “L’episodio,” 34. 52 Rajna, “L’episodio,” 35. In this article, Rajna traces the sources for each the thirteen questions back to the Provençal Joc partit, Breton lays, and the fabliaux.

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times in French between 1530 and 1541 and four times in Spanish, in 1541, 1546, 1549, and 1553; the English translation thus represents a further localized interpretation of this emblematic romance text. Now, with the publication in 1566–7 of Painter’s translated European tales, and this extract from the Filocolo, the questioni d’amore genre asserts itself in the English medium as both a publishing genre and implicit reading practice, based on “the practice of telling stories which debate a series of knotty problems concerning love, designed to be picked apart by the stories’ recipients.”53 A close examination of the materiality of the translated book-object itself provides us with a way into the production context of this particular translation performance, and a point of meditation about the many textual and transmission trajectories that intersect in this volume. I have taken as my case study the copy held in the British Library, shelfmark C. 57. c. 35.54 The Pleasaunt disport is a small quarto volume, measuring approximately 19 cm by 14 cm, with a total of 56 numbered leaves for the text and 3 leaves of front matter. It contains a number of prefatory paratexts, original to the English edition – the title page, a dedicatory letter, and invocatory lyric – followed by the translated text itself. 55 The mise-en-page is varied, with an equal focus on decorative elements and usability for the reader (the distinction between the main text black-letter type and the roman type used for proper names, for example, is very useful to situate the reader in the text and breaks up the expanse of dense black type), and it also contains occasional marginal glosses, set in contrasting italic type.56 The physical appearance of the book – its size, typography, ornamental features, and scholarly aids such as the glosses – thus suggests an intended lettered audience rather than a popular one, although the predominance of black-letter type also provides an associative link to English vernacular production.57 A more detailed study of the editorial paratexts provides further evidence about the context in which this book was produced and the source texts for this translation. The title page reads: “A pleasaunt 53 Robert Maslen, “Realism,” in Braden, Cummings, and Gillespie, Oxford History of Literary Translation, 2:347–57 (354). 54 This is the copy photographed for the EEBO database. 55 All abbreviations have been silently expanded in citations from this edition, although original spelling has been preserved. 56 On the marginal glosses and headings, see Wright, “Elizabethan Translation,” 293–4. 57 On early modern typography and design, see Mark Bland, “The Appearance of the Text in Early Modern England,” TEXT, 11 (1998), 91–154.

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disport of diuers Noble Personages. Written in Italian by M. IOHN BOCACE Florentine and Poet Laureat: in his Boke vvhich is entituled PHILOCOPO. And now Englished by H.G.” Below the title is Bynneman’s decorated colophon and the imprint information: “¶Imprinted at London, in Pater Noster Row, at the signe of the Marmayd, by H. Bynneman, for Richard Smyth and Nicholas England. ANNO DOMINI 1567.”58 The title Pleasaunt disport echoes that of Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, also published by Bynneman, thereby suggesting a shared diversionary aim in the reading of instructive narratives. The cryptic reference to “H.G.” has led to some discussion over the identity of the translator, but Wright has shown that it was probably Henry Grantham, a teacher of Italian who would go on to translate Scipio Lentulo’s Italian grammar into English, published as a bilingual text in 1587.59 The subsequent editions of this translation (in 1571, 1575, and 1587) have a significant addition to the title, which now reads: “Thirtene most plesant and delectable Questions, entituled A disport of diuers noble personages Written in Italian by M. Iohn Bocace, Florentine and Poet Laureate, in his Booke named Philocopo.”60 The previous title is still present, indeed is highlighted by the use of “entituled,” but the new titular formulation creates a formal link to the previous French and Spanish translations, which could well have been circulating in England alongside the first edition of this translation. In the analysis that follows, all references are to the first (1567) edition unless otherwise stated. It seems likely that the translator worked in part from an Italian source text, probably Sansovino’s Venice edition of 1551 or its 1554 or 1564 reprints.61 Once again, however, other source texts for this English translation can be traced through France, since the paratexts and translated text of the English version show traces of both the 1530/31 Treize elegantes demandes damours and the full French translation of the Filocolo of 1542, Adrien Sevin’s Philocope.62 Indeed, the title paratexts of the 58 On Henry Bynneman, see Maureen Bell’s entry on him in the ODNB. 59 See Wright, “Elizabethan Translation,” 300–3. See also L.G. Kelly’s entry on Grantham in the ODNB. The translator’s name is given in the alternative spelling “Henry Granthan” in the Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, 515. 60 The title is transcribed here from the 1571 edition. 61 The source editions are meticulously identified in Wright, “Elizabethan Translation”; on the Italian source text see 291, 294. 62 On these translations, see Hauvette, Les plus anciennes traductions, 2–18. Wright stresses the importance of the Sevin edition to this translation, but believes “the English translator knew nothing of the French version of 1531” (“Elizabethan Translation,” 290).

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English editions may well reveal this transmission history: Sevin’s Philocope is re-Italianized in the 1567 edition (“in his Boke vvhich is entituled philocopo”), and the 1531 French title then re-emerges in the 1571 and 1587 reprints.63 None of the discursive paratexts are transmitted from either of the French source editions, and the English edition is relatively unencumbered by comparison.64 In his dedication to William Rice (fols. *2r–v), the translator claims a personal motivation for undertaking this task.65 In a very Boccaccian moment, he expresses his desire to show gratitude to dear friends who have helped him: In how much the thankful sorte are desirous (as reason vvilleth and experience daylie teacheth) to gratifie such their deare friendes, as to vvhome for sundrie good tournes and recyued benefits they are not a lyttle beholding, the sundrie dealing in vse and apparant to the vvorld, to the great prayse and commendation both of the one and the other gyueth a sufficient testimonie. (fol. *2r)

In return for favours granted, then, he has translated this book [s]o that, taking occasion therby to shevv the good vvil I haue, to pay in part the debt many yeares due, for that your bountie tovvardes me (the least sparke vvhereof I am vnable to satisfie:) I do give vnto you this italian Disporte, the vvhich I have tourned out of his natiue attyre into this our english habite, to the end the same maie be no lesse familiar to you and to such others (for your sake) as shall vouchsafe thereof, than it is

63 Wright considers that the presence of the title Philocopo signals only the Italian source text: “Elizabethan Translation,” 290. 64 For example, the 1531 edition contains the printer’s privilege (“Privilege pour le present livre” / Privilege for the present book; fols. 2r– 2v); a prologue (“A celle qui merite tiltre de seulle parfaicte cordial salut & entiere amytie”; To her who deserves the title of only perfect lady, cordial greetings and complete friendship), signed “Le serviteur” (your servant; fols. 3r– 6r); and a table of contents (fols. 6v– 8v). The 1542 edition (a large folio) contains a superabundance of texts: the privilege (“Signé par le Roy”; Signed by the King; fol. a1v); four dedicatory poems in praise of Boccaccio and the translator (fols. a2r–a2v); and a dedicatory “Epistre du Traslateur” (Translator’s Letter) to Madame Claude de Rohan from Adrien Sevin (fols. a3v–a6v). 65 I have not been able to find any information on Rice, but Grantham’s use of the honorific “Right worshippful,” typically used in the sixteenth century to address a mayor or magistrate, may give some indication of his status.

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eyther to the italian or the french: and desire that the same may march abrode vnder your charge. (fol. *2r)

Rather than underlining its generic content, the translator aims to insert this work into late sixteenth-century English book culture: the content of the book has been translated precisely so that the anglophone audience may access it in the way that Italian and French readerships have done already, for cultured dialogic debate. (Though, of course, Italian-language readerships had not actually accessed the Thirteen Questions sequence as an independent entity in print.) Although the translator implies he has worked from the original, both here and on the title page, his French source editions are none the less obliquely acknowledged by their mention here. In common with contemporary prose conventions, the book is presented as a diverting yet instructive text, which will offer good examples to emulate: Not doubting but as the reading thereof shal bring pleasure and delight: so the matter being thervvithall duely considered shall gyve sundrie profitable Lessons meete to be followed. (fol. *2r)

Strikingly, although the Pleasaunt disport is promoted on its title page as a European romance, with references to contemporary Italianate associations, the translator now authorizes his work through reference to Boccaccio’s Latin scholarly works: And bycause the name of the Author (being of no smal credit vvith the Learned, for those his sundry vvell vvritten vvorkes) is of it selfe sufficient to carrie greater commendation therevvyth than my Pen is able to write, I leaue to labour therin, least my lacke may be an occasion to the leesing of his due prayse. (fols. *2r–v)

The epistle finishes with the conventional expression that the dedicatee will accept this book, and a very pious closing sentence, “I betake you to the tuition of mighty God, who [...] after this life make you possessor of those ioyes vvhereof vve all hope to be partakers” (fol. *2v). Below the epistle is a poem, “The Booke to the Reader,” an unusual feature that is the only example of this type of paratextual device in all of the early modern English editions of Boccaccio. Although the poem is not a direct translation of any of these, it may well be inspired by the

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example of the four dedicatory poems included in the editions of Sevin’s 1542 French translation of the Filocolo.66 The principal theme, articulated by the book itself, is the application of good judgment though reading, and thus refers to the text to follow, a supposition reinforced by further references to courtly behaviour, “good or lewde” choices, and the pleasure of reading. However, unlike the French prefatory poems, no specific mention is made of Boccaccio, his book, or his translator, and so we cannot know definitively whether the poem was written specifically to introduce this work by the translator, or whether it was a conventional paratextual device, perhaps inserted by the editor to aggrandize the translated text. It reads, in Italic type: Loke ere thou leape, dome [judge] not by viewe of face Least hast make wast, in myssedoming [misjudging] the case: For I teach not to Love, ne yet his lore, Ne with what salve is cured such a sore: But I the carke with cares that thereby happs, The blysse with ioyes, the storms with thunderclapps. The curtesies, where most his force is shewde, The choice of best, be it of good or lewde, Compare them so, as domed is the doubt Thereof, and aye the truth well sifted out: The which to reade such pleasure thou shalt finde As may content a well dysposed minde.

(fol. *2v)

However, while the prefatory paratexts are deliberately orientated towards the English audience, further into the book we find a different story. The target text and its accompanying organizational paratexts reveal that in fact the translator or the other agents involved in the production of the book availed themselves of two different French source editions, in addition to an Italian source edition. Wright’s assertion that this English translation was not related to the French 1531 edition must therefore be questioned, since a close comparison of the translator’s source and target texts suggests that there is in fact a link to this

66 Ruth Mortimer notes that one of the verses (fol. a2v) in the 1542 French edition of the Filocolo is attributed to Nicholas de Herberay, the translator of the Amadis: Mortimer, Harvard College Library Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Catalogue of Books and Manuscripts. Part I: French Sixteenth Century Books (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1964), 1:137.

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version.67 In general, the liminal areas of any translated text are often sites that reveal aspects of the transmission history and translation process, and since there is no Italian printed source text of the abridged Thirteen Question sequence, it makes sense to see whether the opening passage is of the English translator’s invention, or is instead derived from the source editions. The text of the English version begins in medias res, with Florio and his shipmates sailing into peril on a dark and stormy night: Florio surnamed Philocopo, accompanied wyth the Duke Montorio, Ascalion, Menedon & Massalino, in sayling to seeke hys Friende Biancofiore, was thorow a very obscure and darke night, by the fierce winds, driuen into gret dangers, but the perilles beeing once passed, they were cast into the Porte of the auncient parthenope, whereas, of the Mariners, (espying themselues in Haven) he receiued comfort, not knowing into what coast Fortune had forced him, yealded thankes to his Gods. And so tarried the newe day, the which after it once appeared, the place was of the Mariners discried, so that they all glad of suretie & of so acceptable arriuall, came a shoare. Philocopo with hys companions, who rather seemed to come forth new risen againe out of their Sepultures, than dysbarked from ship, loked back towardes the waywarde waters, and repeating in themselves the passed perilles of the spente night, coulde yet scarcely think themselves in suretie. (fols. Ai–Aiv)

Neither Adrien Sevin’s 1542 French translation nor Wright’s proposed Italian source text contains this situating statement, for the very basic reason that this episode is integrated into the full narrative. The Sevin text begins to correspond to the English version in paragraph 2 of fol. R1v (the verso of page XCVII): E tant que la nef quasi en pieces & submergée, fut auant le point du iour iectée au port de l’ancienne Parthenope, ou les mariniers se voyans en seureté l’ancrerent ainsi rompue qu’elle estoit, & eulx aucunement reconfortez & non sçachans ou fortune les eust renduz, en rendirent graces aux dieux. Puis si tost qu’il fut clair iour, Philocope & ses compaignons qui sembloient estre sortis du tumbeau, se voyans seurement descendirent à

67 “From all this evidence it is obvious that there is no connexion between A pleasaunt disport and the French translation of 1531”: Wright, “Elizabethan Translation,” 292.

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terre en deues & devotes oraisons, sacrifices & oblations, tousiours pensans à leur perilz passez. (fol. Rv)68 And as the ship was nearly broken up and sunk, before dawn it was cast into the port of ancient Parthenope, where the sailors finding themselves in safety, anchored her, as broken as she was, and they were consoled to some extent, not knowing where fortune had delivered then, and gave thanks to the gods. Then as soon as it was light, Philocope and his companions, who seemed to have emerged from the grave, finding themselves in safety, landed with divers and devoted prayers, sacrifices and offerings, all the while thinking of their past perils.

Certain translational choices of key words and pairs (italicized in both extracts) indicate that this is a primary source for the English text: for example, “Mariners” | “mariniers”; “in suretie” | “en seureté”; “passed perilles” | “perilz passez,” etc.69 However, the sense is quite different in certain places, and the key opening statement is absent

68 All contractions have been silently expanded in these citations from the French and Italian editions. 69 A comparison with the Italian text of the 1551 Sansovino edition shows that the English lexical choices tend to follow the French rendering, rather than the source Italian: “Mentre queste cose cosi andavano, la nave portata da poderosi venti senza alcuno gouernamento, prima che giorno apparisse da alcuna parte, ne porti della antica Parthenope fu gittata quasi vicina a gli ultimi suoi danni, e quivi da marinari che vedendosi in porto ripresero conforto, cosi spezzata dalle bande e fracassata in sicuro luogo dall’ancore fu fermata, e aspettarono il nuovo giorno, ringrattando gli Iddij, non sapendo in che parte la fortuna gli hauesse balestrati. Poi che il giorno apparue il luogo fu conosciuto da marinari, & contenti d’essere in sicura et gratiosa parte discesero a terra. Filocopo et suoi compagni, liquali piu tosto dalla sepoltura risuscitati pareuano uscire, che dalla naue, scesi a terra, e rimirando verso le crucciate acque, repetendo in se medesimi e passati pericoli della passata notte appena pareua loro potere essere sicuri, & ringratiando gli iddij, che da tal corso recati gli haueano a salute offersero loro pietosi sacrificij, et cominciaronsi a confortare” (fols. BB1v–BB2r). (And while all this was going on, the ship (carried uncontrollably by the heavy winds) was cast by the fierce blasts into the harbor of old Parthenope before the day had appeared on any side, seemingly close to its final destruction; and there the mariners, once they saw they were in port and had taken comfort from this, secured it with its anchor in a safe location, all buffetted and broken by the blasts. Thanking the gods, they awaited the new day, not knowing in what region fortune had cast them.) Translation taken from Il Filocolo, trans. Donald Cheney with the collaboration of Thomas G. Bergin (New York: Garland, 1985).

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from the English rendering. For this, we must return to the 1531 French translation, despite Wright’s assertion that is not a direct source: Navigant Florio surnomme Philocolo et cherchant samye Blanchefleur acompaigne du duc Montour/Ascaleon/Menedon & Mavalino fut par une tresobscure nuyct gecte des fiers ventz et quasi proches a ses derreniers dangiers/devans le port de lancienne Parthenope / auquel lieu attendit le iour: Lequel venu fut par les mariniers le lieu recongneu Et lors descendit Philocolo auec ses compaignons: lesquelz plus tost de la sepulture ressuscitez sembloient sortir/ que de la nef. (fol. A1r) Florio, nicknamed Philocolo, sailing in search of his lady Blanchefleur, accompanied by the Duke of Montour/Ascaleon/Menedon & Mavalino, cast about by the fierce winds one pitch black night, in a situation verging on mortal peril, was driven to the port of ancient Parthenope, where he waited for dawn. When this came, the sailors recognized the place. And then Philocolo and his companions came ashore: they seemed to have emerged from their tombs rather than from the ship.

It is immediately clear that this French text of 1531 is abridged compared to the later translation of 1542, and that this anonymous translator has invented an opening phrase to situate the protagonist and his companions. The English translator has therefore combined elements of the two French editions: the introductory scene-setting line invented for the earliest version, and the more discursive prose of Sevin’s translation, which is itself a more accurate rendering of the Italian, although still abridged.70 In addition to these strong textual links between the 1531 French edition and the English version, the mise-en-page of the two books at this initial moment also show marked similarities. The size, black-letter type, and layout are alike, and in both cases the text begins with a large decorated capital letter: a floriated N for the French and a large historiated

70 In establishing the source texts, Wright notes that the English translator has a reference “to Dionysius the tyraunt” (fol. Niiv), replicating an error in the 1551 Italian edition, which reads “al tiranno Dionisio.” The reference is actually to the brother of Dionysius, which the first French edition renders correctly (1531, fol. H7v); the 1542 French translation also has the reference “au tyrant Dyonisius” (fol. X): Wright, “Elizabethan Translation,” 292.

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F  for the English version. The most significant correspondence, however, lies in the titular rubrics at the head of the page, which read: Prologue au liure des treize questions | damour/composees en uulgaire italien | par Jehan Bocace poete florentin / et | puis nagueres traduictes en francoys. (fol. A1r) Prologue to the book of the thirteen questions of love, composed in the Italian vernacular by Jehan Bocace the Florentine poet, and now translated into French. The Prologue to the .xiii | Questions, composed in Ita- | lian, by M. Iohn Bocace, Flo- | rentine, and Poet Laureat: | And nowe turned into English | by H.G. (fol. A1r)

There are some differences: the English text substitutes “English” for the French translation, and changes “poete florentin” to “Florentine, and Poet Laureat.” The mention of Boccaccio’s supposed poetic laureation does not occur in the titles of the French editions. Meanwhile, other paratextual features, such as the chapter titles and marginal glosses, show a strong dependence on the 1542 French translation by Sevin, and so we can see that the paratextual features and target text of this translated book speak of no fewer than three source texts in two languages, and by extension, three different localized production contexts in France and Italy. The English book thus captures multiple trajectories and moments in Boccaccio’s reception history, including the first print manifestations of the Thirteen Questions tradition in Paris, in 1531; the great French romance translation projects of the 1540s, expressed in Janot’s folio Philocope (itself including repurposed Amadis woodcuts); and the many editions of Boccaccio printed in Venice in the 1540s and 1550s. Finally, the marginalia in the British Library copy provide some information about what kind of reader owned this book. This copy was the property of Myles Blomefylde (1525–1603), who was a “medical practitioner and alchemist.”71 His name is signed on the first title page, and again at the end of the translator’s epistle, this time in capitals

71 Robert M. Schuler, “Blomefylde, Myles,” in the ODNB.

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and with his occupation – “Physition” – appended.72 Inasmuch as one reader is typical of a readership, this would suggest that the Pleasaunt disport was being read by the professional middle classes, those who were well educated but not of the professional literary classes. Myles Blomefylde seems to have attended, but not graduated from, St John’s College, Cambridge, and made at least one trip to Italy, in 1568. His purchase of the book, if it took place at the time of publication, may well have been part of a program of Italianate reading in advance of (or during) his trip. Grantham’s translation of the Pleasaunt Disport is therefore an entirely representative example of translation practice in the later sixteenth century, and embodies the hybrid romance linguistic context in which it was produced. Culturally, it is a product of the burgeoning Francophilia and Italophilia of the early part of Elizabeth’s reign, where the two linguistic cultures were in some senses understood as related, or even interchangeable. Scholars seemed to operate equally well across the two languages; language tutors often taught the two together; readers would use French texts to access Italian culture, and no sense of linguistic purity or authenticity as we would understand it today operated in the world of translations where multiple sources were used together. The practical “closeness” in the uses of the two languages is reflected in the conflation of their literatures in the understanding of the period. This cultural traffic between France and Italy and back again had of course been common from the early medieval period onward, and Boccaccio himself participated fully in it in his Neapolitan period. The French mediation of Italian culture to England was likewise a longestablished trend, and from this perspective, the Pleasaunt Disport merely continues what has gone before. The 1580s: Amorous Fiammetta A new Boccaccio translation was published in 1587, the same year as the fourth and final edition of the Thirteen Questions.73 This is the English

72 This is the copy reproduced on EEBO, although the black-and-white image cannot do justice to his flourishes in red ink. 73 For a detailed discussion of this edition, see my essay “The Framing of Fiammetta: Gender, Authorship, and Voice in an Elizabethan Translation of Boccaccio,” in Elizabethan Translation and Literary Culture, ed. Gabriela Schmidt (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 299–339.

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translation of the Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, translated by Bartholemew Young and published as Amorous Fiammetta.74 Young (c. 1560–1612) was a member of a prominent recusant family, and spent some time in Spain with family members between 1578 and 1580, returning to legal studies at the New Inn, where he was noted for his linguistic competence in theatrical productions in French and Spanish. He was admitted to the Middle Temple in 1582, around which time he embarked on his first major translation, Montemayor’s pastoral romance Diana, translated from the Spanish (STC 18044), which was finally published in 1598. His next translation was from Italian, the fourth book of Stefano Guazzo’s Civil Conversation (STC 12423), which was published in 1586. The Fiammetta is his final known translation. Among Boccaccio’s late sixteenth-century translators he is unusual in that he seems to have worked primarily from an original Italian source text, as is shown by the presence of paratexts from Italian editions in his English translation.75 The Fiammetta is thought to have been written in the first part of Boccaccio’s career before the completion of the Decameron, perhaps about 1343–4.76 Set in the same Neapolitan-inflected courtly milieu familiar from other works such as the Filocolo, it is in fact likely that it was written on his return from Naples to Florence, and may be seen as a re-evocation of this courtly literary-cultural world. The Fiammetta became enormously popular both in Italy and beyond, appealing to a mixed audience that encompassed both educated humanist readers, attracted by its elegance and erudition, and less scholarly ones. The text

74 STC 3179. On this translation, see Wright, Boccaccio in England, 105–8. Young’s translation can be found in a modernized version in Giovanni Boccaccio, Amorous Fiammetta (London: Navarre Society, 1926), itself discussed in chapter 6 of this book. For Young’s biography, see Edward Hutton’s introduction to this text, xxxv– xl; T. Harrison, “Bartholemew Yong, Translator,” MLR, 21 (1926), 129–39; L.G. Kelly’s entry on him in the ODNB; and now the “biographical sketch” by Robert Cummings in Braden, Cummings, and Gillespie, Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, 2:470. 75 On the possible source texts for this edition, see Wright, “The Italian Edition of Boccaccio’s Fiammetta used by Bartholemew Young,” MLR, 38 (1943), 339–40. 76 On the dating, see Carlo Delcorno’s introduction to his critical edition Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, in Branca, Tutte le opere, 5.ii (1994), 1–412 (3). The primary critical study on the Fiammetta remains Janet Smarr, Boccaccio and Fiammetta: the Narrator as Lover (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986). Recent feminist scholarship on Boccaccio has also sought to explore this subject; for an introduction to this field, see Thomas C. Stillinger and Regina F. Psaki, eds., Boccaccio and Feminist Criticism (Chapel Hill: Studi e testi di Annali d’Italianistica, 2006).

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became influential as a literary romance narrative and as a model of prose excellence, probably reaching its apex of popularity in the sixteenth century, and we have already seen in the first part of this chapter how French and Spanish printers published a number of translations and continuations for their readerships.77 From a contemporary source in the 1580s, it seems as though the Fiammetta was being read in England even before its English translation was published: a letter from “N.W.” to the author, and published as part of the prefatory matter in Samuel Daniel’s translation of Paolo Giovio’s emblem book, The Worthy Tract of Paulus Iouius (1585), contrasts this worthy enterprise with other types of reading matter: For if Courtiers are inwardly rauished in vewing the Picture of Fiametta which Boccace limned. If Ladies entertaine Bandel or Ariosto in their Closets. If Louers imbrace their Phisition Ouid in extremitie of their passion: then will Gentlemen of all tribes, much rather honor your Impresa, as a most rare Iewell, and delicate Enchiridion. (fols. *4v–*5r)78

This snapshot of the Fiammetta and other translated romance texts in their English readerships signals the grounds on which these imported texts were valued by contemporary audiences, that is, as a private reading experience through which to explore the emotional landscape of love in various prose genres. In all these cases, the analogies drawn are to private, intimate encounters: the “inwardly ravished” courtier uses the Fiammetta as an exploration of the interiorized rhetoric of the emotions; the chivalric, even lurid narratives of Ariosto and Bandello are consumed by ladies in their “closets” (echoing a typical plot device of such tales), and lovers turn to the classical “Physition” of the erotic, Ovid, for an explanation of their symptoms. More pragmatically, Wright ascribes this courtly enthusiasm for the Fiammetta to the publication in Paris of Gabriel Chappuys’s bilingual Fiammetta in the same year: La Fiammette amoureuse de M. Iean Bocace Gentil-homme Florentin: Contentant, d’une invention gentile, toutes les plainctes et paßions d’amour

77 For a summary of the reception history of the Fiammetta, see Delcorno, “Introduzione,” in Elegia, 17–21. 78 STC 11900. This allusion is noted in Wright, although he attributes the quote to Paulus Iovius himself: Boccaccio in England, 105. Daniel’s source text is Giovio’s Ragionamento sopra i motti, & disegni d’arme, & d’amore, che comunemente chiamano imprese, first published 1556 (Venice: Giordano Ziletti).

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(Amorous Fiammetta of M. Iean Boccace Florentine Gentleman: Containing, by his genteel invention, all the laments and passions of love). This Fiammetta had an explicitly autodidactic aim: “Faicte Françoise & Italienne, pour l’vtilité de ceux qui desirent apprendre les deux langues, par G. C. D. T.” (Made in French and Italian, for the benefit of those who wish to learn the two languages, by G. C. D. T.)79 This new and accessible bilingual edition may well have been available in London for those elite readers seeking to participate in Franco- and Italophile literary culture, and its publication could have provided the impetus for Young’s own translation. The English translation may even have served a dual utilitarian purpose: as a handbook for the emotions and a crib for the aspirant language learner armed with the Chappuys bilingual edition. However, even if the Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta was known as a text in those elite readerships that could access French and Italian editions of Boccaccio, we should not forget the fact that “Fiammetta” as a character was also well known to the English readership of the various editions of the Thirteen Questions, which had circulated in England for the best part of two decades by the mid-1580s. “Fiammetta” would be known as the queen of the courtly love debate (as well as a character in the Decameron for those who had read it in French or Italian), and thus the publication of a “sequel,” told in the voice of Boccaccio’s famed beloved, would be a tempting prospect for the anglophone romance readership. Once again, as we saw for the 1567 Pleasaunt Disport, the translated book-object reveals the coordinates of its transmission history. Like its predecessor, the English Fiammetta is a small quarto volume, printed in signatures of four. The copy consulted at the British Library (shelfmark C.57.b.46) measures about 13 cm by 17 cm and has been heavily cropped for binding so that the upper headings and page numbers are not always legible.80 Its richly informative title page is highly revealing of the late sixteenth-century reception of the English Boccaccio (figure 4):

79 La Fiammette amoureuse de M. Iean Bocace Gentil-homme Florentin: Contentant, d’une invention gentile, toutes les plainctes et paßions d’amour (Paris: Abel l’Angelier, 1585). British Library C. 97.a.10. 80 British Library C.57.b.46. The binding is later: the spine reads “boccace’s | amorous | fiammetta | by yonge | mdlxxxvii.” The Bodleian copy (Douce BB 387) is larger, measuring approximately 20 x 15 cm.

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Amorous Fiammetta. Wherein is sette downe a catologue of all and singuler passions of Loue and iealousie, incident to an enamored yong Gentlewoman, with a notable caueat for all women to eschewe deceitfull and wicked Loue, by an apparant example of a Neapolitan Lady, her approued & long miseries, and wyth many sounde dehortations from the same. First written in Italian by Master Iohn Boccace, the learned Florentine, and Poet Laureat. And now done into English by B. Giouano del M. Temp. With notes in the Margine, and with a Table in the ende of the cheefest matters contayned in it. Bel fine fa, chi ben amando muore. Petrar: Lib. 10. Sonnetto. 110. At London: Printed by I. C. for Thomas Gubbin and Thomas Newman. (fol. *1r)81

Boccaccio’s translated text is framed within the book-object by a graduated series of paratextual elements, some carried over from the source editions and translated into English and others prepared directly for the English production context.82 The front matter comprises the title page, followed by two dedications: an “Epistle Dedicatory” “To the Right worshipfull and vertuous Gentleman, Sir VVilliam Hatton Knight” (fols. *2r–v) and a second “To the noble and gallant dames of the Cittie of Castale [sic] in Mon: Ferrato Gabriel Giolito” (fols. *3r–v), a translation of the Venetian publisher Gabriele Giolito’s preface to his own Italian editions of this text. The volume also includes translations of the glosses and table of contents from the source Giolito edition. The closing paratextual elements are as strategic as the opening ones; the book ends with three distinct notices: “The ende of the table,” a French epigram, and a date in Italian, mistakenly reversed, “Il decimo l’Anno terzo d’Aprile. 1587.”83 Taking the book as a whole, both the choice of text to be translated and the careful mise-en-page of this edition are suggestive of editorial aspirations and generic positioning. Decorative borders are used throughout at the head of every distinct section; each title is laid out as a tapering triangle, and each section begins with a decorated capital letter. A variety of types are used for different sections of the book: the bookseller’s dedication is set in italic, while the second

81 The date is missing from the British Library copy, but appears on the Huntington Library copy photographed for EEBO. “I. C.” is identified as John Charlewood. 82 I explore the effects and interrelations of these different nested frames in my essay “The Framing of Fiammetta.” 83 Harrison notes that the date should read “Il decimo terzo d’Aprile l’Anno 1587” (“Bartholemew Yong, Translator,” 135).

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dedicatory paratext by Giolito is set in roman type; the text of the Fiammetta itself is set in small black-letter characters, with marginal notes in roman. The overall effect is very similar to the form established in the first “new” English Boccaccio translation, the Pleasaunt Disport, and as we will see, this generic book style will endure into the 1590s and the last translation to be discussed in this chapter.84 By reference to paratextual features and textual variants, Wright has demonstrated that Young’s source text was probably either the 1558 or 1565 Giolito edition of the Fiammetta. The earliest French editions of the Fiammetta were heavily abridged, containing only the first six books of the total of nine, and hence omitting a substantial amount of mythological material.85 This English translation renders the whole text, albeit reorganized into seven books rather than nine, and so is textually unrelated to the 1530s editions. Wright rules out any reliance on Chappuys’s 1585 bilingual edition on the ground that the latter does not contain the text of Giolito’s dedication to the ladies of Città di Casale, translated and included in the English version, but I have found some paratextual correspondences that may suggest the 1585 French edition had some influence on the English one. Like Wright’s proposed source Italian editions, the Chappuys edition is also organized in seven books, and framed with Fiammetta’s prologue and closing address. A comparison of the paratexts of the two proposed Italian source editions of 1558 and 1565 with the 1585 bilingual Paris edition and the 1587 English Fiammetta, however, reveals some interesting evidence. In all of the editions, the prologue and conclusion are both voiced by and labelled as being by Fiammetta. The English rendering reads: “The Authour His Prologue: Fiammetta speaketh” (fol. *4) and “Fiammetta speaketh to Her Booke” (fol. Jj1r). The two proposed Giolito source editions have the same pagination, and both have the same headers “PROLOGO. LA FIAMMETTA PARLA” (at fol. A4r), and “LA | FIAMMETTA | AL SVO LIBRO” (at fol. Or). However, the 1585 facingpage Italian and French edition has different headings in the two versions. Here we find on the verso (Italian) side “PROLOGO, LA FIAMMETTA PARLA” (fol. *3v), the same as the Italian source editions,

84 For example, the opening formulation of the dedication of the Fiammetta (“To the right worshipfull and vertuous Gentleman”) recalls closely the wording of the Pleasaunt Disport’s dedication, in what is perhaps deliberate imitation. 85 Hauvette, Les plus anciennes traductions, 34–5; Kemp, “Les éditions parisiennes,” 250.

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and on the recto (French) side “AVANT-PROPOS DE L’AVTEUR. LA FIAMMETTE PARLE” (fol. *4r). To my knowledge, this is the only Fiammetta in French or Italian that makes this reference to the author, which suggests that someone involved in the production of the book (i.e., Young, or perhaps the printer) may have used it as the basis for his title for this section in the English translation. Although this is merely a  single example of a textual variant, given the common sixteenthcentury translation practice of using multiple source texts in several languages, it seems as though this does nonetheless provide evidence of another source edition. Young himself may not have needed an intermediary French text like some of the other Boccaccio translators, but either he or the printer probably drew on this edition for an element of the organizational paratexts of the English book. Indeed, if the book was intended to serve as an English crib to accompany the bilingual French edition, perhaps for language-learning purposes, then such a title would be a helpful navigational device to link the two books and three languages. The paratexts of this translation also show how the English reception of Boccaccio had evolved since the 1560s incarnation embodied in the Pleasaunt Disport. The publication of a fourth edition of the Thirteen Questions in the same year as this translation is the first indication that there was a renewal of interest in him; the development in genre, however, between codified courtly disputes and the tragic love story of Fiammetta suggests that slightly different narrative concerns are now at play. The lengthily discursive title page advertises this up front with its insistence on the erotic theme: it is a “catologue” of all the emotions (chiefly negative) associated with the passions. The text is ripe with the signifiers of romance: the protagonist is “amorous” and “enamored,” she is of the upper classes, a “yong Gentlewoman,” a “Lady.” The Italian-ness of the work is also stressed, and valorizes two particular and distinct Italian literary traditions. First, the setting is Naples, on the Mediterranean coast of Italy, an emblematic site for the romance narrative. Second, the text was written in Italian (thereby providing further authenticity as a romance document), by a native of another renowned literary city. Boccaccio’s name, meanwhile, is given in its French form, and he is presented simultaneously as humanist (“learned”) and poetic authority. His description as “learned Florentine, and Poet Laureat,” in fact, would be a more accurate description of Petrarch, and it seems likely that the intention is to present Boccaccio as an authority on the thematics of love precisely after the example of Petrarch. Indeed, the

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English Fiammetta is overtly framed by a citation from one of Petrarch’s sonnets, a line repeated three times in three languages, first on the title page in the original Italian, then as an epigram at the end of the translation in Spanish (fol. Jj3v), and once again in French at the end of the closing table of contents (fol. KK3v).86 A final note of superimposed “Italian” authenticity can be seen in the translator’s punning self-presentation (or the editor’s presentation) of Bartholemew Young as “B. Giouano del M. Temp,” a reference to his legal studies in the Middle Temple.87 In addition to its appeal as a tragic romance, the title page also underlines the moral usefulness of the text by advertising the presence of Giolito’s admonition to his ostensible female dedicatees, the “notable caueat for all women to eschewe deceitfull and wicked Loue,” although simultaneously providing enough titillating detail about Fiammetta’s miseries to entice the romance reader. The other prefatory paratexts serve to promote this translation in similar terms. The Epistle Dedicatory, unusually, is not written by the translator but by the bookseller, Thomas Newman.88 Here he reiterates the wording from the title page, describing the text as “a peece of worke worthy the wearing, in that it sheweth the manner how to eschew deceitfull & wicked loue” (fol. *2v): For beeing greatly indebted to my honourable good lord by duety, for the first payment I offer although not mine owne labours, to you his honours worthy Nephue, this small pamphlet of M. Iohn Boccace a famous Poet, and translated by M. Bartholemewe Young of the middle temple, a peece of worke worthy the wearing, in that it sheweth the manner howe to eschew deceitfull & wicked loue: which considered although wisdome

86 “Bueno fin haze, el qual bien a-| mando muera”; “Il faite bon fin qui meurt pour | bien aymer.” The quotation is from the last line of Petrarch’s sonnet 140, “Amor, che nel pensier mio vive e regna.” 87 Harrison notes that “the translator’s whim of thus italianizing his name deceived Warton, who writes in his History of Engl. Poetry, III, 467: ‘Boccace’s Fiametta was translated by an Italian who seems to have borne some office about the court’” (“Bartholemew Yong, Translator,” 135). 88 On Newman, see his entry in the ODNB by H.R. Tedder, rev. Anita McConnell. Hatton was the nephew of Sir Christopher Hatton, a prominent courtier and favourite of Elizabeth I; Wright suggests that the translation was thus “thought likely to appeal to cultured and influential circles”: Boccaccio in England, 106. See also Harrison, “Bartholemew Yong, Translator,” 135.

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willed me to goe (non Vltra crepidam) I thought good to present this pamphlet under your worships protection. (fol. *2v)

The publisher offers this work to his dedicatee, while acknowledging the fact that it is not quite “mine owne labours” (i.e., that it is the work of Boccaccio and the translator). Ironically, close textual investigation shows that even the dedication is not the bookseller’s “owne labours,” as it is in fact plagiarized from two of Robert Greene’s Epistles Dedicatorie; only the passage quoted above is original to this bookobject.89 However, this short passage itself is a valuable statement of editorial intentions: the book is referred to as a “small pamphlet,” which may be a simple manifestation of the modesty topos, but might also refer literally to the size of the volume and its relatively small dimensions. Boccaccio is both anglicized and gallicized here as “Iohn Boccace,” and is presented only as a “famous poet.” From this we may be able to deduce that Boccaccio’s literary reputation had definitively mutated by this point from Latin scholar to vernacular author. The fact that this single paragraph is simply embedded in a conventional romance dedication discourse culled from Greene can be seen to stand for the way in which Boccaccio’s elegiac romance is simply inserted into wider English realistic prose narrative of the 1580s. This translated book-object therefore benefits from a localized generic romance positioning: in its quarto format, the standard for such subject matter; in the statements of its affective utility as articulated on the title page and first dedication; and via other elements such as the paratextual associations with Petrarch. Newman’s epistle is followed by a second prefatory text repurposed from a different linguistic context: the dedication written by or on behalf of Gabriel Giolito, first published in his 1542 edition of the Fiammetta, where it addressed a quite different constituency.90 The motivation for “translating” (in both its linguistic and spatial sense) this 89 On this, see my “Framing of Fiammetta,” 326–7. 90 In fact, the dedication was probably composed by someone else (likely Giolito’s editor Lodovico Dolce), since the publisher himself was unlikely to have had such rhetorical facility in writing. However, it seems probable that his dedications do express his wishes. I therefore refer to the author as “Giolito” throughout this section. On this, see Angela Nuovo and Christian Coppens, I Giolito e la stampa nell’Italia del XVI secolo (Geneva: Droz, 2005), 102. For more information on the Italian editorial history of the Fiammetta in the sixteenth century, see my “Framing of Fiammetta.”

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editorial paratext is immediately clear: the text offers, first, a formal dedication to a specific constituency of aristocratic female readers, much like Fiammetta’s own nominated audience in the authorial prologue and conclusion (“the noble and gallant Dames of the Cittie of Castale in Mon Ferrato”), and, second, provides an instructive context in which it can be read.91 Its translation and inclusion here suggests that Young, or perhaps the publishers, felt that its extratextual functions were equally applicable to the English receiving context. This text presents an instructive context in which the text can be read by female readers, supplying a useful defence against the morally dubious consequences of reading frivolous romances. Notably, in comparison to the previous dedication, this one offers a sustained discussion of the work it accompanies, and privileges this discussion over the personal appeal to the readers (which comes at the end of the piece, rather than at the beginning as in the Newman text). The dedication also provides a much less qualified praise of Boccaccio and his works than that offered by Newman, and it serves – by force of its position alone – to present the book in the most favourable light. Furthermore, its inclusion may indicate a direct appeal to an English “female” readership. Giolito tells his female readership how precious this text should be to them in particular: Amongst the finest and vulgare prose of that most excellent & learned Clarke, master Iohn Boccace, wrytten for your profit and consolation, there is none (moste noble Ladies) which you ought to hold more deere, and esteeme more precious, then this present worke, intituled (Amorous Fiammetta). Because contayning in it the sighes, the teares, & prolonged miseries of an enamoured yong Gentlewoman forsaken of her Lover, who doth not conceive this very same to be set foorth as a soveraigne example, and sole instruction for you all. (fol. *3r)

Giolito’s dedication, however, seems to undermine playfully the moralizing directives of this first phrase: the book should not put

91 On Giolito’s fictional and actual female readerships, see Androniki Dialeti, “The Publisher Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, Female Readers and the Debate about Women in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” Renaissance and Reformation, 28 (2004), 5–32. On Giolito’s dedications to this specific aristocratic female constituency, see Salvatore Bongi, Annali di Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari da Trino di Monferrato, stampatore in Venezia (Rome: Ministero della pubblica istruzioni, 1890–97), 1:37–40.

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women off either men or amorous pursuits, but rather help them to find suitable lovers: Not, that by the condemned ingratitude of one yong man, you should learne, generally to despise all men, but rather because knowing by another, howe daungerous a thing it is, lightly and quickly to giue credence to euery one his promise, Loue beeing a natural fire to burne the brauest & most gentle minds, & enclyning your selues to loue, you may select & chose out such a subiect, that afterwards the like repentance, and a worse condition perhappes then Fiammetta had, may not befall vnto you. (fol. *3r)

The female readers are enjoined to use it in a collective way, not reading it alone in an act of solitary consolation, but instead as a basis for their own discussions on the nature of love, and as a model for suitable conduct; imitating, in fact, the courtly disputes found in the Pleasaunt disport: Reade it therefore, & dyscoursing amongst your selues the dolorous complaints of that miserable and haplesse Ladye Fiammetta: by her desastrous and aduerse Fortune, learne you (fayre Ladyes) to be wyser and better aduised. (fol. *3v)

Giolito then makes an explicit connection between the noblewomen of his dedication and the protagonist of this work, reasserting its moral usefulness to the modern sixteenth-century female readership and personalizing its appeal as a universal female experience. He closes with an appeal to women not to withhold their love from men: And hauing the name and tytle of the fayrest and noblest ladies in Italy, assume also the prayse and commendation vppon you of the wysest and moste pittifull Gentlewomen in the same. Because a womans ornament is not in her cruelty enclosed, or in her peeuish austernes, and noen amongst them was euer commended for an vnworthy enemy to mens affections. In the meane whyle I wyll not omitt (gracious Ladies) hereafter to offer vppe to your high and sacred thoughts, more noble matters, & of greater consequence. (fol. *3v)

The contradictory stances of this dedication – at once urging the female readership to avail itself of the example set by the protagonist, to engage in moral sexual behaviour, and at the same time not to

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withhold amorous attention from men – is itself highly Boccaccian. This is perhaps not surprising, given that the dedication was probably written by one of Boccaccio’s most expert editors, Lodovico Dolce, speaking for one of his most expert publishers, Gabriele Giolito. Young’s decision to translate this dedication as part of the prefatory paratexts of his translation therefore adds a new dimension to the presentation of the English Boccaccio, the first formal direct address to a female readership in a hundred and fifty years. The dedication to female readers is a key part of Boccaccio’s self-presentation of himself as author in his earlier works, yet it is an element of his writing that seems not to have penetrated to his various English readerships: the versions of the De mulieribus omit the formal dedication to Andrea Acciauouli; the translated section of the Filocolo is entirely decontextualized and therefore lacks its narrative and authorial frames; even here in the Fiammetta, the preface to the ladies is presented first as “The Authour his Prologue,” and only second as “Fiammetta speaketh.” The careful direction of Fiammetta’s words to an intended internal audience of women is therefore subsumed into the male author privilege of Boccaccio and his (male) English translators; only Giolito (and through him, Young) is able to acknowledge the original intended audience through his parallel and deliberate dedication to the modern female constituency of the women of Città di Casale. Young’s translation practice is typical of the period: he follows the source text closely for the meaning, but produces a target text that is densely alliterative, with long phrases and stately rhythm, and often deploys an amplificatory doubling of lexical items. His style is amply demonstrated in this extract from book 1, when Fiammetta is in the first flush of her love affair: Thus therefore I passed this golden and gladsome time many dayes and monethes (as it pleased Love) wythout emulating any louing Ladye or enamoured Gentlewoman, louing most happily, and living most ioyfully in a worlde of sweete content, and swymming with full sayles in Seas of heavenly felicities, and of all manner of delights, not entertayning so much as a thought of discontent and sorrowe, and never imagining, that these pleasures, which then my merry hart was so amply and thorowly possessed of, shoulde bee the roote and plant (in time to come) of my miserable woes, and woful miseries, which at this present, without any hope or remedy at all to my haplesse paine and endlesse greefe, too well I know, and most sencibly feele. (fols. C2v–C3r)

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Adunque, si come piacque ad Amore in cotal guisa piu tempo senza hauere inuidia ad alcuna donna, lieta amando vißi, & assai contenta: non pensando, che il diletto; il quale io alhora con ampißimo cuore prendeua; fosse radice, & pianta nel futuro di miseria; sì come io al presente senza frutto miseramente conosco. (fol. 21r) So, as was Love’s wish, loving happily and not envying any other woman, I spent more of my time utterly fulfilled and not considering that the pleasure I was then wholeheartedly enjoying would be the root and seed of future misery, as I, now fruitlessly, am painfully aware.92

The translation style thus enriches and amplifies both the intensely emotional nature of the text and the characterization of Fiammetta as a learned noblewoman; it is a fitting revoicing for its English receiving context. The translation is unexpurgated, and Young follows the Boccaccian text in describing Fiammetta and Panfilo’s last night together (in a way which the early twentieth-century translator James Brogan feels unable to do).93 However, the moral implications of Fiammetta’s adultery are modified by Young’s decision to often change reference to God (in the singular) to the “gods,” perhaps to remove the narrative to a pre-Christian temporality or at least to shift the character Fiammetta out of it. Boccaccio’s original text does use both “gods” in the plural and “God” in the singular, but it is striking that the English version shows a strong preference for the pagan construction, as seen, for example, at the end of book 7 of the English translation, which reads, “The which I pray all the Goddes” (fol. Hh4r), in comparison with the Italian “Al quale io priego Idio” (The which I pray to God; VIII, 18, 4); or “O most gracious governours of high Heaven” (fol. T3r), for “O grandissimo rettore del sommo cielo” (O most great governor of high heaven; V, 35, 1). In this way, the action is transposed out of a conventional realistic Christian setting, and into a narrative world that is

92 The Italian text is taken from the 1565 Giolito edition of the text (University of Manchester, John Rylands Library, shelfmark SC 8317A); book I, 25, 16 in Delcorno’s edition in Branca, Tutte le opere. The English translation is from The Elegy of Lady Fiammetta, ed. and trans. Mariangela Causa-Steindler and Thomas Mauch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 27. 93 The last night of the lovers is found in book 2, fols. G3v–G4r. Brogan’s translation is discussed in chapter 6 of this book.

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both recognizably “romance” in its courtly Neapolitan setting and classically inflected through its overt correspondences with Ovid’s Heroides.94 The 1590s: A Famous Tragicall Discourse of Two Lovers, Affrican and Mensola The final Boccaccio translation of the sixteenth century was published in 1597, a prose rendering of Boccaccio’s verse pastoral Il Ninfale fiesolano, translated by one “Jo. Goubourne,” and printed in London by “Ia. R for William Blackman.”95 Relatively little is known about the translator, John Golburne.96 The Boccaccio text is his first translation in print, and he published several more translations on various religious and devotional topics between 1598 and 1602, all translated from French and Spanish.97 From this we can at least deduce that Golburne was not a specialist in the translation of European romance literatures, unlike, for example, Bartholemew Young, the preceding English translator of the Fiammetta. The English Short-Title Catalogue identifies the printer as James Roberts, a well-known bookseller and printer.98 Remarkably, the 1597 Famous Tragicall Discourse is actually related to the 1587 Amorous Fiammetta by marriage: after the death of his first wife, Roberts married Alice Charlewood, the widow of the printer John Charlewood who had printed the Fiammetta, and Charlewood’s print shop was made over to

94 On the Ovidian angle, see my “Framing of Fiammetta.” 95 STC 3184.4. The only extant copy of this book is in the library of Worcester College, Oxford University, shelfmark L. R. 4. 7. The text is reproduced in a modernized form in a twentieth-century reprint edition, Two Tracts. Affrican and Mensola: An Elizabethan Prose Version of Il ninfale fiesolano by Giovanni Boccaccio, and Newes and strange newes from St. Christophers, by John Taylor, ed. C.H. Wilkinson (Oxford: Roxburghe Club, 1946). On this translation, see Wright, Boccaccio in England, 108–12. I discuss this volume in detail in my essay “Print, Paratext, and a SeventeenthCentury Sammelband: Boccaccio’s Ninfale fiesolano in English Translation,” in Renaissance Cultural Crossroads: Translation, Print and Culture in Britain in the Period 1473–1640, ed. S.K. Barker and Brenda Hosington (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 79–99. 96 I follow the STC in giving Golburne’s name in that form, although it is often spelled “Goubourne” in the critical literature (following the title page of the Famous tragicall discourse). On his biography, see the introduction to Two Tracts, xxiii–xxiv, and Wright, Boccaccio in England, 108. 97 For a list of Golburne’s printed translations, see Braden, Cummings, and Gillespie, Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, 2:514. 98 See David Kathman’s entry on Roberts in the ODNB.

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him by the Stationers’ Company in 1594. To the best of my knowledge, no one has yet made the connection between these two printed English editions of Boccaccio, nor indeed commented on the remarkable material and visual similarities between the two editions, which I will demonstrate in the following discussion. Roberts’ acquisition of the Charlewood print shop and the stock of books casts new light on the production context of this last Boccaccio translation of the sixteenth century. Having the Amorous Fiammetta literally to hand may have inspired him to commission a new English Boccaccio, or, perhaps knowing the reputation of the press, Golburne may have approached him to publish it, which perhaps induced Roberts to set it in the style of the preceding Boccaccio edition. The obscurity of the other agents of production – Golburne himself, William Blackman, and Alice Charlewood, who worked as a printer herself as the “Widow Charlewood” between her marriages – means that we cannot construct the exact circumstances by which the translation came to be made, but the Roberts connection at least adds a new piece to the puzzle of the English reception of this text. The Famous Tragicall Discourse is unusual among the three printed sixteenth-century Boccaccio translations for a number of reasons. First of all, it is unique amongst them in that it has been made from a single source text in a single source edition, and that the source edition is French. Golburne identifies it on the title page as Antoine Guercin’s 1556 Lyons Nymphal Flossolan, and follows it extremely closely, not only for the text itself, but for all of the paratextual material as well.99 In size, however, the two volumes differ: the French edition is a tiny sixteenth, measuring about 8 by 12 cm, while the English edition is a larger, quarto edition. In both cases, the format is indicative of the way in which the text was intended to be situated within the wider literary field: both the tiny French book and larger English quarto signal the translated text’s genre as fictional “romance” reading. There appears to have been no contact with any Italian source edition at any stage of the production of the English version. Second, the intermediary text between Boccaccio’s Italian and the English translation completely changes the shape of the text, and book: the 473 stanzas in ottava rima of Boccaccio’s poem have been transformed by the French translator into nineteen chapters of prose, in which some stanzas are completely omitted and other episodes are 99 On Guercin’s translation, see Hauvette, Les plus anciennes traductions, 43–9.

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developed. This textual structure is then imported virtually unchanged into the English book. In terms of our contemporary notions of translation norms, such wholesale alteration of the source text’s prosody and amplification of the content could appear overly interventionist, and lacking in basic equivalence, yet this is, of course, a common strategy in the sixteenth-century French literary field. The French prose rewriting of Boccaccio’s text thus provides evidence of the perceived function of Boccaccio’s text in this specific French context, and its implied interrelation to home-grown genres. If translation is conceived of as a way to meet a hitherto unmet need in the receiving culture (perhaps in this case a voracious reading public’s “need” for ever more erotic pseudoclassical romance narratives), then it is perfectly natural that the translated version would assume not only the stylistic characteristics of the dominant narrative form of the genre (a richly adjectivized, eventful, and sometimes rather steamy prose) but also the physical form in which this genre travels in that literary polysystem.100 With the substantial remodelling of the Boccaccio text (from verse to prose) having happened some forty years prior to the English rendering, Golburne’s version can be seen as an entirely typical late Elizabethan translation of its kind. His English rendering follows the source edition extremely closely, not only for the text itself but also in its paratextual material.101 However, the book he translates is not so much Boccaccio’s Ninfale fiesolano as this new French invention, which has very little to do with Boccaccio’s Italian verse pastoral, and much more to do with the print and narrative conventions of mid-century French prose romance genres. Boccaccio’s Ninfale fiesolano is not one of his better-known works, although it enjoyed a certain popularity in Italy and abroad in the premodern period.102 Written (like the other vernacular works translated in the sixteenth century) before the Decameron, probably between 1344 and 1346, it is a pastoral romance with nymphs, shepherds, and the goddess Diana, which culminates in the mythological foundation of 100 For the polysystem theory as applied to translation by Itamar Even-Zohar and Gideon Toury, see Mark Shuttleworth, “Polysystem,” in Mona Baker and Gabriel Saldanha, eds., Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2009), 197–200. 101 On Guercin’s translation, see Hauvette, Les plus anciennes traductions, 43–9. 102 For an introduction to the Ninfale, see Armando Balduino’s introduction to his edition, Ninfale fiesolano, in Branca, Tutte le opere, 3:273–421, and Victoria Kirkham’s summary of the life and works of Boccaccio in the Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies, ed. Gaetana Marrone (New York: Routledge, 2007), 1:242.

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Fiesole. The shepherd Africo sees the beautiful nymph Mensola bathing in the forest; disguising himself as a nymph, he infiltrates the group, and rapes her when they are alone together. Dishonoured, Mensola abandons him despite his protestations of love; Africo eventually kills himself, and his name is given to a river. Mensola gives birth to their child and, fleeing Diana’s wrath, is turned into water by the goddess, becoming another river. The child, Pruneo, is raised by Africo’s parents and founds the legendary lineage of Fiesole. The French prose rendering is rather more sensational than the original verse, lingering, for example, on the voyeurism of Africo spying on the nymphs and living among them as a woman. Hauvette writes that the translator “substitue la grivoiserie au naturalisme des scènes principales” (substitutes suggestiveness for the naturalism of the principal scenes), and this will be shown later in this analysis.103 Physically, the translation takes the form of a slim quarto booklet of only forty leaves, printed in signatures of four, with four extra leaves surrounding it and thus roughly the same size as the previous two translations.104 Only one copy is now extant, and the Boccaccio translation is bound together in a single volume with six other short romances.105 The Boccaccio text comes last in the collection, and is the oldest of the texts included. The book contains a wealth of situating paratextual material, comprising a title page (fol. Ar), a dedication “To the vertuous Gentleman Maister Frauncis Verseline” (fol. A2r), an address to the reader, “To the readers health and continuall happiness” (fols. A2v–A3r), and a table of contents (fols. A4r–A4v). The putative authorial prologue, whose rubric begins “The Author desireth the fauour of his Mistris” is placed between the address to the reader and the table of contents; it is therefore separated quite distinctly from the body of the text it introduces. The translated text itself then follows the table of contents, divided into eighteen prose chapters. The book ends with a simple explicit, which reads “Thus endeth Maister Iohn Bocace to his Flossolan. Data fata secutus” (fol. L4r). The Latin tag is a quote from Virgil’s Aeneid, I, 382, meaning “following what is decreed by fate.” In its “shape,” the translated book follows its source edition very closely, the only principal differences being the insertion of the English dedication between title page and address to the reader, the detaching 103 Hauvette, Les plus anciennes traductions, 47. 104 Introduction, Two Tracts, xxv. 105 I discuss the collection of romances in more detail in my “Print, Paratext.”

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of the “authorial” proemial passage from the main text and its placing after the address, and the associated reduction in the number of chapters from nineteen to eighteen (Guercin’s chapter 1 is the proemial sequence, and is presumably of his own invention).106 I will unpack the transmission history and production context of the book through a discussion of each of the paratexts in turn. The discursive title page (figure 5) develops and consolidates the image of Boccaccio as the writer of tragic romances, which began with the 1587 Amorous Fiammetta: A Famous tragicall discourse of two louers, Affrican, and Mensola, their lives infortunate loues, and lamentable deaths, together with the of-spring of the Florentines. A History no leße pleasant then full of recreation and delight. Newly translated out of Tuscan into French by Anthony Guerin, domino Creste. And out of French into English by Io. Goubourne. AT LONDON Printed by Ia. R. for William Blackman dwelling neere the great North doore of Paules. 1597.

The layout of the page is entirely typical of the period, but shows especial similarities to the title page of the English Fiammetta, printed a decade earlier (figure 4). The text is centred, in a variety of types and sizes, and follows the Fiammetta’s disposition of type section by section. A large italic A stands alone at the top of the page, corresponding to the top line of the title of the earlier edition, Amorous Fiammetta. (Since Roberts acquired the print shop, it could well be even the same piece of type.) Below this, the title text is set in roman, reducing in size line by line. The second sentence is set in italic, and the translation details of the two translations are given below in roman, just as in the Fiammetta. A large square printers’ flower decoration is placed in the lower half of the page, and the publishing details are at the bottom of the page. Although subtle, I believe these visual and organizational correspondences are so strong that they cannot be anything other than deliberate, since they continue throughout the book. Indeed, the closing organizational strategy of the book is virtually identical, with the presence of another closing epigraph, this time by Virgil. Just as Petrarch provided the generic reference for Amorous Fiammetta, here Virgil’s Aeneid supplies the tag for a classicizing pastoral romance.

106 Wright, Boccaccio in England, 109.

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One of the most striking features about this title page in comparison with those of other Boccaccio translations that we have seen is that Golburne (unlike some of his predecessors) made no attempt to conceal the fact that he was working exclusively from a French source text. Indeed, he goes so far as to advertize it on the title page. The source text is Antoine Guercin’s 1556 Lyons Nymphal Flossolan, and Golburne follows it extremely closely, as can be seen immediately by a comparison of the title page text of the French edition with its later English edition (figure 6): LE NYMPHAL FLOSSOLAN DE M. Iean Boccace. Contenant le discours de deux amans, African & Mensole, avec leur vie, & mort, ensemble l’origine des Florentins, histoire non moins belle, que recreative. Nouuellement traduit de Tuscan en Francoys, par Antoine Guercin du Crest. A LYON Par Gabriel Cotier. M. D. LVI. The Nymphal Flossolan of M. Jean Boccace. Containing the discourse of two lovers, African & Mensole, with their lives, & death, together with the origin of the Florentines, a history no less beautiful than entertaining. Newly translated from Tuscan into French, by Antoine Guercin du Crest. At Lyon By Gabriel Cotier.

The description of the text is translated virtually word for word, with the only significant changes being the removal of the original title and its substitution with the melodramatic “Famous tragicall discourse,” and the addition of a second line detailing the English translator. In terms of the transmission history, the title page therefore speaks not only of Golburne’s sources but also his misunderstandings or even emphases; so, in English, Guercin becomes “Guerin,” and “du Crest” has become “domino Creste.” Wright suggests that the name has been “carelessly read,” but it is possible that Golburne was attempting to ennoble the origins of his source translator with the Latin title.107 A final striking feature of this title page is the absence of any reference to Boccaccio as the original author of this work. One argument might be that if the printer is trying to imitate the layout of the Fiammetta title page, then there is no appropriate space in which to put this information, or instead, it may be that Boccaccio’s author-function is far less important than the generic description of the romance within. 107 Wright, Boccaccio in England, 109.

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If we now reconsider the paratexts and material features of the English version of the Ninfale fiesolano in the light of its French source edition, we discover many suggestive features that are indicative not only of its source literary culture but also its particular English receiving culture. Only two of the paratexts have been constructed primarily with the English audience in mind, the title page and Golburne’s dedicatory letter. As we have seen, the title page seeks to firmly situate the text within a generic romance framework through its mise-en-page and sensational retitling as “A Famous tragicall discourse,” a formulation that recalls other popular prose translations from the French and Italian, most prominently perhaps Geoffrey Fenton’s Certaine tragicall discourses written oute of Frenche and Latin, by Geffraie Fenton, no lesse profitable then pleasaunt, and of like necessitye to all degrees that take pleasure in antiquityes or forreine reapportes (London: Thomas Marsh, 1567).108 The dedicatory letter to Francis Verseline is an equally generic exercise, which shows some affinities with Thomas Newman’s Epistle Dedicatory in the corresponding part of the Fiammetta, in its dedication “To the vertuous Gentleman Maister Frauncis Verseline, I. G. wisheth continual health and perfect happines.” Francis Verseline was the son of the Londonbased Venetian glassmaker Jacopo Verzelini, and Wright has suggested that this selection of dedicatee shows that “Goubourne’s patron was an Englishman of Italian descent who had some taste for the literature of Italy.”109 Both dedications begin with the invocation of a literary authority: “the paltring poet Cherillus” in Newman and “the Philosopher” in this translation, used to justify the poorness of the offering to the dedicatee. Just as in Newman, Golburne uses the same term (“Pamphlet”) to describe the translated book, and notes its provenance: “I have presumed to present you with this little Pamphlet, translated out of French into our vulgar tongue, at the speciall instance of sundry Gentlemen” (fol. A2r). In fact, if it was not for the mention of Boccaccio in the translated address to the reader, we might wonder if Golburne had any idea of the identity of the original author; as it is, it seems highly unlikely that he would know of its original form as a narrative poem. The dedication is more striking for what it lacks than for its actual contents. The mention of the “sundry Gentlemen” who had requested a translation of this book 108 STC 1356.1. A further edition was printed in 1579 (STC 1356.3). 109 Wright, Boccaccio in England, 109. On the Verzelini family, see Anita McConnell, “Jacob Verzelini,” in the ODNB.

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may indicate the historic circumstances of its commissioning, but could simply be a conventional dedicatory formula. It does however correspond to what we know of the actual readerships of popular prose in the late 1590s, a genre that, despite its stereotyped associations with women, was largely written by and for men.110 Perhaps because of its intended readership and their objectives, there are no overt attempts to present the book according to the typical ways in which Boccaccio was valued in the sixteenth century – no references to Boccaccio the scholar or poet, and no implicit moralizing framework such as that found in other Boccaccio translations of the sixteenth century. The interest of the text is found entirely in its generic qualities as a “tragicall discourse” of two lovers and their untimely ends, presented to a male friend of Italian origins. Visually, again this section alludes to the Fiammetta volume, with a deep border in the top margin made up of printers’ flowers, a tapering dedication title in roman, and large historiated initial capital. The text is here set in roman, however, while it is italic in the other book. The next section of the book is the translator’s address to the reader – the French translator, that is. Since it is unsigned, Golburne translates the whole text into English, and thus is able to assume ownership/authorship by implication. This section corresponds to Giolito’s address “To the Dames” in the Fiammetta volume, and is similarly the only one of the prefatory documents that seems to directly engage with the translated text. The translator claims to have begun translating a part of the text for his own pleasure rather than for glory, but, persuaded by others, he completed it: This small Treatise happening to my hands, formerlie compiled in Tuscan meeter, by M. Iohn Bocace a Florentine Poet, contayning a briefe discourse of loue, made by a young Flossolan sheepheard to one of Diana’s Nimphs, their famous succession, with the of-spring of the Florentines, and the foundation of their Citty. I attempted to translate some part thereof, for mine owne recreation, more then any desire I had to publish the same: But since, at the earnest request of some (who had power to commaund me) I prosecuted my attempt to the end. (fol. A2v)111

110 On the association of women with the romance genre, female authors, and female readerships (both historic and invented), see Helen Hackett’s invaluable study Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 111 The corresponding passage in the French source text is found at fols. a2r–v (3–4).

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To those who would criticise him for having “applyed my studie to a thing so base and vnprofitable” he cites other authors who have undertaken similar endeavours: “the famous Grecian Homer hath spent many houres and dayes to write the warres of Rats and Frogs, Virgill his Priapus, Petrarcke, the amours of his Laura” (fols. A2v–a3r). The shared parentage of the two Boccaccio editions is evidenced most clearly in this section, which has for its top border a decorative woodcut identical to that used for the chapter headings in the Fiammetta (fol. A2v). The final element influenced by the Fiammetta’s organization is the last before the table, a section entitled “The Author desireth the favour of his Mistris in his ayde to the effecting of this Booke, and the like of all amorous Ladies for defence of his work, against the slaunderers thereof.” This is in fact a translation of Guercin’s chapter 1, extracted from the source text and placed here out of sequence presumably to imitate the authorial paratext placed in the corresponding part of the Fiammetta, “The Author his Prologue” (fol. *4). The title is of course a translation of the French rubric: “Icy l’Auteur souhette la grace de sa dame pour luy ayder al’accomplissement de son liure, & inuoque la faveur des dames amoureuses pour defendre son oeuvre contre les mesdisans” (Here the author desires the grace of his lady to help him accomplish his book, and invokes the favour of amorous ladies to defend his book against malicious gossips; fol. a4r). The text of the Ninfale has undergone a twofold translation process: first from Italian verse into French prose, and then from French into English. Hauvette has suggested that the French translator first of all took a general view of the poem, then rendered it freely in sections of a regular length, which he made into nineteen chapters, not attempting to render it stanza by stanza. Guercin does not translate all parts of the text, but varies the attention given to various parts of the action, amplifying the opening sections and abridging or even cutting whole stanzas during later parts of the text.112 The structure and organizational devices found in the English book (the divisions into its prose chapters, the numbering, the descriptive rubrics) are also derived from Guercin and/ or those agents involved in the production of the French book, and Golburne simply translates the whole product into English. Notably, both the style of the free translation and the new organizational paratexts created by Guercin have the effect of amplifying the sexual content 112 Hauvette, Les plus anciennes traductions, 45.

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of the source text.113 The amorous hinterland of this text had been, of course, highlighted in the titles of the earliest Italian editions, where formulations along the lines of “Ninfale fiesolano damore” were common, but Guercin goes far beyond a simple titular repositioning in his French version.114 What is left implied in Boccaccio’s verse is spelled out in graphic detail in the prose rendering, starting with the superimposed chapter headings: for example, “African acoustré en grace forçà & rau[i] st finement son pucellage a la belle Mensolle contre sa volunté en la vallée de l’estang” (African, advantageously dressed, cunningly took the fair Mensolle by force and stole her virginity against her will in the valley of the pond; fol. g8r), which becomes in the English: “How Affrican disguised as a Mayd, deflowered the faire Mensola vnwilling in the valley of the Pond” (fol. Gr). Most mendaciously, in Guercin’s hands the characterization of Mensola changes from innocent nymph to a more knowing and sexually experienced woman.115 At this distance, we can only speculate on Guercin’s authorial intentions with this rewriting: whether they were his attempt to remake the poem in the light of contemporary views of Boccaccio, or whether they reveal instead a distillation of current reading practice and conceptions of romance literature. Published a decade after Le Maçon’s new French rendering of the Decameron of 1545, this work too is a product of the climate of the great French translation projects that began in the 1540s, and that were discussed in the first part of this chapter. Formally, it is a translation after the fashion of the 1543 Roland Furieux, in that it is a prose rendering of an epic Italian poem. Stylistically, too, the influence of Le Maçon’s translation can be seen in the sexually explicit sections of the text, which even quote some of Le Maçon’s renderings of Boccaccio’s euphemisms. The 1556 Guercin Nymphal speaks very powerfully of its  originating milieu, and represents both a particular moment in Boccaccio’s reception history in France and a particularly “French” kind of engagement with the text that is then imported wholesale into England. Hauvette notes that this publication “marque le point de départ d’une déformation des œuvres de Boccace qui sera fréquente chez les imitateurs français du conteur: c’est le côté licencieux qui l’a surtout intéressé” (marks the point where Boccaccio’s works begin to be deformed

113 On this, see Hauvette, Les plus anciennes traductions, 46–8. 114 Hauvette, Les plus anciennes traductions, 46. 115 Hauvette, Les plus anciennes traductions, 48–9.

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in ways that will become common among the storyteller’s French imitators: it is the licentious aspect that interested him above all else).116 A single example will demonstrate the transformations imposed on the text: the central rape scene on which the narrative turns. In Boccaccio’s poem, Africo (in his disguise as a nymph) attacks Mensola as they bathe together in the stream, while the Guercin rendering literally removes this final obstacle and simply has them both on the riverbank. Mensola’s desire to kill herself after her rape is melodramatically amplified in the French with the introduction of an arrow into the proceedings, while the sexual metaphor of messer Mazzone is reinforced with similar – and notorious – quotes from the Decameron. The following extracts give first the source text, with Daniel Donno’s English translation facing, then the French version with my English translation enclosed in parentheses, and finally the English rendering of 1597.117 Mensola, le parole non intende ch’Africo le dicea, ma quanto puote con quella forza c’ell’ha si difende, e fortemente in qua e n’ là si scuote dalle braccia di colui che l’offende, bagnandosi di lagrime le gote; ma nulla le valea forza o difesa, ch’Africo la tenea pur forte presa. Per la contesa che facean si desta tal che prima dormia malinconoso, e, con superbia rizzando la cresta, cominciò a picchiar l’uscio furioso; e tanto vi diè della testa, ch’egli entrò dentro, non già con riposo ma con battaglia grande ed  urlamento e forse di sangue spargimento.

Mensola could not understand the words Africo uttered, but she defended herself with all her strength as long as she was able. As her cheeks streamed with tears, she wrenched violently one way and then another against the arms that clutched her. But neither opposing nor resisting would avail her, for Africo still held her in his power. And as they struggled thus, something awoke that, till that time, had slept dejectedly. Lifting its haughty crest, it commenced wildly to knock against the gate and thrust its head so far within that it gained entry, though not without great struggle and loud shrieks and not without perhaps some loss of blood.

116 Hauvette, Les plus anciennes traductions, 49. 117 Since it is not clear which source text was used for Guercin’s French translation, I have taken the Italian text from Balduino’s edition in Branca, Tutte le opere, vol. 3. The English translation is taken from Donno’s The Nymph of Fiesole by Giovanni Boccaccio (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 70–1.

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Ma poi che messer Mazzone ebbe avuto Monteficalli, e nel castello entrato, fu lietamente dentro ricevuto da que’ che prima l’avean contastato; ma poi che molto si fu dibattuto, per la terra lasciare in buono stato, per pietà lagrimò, e del castello uscì poi fuor, umìl più ch’un agnello. Poi che Mensola vide esserle tolta la sua verginità contro a sua voglia, forte piangendo ad Africo fu volta e disse: – Poi c’hai fatto la tua voglia ed hai ’ngannata me, fanciulla stolta, usciàn dell’acqua almen, ch’i’ muo’ di doglia, però ch’i’ vo’ del mondo far partita, togliendomi con le mie man la vita. (§§243–6)

But when at last Sir Mace had won Mount Fig and entered in the castle, he was agreeably received where, just before, he had been opposed. He labored much to leave that place in good condition and, at last, weeping perhaps for pity, he issued from the castle, humble as a lamb. When Mensola discovered that she had lost her chastity against her will, desperately wailing, she turned to Africo and said, “Now that you’ve had your will of me, now that you’ve deceived a foolish girl, let me at least leave the stream, for I feel such grief that I’m resolved to quit the world and end my life with my own hands.

African ayant perdu le pouuoir de commander a soy-mesme, voyant que son destin heureux luy offroit si beau ieu, sentant aussi la resurrection de la chair estre venue, sans pouuoir plus attendre, se ietta promptement dessus pour executer son vouloir, de quoy Mensolle fut bien esbaye, voyant que l’autre l’ayant descouverte bien hault, la tenoit embrassée and serrée par les reins estroictement, and encore fut elle plus estonee sentant l’oustil, avec lequel on plante les hommes, frapper rudement a son huys, and aussi se voyant assaillir si chaudement par celuy qui soubz l’habit feminin tendoit a luy desrouber sa virginité, pour obuier a quoy elle feit9 tous effortz possibles, iusques au crier pour vn dernier refuge, mais tout cela prouffita peu. Car maistre martin ayant frappé quelques coups a la porte dorée, en fin entra dedans, and besoigna si bien qu’il se trouua seigneur du fort, sans que l’aultre sceut resister a vn si dangereux assault, parquoy voyant qu’il n’y auoit ordre en s’estendant fut contraincte endurer le plaisir du victorieux: Mais apres que le ieu fut acheué, Mensolle s’assit promptement au pied d’vn arbre regardant d’vn visage enflammé d’ire celui qui l’avoit trompée si finement, and sans luy pouuoir dire aucune chose, se leua bien courroucée, e print le dard qu’elle portoit au parauant, puis auoir mis vn des boutz en terre, se voulut pousser dessus, and mettre le fer d’iceluy au trauers du corps, mais African qui estoit leué la prenant par le bras la

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retourna faire asseoir voulsist ou nom au mesme lieu ou elle estoit au parauant, and pour la consoler lui dit la tenant embrassée de peur qu’elle ne lui eschappast: O ma doulce felicité, ie te supplie en l’honneur des Dieux me pardonner si ie t’ay ainsi courroucée. (fols. h3r–h4r; my italics) (African having lost the ability to control himself, seeing that his fortunate destiny was offering him such a good turn, also feeling that the resurrection of the flesh had occurred, without being able to wait any longer threw himself immediately upon her to carry out his will; Mensolle was shocked by this, seeing that the other had ripped away the top of her garment, was holding her in an embrace, gripping her tightly by the loins, and she was even more surprised feeling the tool by which men are planted knocking violently at her door, and also seeing herself assailed so heatedly by he who, under his female dress, had been trying to rob her of her virginity, to prevent which event she made every possible effort, even shouting as a last resort, but to no avail. Because Master Martin, having knocked several times at the golden door, finally entered inside, and it being so necessary for him to take command of this fort, seized it, and the other not knowing how to resist such a dangerous assault, and seeing that there was no way of repelling the attack, was forced to endure the pleasures of the victorious. But after the joust was finished, Mensolle sat down quickly at the foot of a tree, glaring angrily at he who had wronged her so mortally, and without being able to say anything to him, she got up, well angered, and took the dart that she had with her earlier, then having put one end in the ground, wanted to throw herself onto it and pierce her body with the point. But African, who had got up, took her by the arm and made her sit down again in the same place where she was before, whether she wanted to or not, and to console her, holding her in his arms, afraid that she would flee from him, said, “O my sweet happiness, I beg you by the honour of the Gods to forgive me if I have angered you.) Affrican bereft of all power to commaund him selfe: seeing his happy fates had offered him so good opportunitie, and feeling the heate of nature incite him there unto, delayde not: but prepared to affect his desire. Mensola heereat was greatly dismayed, to see her selfe uncovered, and so straightly imbraced: but more did the wonder feeling the bullets batter at her Castle gate, and her selfe assailed so hotly by him (who under a Maiden counterfaiting) sought to deflower her, bent all her force to resist him, and cried out, as her last refuge: but in vaine: For he had not long laid siege to this hold, and beaten at her golden gate, the assault being fierce, and resistance

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feeble: but the Assailant entred, and demeand him selfe so valiantly, that he proved Maister of the Fort, and the vanquished forced to endure the will of the conquerour. This sport ended, Mensola hastily sat downe, at the root of a greene Tree, and with a fell and angry visage, beholding him, who had so finely deceaued her quite bereft of speech, furiously rose up, and taking in her hand a Dart which she wontedly carried, fired the one end thereof in the ground, intending to cast her selfe thereon, and so to ende her sorowe and shame at once: But Affrican lightly taking her by the arme, and compelling her to sit downe where she was before, stayed the effecting of this pretended Tragedy: And fast imbracing her least she should escape him, he cheered her up with many comfortable words as followeth. My sweete delight (sayd hee) pardon (I pray thee) this outrage. (fols. 22–22v)

The shift from compressed verse to more expansive prose first of all allows Guercin to insert a considerable amount of extra detail, which has the fundamental effect of shifting the point of view from that of Mensola to that of African. In the source text, the first stanza presents Mensola’s struggle to escape her attacker, while the rape is presented via a more impersonal construction of the sexual metaphor of the storming of the castle gates by messer Mazzone. The final stanza of the sequence again returns to Mensola’s point of view as she accuses African in a fury. The French version, by contrast, is written from the point of view of African, who loses control of himself and spies his chance to have his way with the nymph, while the description of the sexual encounter is much more specific in its physical details than in the source text, with perhaps a more titillating aim. The addition of the notorious references to the two most famous sexually explicit tales of the Decameron (III, 10 and IX, 10, italicized) serve to make this a more comic text and one that is also overtly linked to the French Decameron reception. The military sexual metaphor is also expanded (again for probable comic intent) through reference to medieval chivalric codes (e.g., the “seigneur” of the fort, the joust), in what may be a further cultural intertext to the final metaphors of the Romance of the Rose, of the pilgrim forcing his way into the rose-shrine tower. Finally, where Mensola rages after her rape in the source text, here she is struck dumb (in what may well be a more psychologically realistic reaction); her suicidal impulse remains the same, however, albeit dramatized here in a more symbolically appropriate form with the use of an arrow. The third rendering, that of Golburne, largely follows the French text but is notably less sexually explicit. The physical details of Affrican’s grapplings are rendered

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merely as “so straightly imbraced,” and he omits the pronounced sexual circumlocutions: Maistre Martin disappears, along with the “resurrection of the flesh” and “the tool with which men are planted.” It is thus clear that Guercin’s French translation represents a profound reorientation of Boccaccio’s pastoral into the narrative codes of French prose romance (both home-grown French chivalric forms and the imported Iberian romances such as Amadis de Gaule). The reworked narrative is then supported in the French edition by a suite of paratextual features that articulate this generic identity. And it is this version of the text – and more importantly, this style of book – that is recognized as having a potential audience in English translation, within the burgeoning field of popular printed English romances. The startling sexualization of the Boccaccio narrative in Guercin’s free retelling of the narrative is a forerunner of Mirabeau’s version of the Decameron, which is used to such great effect in English nineteenth-century translations of the text and which will be discussed in the next chapter. Just as we saw for the earlier French translations of the 1530s and 1540s, used a generation later as source texts for the Pleasant Disport, here we see another example of a French translation that is picked up decades later in England as a source edition for a new English Boccaccio. But the Golburne Famous Tragicall Discourse is the culmination of this trend: more French, more sexually explicit, and less bound to the idea of Boccaccio the master author of courtly and scholarly romances. The English version of the French text may lack its most sexually explicit references, but the overall narrative thrust and erotic positioning remain absolutely the same, creating a new and very distinct English Boccaccio. Conclusion This chapter has shown the arc of Boccaccio’s reception in the sixteenth century, in which we can trace his evolving presence in English literary culture via the material and textual aspects of his books in translation. In the 1560s and 1570s he is diversionary and courtly; in the 1580s he is sentimental; and by the 1590s he is sensationalized. In each case the translations are evocative of the ways in which Italian literature, and the romance genre, were being read in each decade. The works themselves encompass a wide range of “romance” narrative forms and motifs: from the chaste chivalric tale and courtly debate of the Filocolo extracts, through the semi-realist epistolary novel of the Fiammetta, where the abandoned adulterous woman pines away from no-longerreciprocated love, to the classical nymph-and-shepherd tale of rape,

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death, and regeneration of the Ninfale fiesolano. Boccaccio can be therefore made to intersect very easily with the English narrative trends of the later sixteenth century: the courtly conduct book and erotic debate of the 1560s, born of the newfound interest in contemporary Italian writing such as Castiglione and Guazzo; the simultaneous exploration of the novella by writers such as Painter, Pettie, and Fenton in the 1560s and 1570s; the Fiammetta feeding into the Ovidian and Petrarchist tastes of the 1580s and the interest in imported French and Italian literature as reading matter for foreign-language learners; and finally the pastoral setting of the Ninfale, perhaps reflecting an fashion for mythological stylings as found, for example, in Sidney’s Arcadia. The translations can thus be eased into English trends, but the slippages born of translation and transcultural mediation mean that the end point of these texts in their new receiving context is sometimes very different from the space they occupied in their originating culture. As we have seen, the Thirteen Questions sequence as found in England never existed in Italian in this form; while the English incarnation of the Famous Tragicall Discourse is virtually unrecognizable from its Trecento form as a narrative poem. By contrast, the Fiammetta can travel across national and linguistic boundaries virtually unchanged, and still bearing a dedication from one of its Italian editors. Some products travel intact, and some do not, and their routes through different cultures leave their traces in unexpected ways. A French editor’s decision to publish a short book extracted from a larger prose work because it invokes the canonical French medieval genre of the jeux partis lives on half a century later in the fourth edition of a book printed in London in 1587; a French free paraphrase of a narrative poem becomes institutionalized as a “Boccaccio” text, in part because of the visual codes articulated by a printer who seeks to highlight the Boccaccio brand of tragic romance for the London market. Even two hundred years into this history, the English Boccaccio therefore continues to be made up from a rag-bag of disparate elements, stitched together by individuals who are seeking to express their own ideas about literature, canonicity, sex, morality, Italianity, utility, and so on. But the books themselves tell us that there is a matrix of interconnected texts, books, and individuals, stretching across Europe from Italy to London, and writ small on the space of the page.

4 “One Hundred Ingenious Novels”: Refashioning the Decameron, 1620–1930

This chapter concentrates on the textual history of the Decameron in English in its “complete” form from the first English translation of 1620 up to the year 1930, a moment that marks perhaps its widest print divulgation (with at least sixteen separate editions printed) and the year of two new landmark translations. The Decameron has the longest continuous presence in English translation of any of Boccaccio’s works, and, as a result of this, has become the text with which Boccaccio is most closely associated in anglophone culture. The first English translation of the Decameron was published in 1620, and new editions and translations have been published regularly from then up to the present day, with the only substantial gap in publication a sixty-five-year span between 1741 and 1804. Some forty-two different English-language editions of the “complete” text were published between 1620 and 1900, and at least a further one hundred and thirty more up to the time of writing. New editions of older translations are still being produced – indeed, have enjoyed a resurgence with the advent of print-on-demand reissues available via online booksellers – while at the same time publishers continue to commission “traditional” new translations, the most recent of these being J.G. Nichols’s rendering, first published by Oneworld Classics (London: 2008).1 The monumental amount of translation

1 Nichols’s translation has now been taken up by the Random House publishing group, thus gaining very wide distribution; new editions were published in 2009 (Everyman’s Library) and 2012 (Vintage Classics).

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production in this single part of Boccaccio’s corpus relative to the other works indicates the domination of this work above all his others.2 More than any other of Boccaccio’s works, the publishing history of the Decameron shows that the text has been felt to possess an enduring relevancy and appeal to anglophone readers for the past four hundred years. However, at the same time, the eternal quest for adequacy means that there is and always will be scope to make (and publish) another translation.3 In its very inadequacy to the source text, the English Decameron is endlessly perfectible, and this chapter will therefore attempt to resolve what this text means for English readers in its many different material manifestations between 1620 and 1930. Since, with approximately 170 different editions to consider, it would be impossible to offer a detailed analysis of each book-object in context, as has been the case in earlier chapters, here I instead attempt to follow themes

2 Virginia Cox provides a short overview of the history of the Decameron in English translation in The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, ed. Peter France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 473–4, while G.H. McWilliam supplies a longer translation history in the first edition of his translation of the Decameron (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 25–43. See also Nancy M. Reale’s summary in the Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English, ed. Olive Classe (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000), 1:164–6. Some studies of the problems of translating this text can be found in G.H. McWilliam, “On Translating the ‘Decameron,’” in Essays in Honour of John Humphries Whitfield, ed. H.C. Davis et al. (London: St George’s Press, 1975), 71–83; Christopher Kleinhenz, “The Art of Translation: Boccaccio’s Decameron,” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, 36 (1987), 104–11; and Peter Bondanella, “Translating The Decameron,” in The Flight of Ulysses: Studies in Memory of Emmanuel Hatzantounis, ed. Augustus Mastri (Chapel Hill, NC: Annali d’Italianistica, 1997), 111–24. Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin has published widely on this subject: see his “Editor’s Introduction” to his revised version of John Payne’s translation of the Decameron (Ware: Wordsworth, 2004); “‘Boccaccio Could Be Better Served’: Harry McWilliam and Translation Criticism,” in Italian Culture: Interactions, Transpositions, Translations, ed. Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, Corinna Salvadori, and John Scattergood (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006), 45–68; and his “Translating Boccaccio,” in The Cambridge Companion to Boccaccio, ed. Guyda Armstrong, Rhiannon Daniels, and Stephen J. Milner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 3 As Lawrence Venuti notes, “the retranslation may claim to be more adequate to the foreign text in whole or part, which is to say more complete or accurate in representing the text or some specific feature of it. Claims of greater adequacy, completeness, or accuracy should be viewed critically, however, because they always depend on another category, usually an implicit basis of comparison between the foreign text and the translation which establishes the insufficiency and therefore serves as a standard of judgment. This standard is a competing interpretation”: “Retranslations: The Creation of Value,” Bracknell Review, 47 (2004), 26.

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through a chronological timeline. I will therefore select individual translations to discuss either in their capacity as significant milestones in the publication history, or in being emblematic of broader trends. Several key themes emerge in this narrative of the Decameron’s history in English. The first of these is a focus on the “shape” of the text, that is, on the discrete elements of the source text that are translated (or more pertinently, not translated) into the English editions. Taking the long view, this is a journey from incompleteness to wholeness, and one that is articulated around what is removed. At different points in the text’s history this includes blasphemous or sexually explicit novellas, the authorial paratexts, and even the situating frame-story. The culmination of the denatured Decameron is found in two editions of the early eighteenth century, and thereafter we see a movement towards the restoration of all parts of the whole, uncensored text, a project that makes incremental advances through the publication of new translations and new editions up to our end point of 1930. In parallel with what is removed, we can consider its opposite, that is, what is added. In exactly the same way as we have observed in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century translations, this text is mediated to its readerships via a range of different paratextual frames, some of which are transmitted relatively unchanged from source editions and some of which are created for the intended English audiences. Due to its sexually explicit and (to a lesser degree) anticlerical content, the Decameron requires considerably more editorial framing than the previous works studied in this book, and the paratexts provide a rich field in which to investigate the constant editorial tension between the censorship and display of this sexual content. During the course of the nineteenth century, in particular, we can see how the management of and access to the censored material itself becomes a key editorial strategy, expressed through paratextual additions such as French translations of censored passages, and the inclusion of illustrations that themselves amplify the written text. The dependence on French and Italian source editions is most pronounced in the first two centuries of the text’s history in English; thereafter the new editions tend to look back at the indigenous tradition of the receiving context, and silently assimilate their English paratexts and interpretative frameworks rather than those of foreign source editions. It seems very likely, in fact, that by the mid-nineteenth century, the main (and perhaps only) source for some of the English translations are English editions alone, and that “translational activity” in these

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cases is confined simply to an attempt to render the text ever more transparent and fluent as an expression of contemporary English.4 This trend towards fluency and readability, expressed in the publication of ever-more-popular Decameron editions, is counterbalanced by another dynamic, in opposition to it. This is the development of what might be termed a more scholarly Boccaccio, perhaps even a “Boccaccio commentary tradition,” that is also created within the paratexts of the individual books. From the eighteenth century onward, we find evidence of a desire on the part of the readership for a critical context into which Boccaccio can be inserted, in the form of paratexts such as lives of the author, introductions to the works, and scholarly glosses. The intention is to historicize Boccaccio as an author, to assert his intellectual authority in the face of the increasingly loud background noise of the “romance” Boccaccio, and to write his reception into an English national literary history, which looks back to the premodern translations as evidence of the English engagement with Italy. This scholarly mission largely runs in parallel to the transparent translation strategies, but on at least one occasion rejects them completely. The Seventeenth Century: The Translatio Princeps The publication of the first full English translation of the Decameron in 1620 (figure 7) is unarguably the defining event in Boccaccio’s premodern reception history.5 A number of the so-called minor vernacular works were translated during the latter part of the sixteenth century,

4 “A translated text [...] is judged acceptable by most publishers, reviewers and readers when it reads fluently, when the absence of any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities makes it seem transparent, giving the appearance that it reflects the foreign writer’s personality or intention or the essential meaning of the foreign text – the appearance, in other words, that the translation is not in fact a translation, but the ‘original’”: Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008), 1. 5 This first printed edition is probably the most studied of all Boccaccio’s works in translation, and has been the subject of a monograph by Herbert G. Wright, in which the author seeks to prove John Florio’s authorship of the translation: see The First English Translation of the Decameron (1620): Essays and Studies on English Language and Literature (Uppsala: Lundequistska Bokhandeln, 1953). For a more detailed discussion of its five seventeenth-century editions, see my “Paratexts and Their Functions in Seventeenth-Century English Decamerons,” MLR, 102 (2007), 40–57. See also Anna Strowe, “Is Simpatico Possible in Translation? The 1620 Translation of the Decameron and the Case for Similarity,” The Translator, 17 (2011), 51–75.

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but perhaps surprisingly, no translation of Boccaccio’s best-known work, the Decameron, was published during this period. The printer John Wolfe may have attempted to publish either an Italian version or English translation of the Decameron in 1587, when it was entered on the Stationers’ Register in his name, but no trace of this work survives, so we may presume it was never published. Both the timing and the individuals involved are significant, however: 1587 was the year in which the fourth edition of the Thirteen Questions was published, alongside the new translation of the Fiammetta, while Wolfe himself had earlier worked in Florence, possibly with the famous Giunta family of printers, and now printed books in London in both English and Italian. In this decade, for example, he published Italian-language editions of Machiavelli’s Discorsi (1584), Prencipe (1584), Historie (1587), Libro dell’arte della guerra (1587), and L’asino d’oro with a selection of other works (1588), Quattro Commedie by Pietro Aretino (1588), and a new edition of Hoby’s English translation of Castiglione’s Courtier (1588).6 His Decameron may have been suppressed, or other circumstances may have prevented or delayed its publication; but whatever the reason, no English Decameron would appear until the beginning of the third decade of the seventeenth century. Even when the book was entered on the register a second time, on 22 March 1620, with a license granted by the Bishop of London via his secretary, it seems to have been held up again, this time “recalled by my lord of Canterburyes comand.”7 Nonetheless, the book was published later the same year. Perhaps as a result of its long gestation, once an English version is finally printed by Isaac Jaggard in 1620, its subsequent print fortune shows a real appetite and enthusiasm for this translation, with five separate editions published in different formats during the next sixtyfour years. The first edition itself is a handsome folio, printed as two volumes, and lavishly decorated throughout with woodcut illustrations of the brigata, visual ornaments, and decorated capital letters.8 The woodcuts are of French origin, based on those used in a 1558 French

6 For an overview of Wolfe’s Italian printing in London, see Michael Wyatt, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 185–98. 7 Edward Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1557–1640 (London: 1875–94), 3:311, cited in Wright, The First English Translation, 11. 8 I have based my description on the copy held in Leeds University Library, shelfmark Brotherton Collection H de W BOC.

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translation printed at Lyons by Guillaume Rouillé.9 The anonymous translator claims to have secured the patronage of Sir Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery, and the text accordingly includes an effusive epistle dedicatory in his honour, as well as other discursive paratexts such as a second dedicatory letter to Herbert at the start of volume 2 and a printer’s address to the reader.10 A second edition of volume 1 was printed by Jaggard for the bookseller Matthew Lownes in 1625, but the second volume never appeared.11 The third edition was printed by Thomas Cotes in 1634, and the fourth in 1657 by his sister-in-law Ellen Cotes.12 Both of these editions are single volumes in duodecimo format.13 The fifth and final edition of this translation is a return to the folio format, and was published as a single volume in 1684 for the bookseller Awnsham Churchill.14 The printing of the translatio princeps in 1620 has often been seen as a watershed moment, yet it may be more useful to see it in terms of its

9 The woodcuts are discussed in detail in Appendix 3 of Wright’s book The First English Translation, 271–5. On Rouillé, see Nathalie Z. Davis, “Publisher Guillaume Rouillé, Businessman and Humanist,” in Editing Sixteenth Century Texts: Papers Given at the Editorial Conference, University of Toronto, October, 1965, ed. R.J. Schoeck (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966), 72–112. 10 Shakespeare’s First Folio is also jointly dedicated to Philip Herbert and his brother William. See Wright, The First English Translation, 11. On the discursive paratexts, see Armstrong, “Paratexts,” 52–7. 11 STC 3173. This may be explained by the size of the print runs for the first two volumes: “No complementary edition of the second volume was published, possibly because [...] Jaggard was still able to supply copies of the first edition. There may well have been some delay in the printing of the first edition of the second volume, not only because Jaggard altered its format to quires of four, but also because it appears that he must have printed a much larger edition of it than for the first volume.” See description for the 1625 edition, in the catalogue of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, English Literature, 1475–1700, compiled by E.V. Unger and W.A. Jackson (New York: [Privately printed], 1940), 1:85. 12 On the death of Isaac Jaggard, his widow assigned the business and copyrights to two brothers, Richard and Thomas Cotes (d. 1641). Ellen Cotes was the wife of Richard Cotes, and took over the business on his death in 1653. See their entries in Henry R. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers who were at work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1641 to 1667 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1907), 52–3. 13 STC 3174 (1634 edition); Wing B3379 (1657 edition). 14 Wing 3378. For Awnsham Churchill, see his entry in Henry R. Plomer and others, A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers who were at work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1668 to 1725, ed. Arundell Esdaile (Oxford: Bibliographical Society, 1922), 69–70.

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continuity with later sixteenth-century print production. In outputs, for example, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are roughly equal in the number of editions published: three translated Boccaccio texts in five (or perhaps six) editions in the sixteenth century, against one text in five editions in the seventeenth century. Boccaccio therefore remains a popular and widely published author, but interest begins to be concentrated on his longest work after 1620. There is continuity, too, in the enduring reliance on multiple source editions in different languages, as this edition uses both French and Italian source texts as the basis for the translation, with evidence of another French edition as a source for the woodcut illustrations. Finally, there is an actual continuity between the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English printers of Boccaccio: James Roberts sold his business (which had formerly belonged to John and Alice Charlewood) to William Jaggard when he retired in 1608, and it was Jaggard’s son Isaac who would print the first English Decameron.15 The edition is unusual amongst Boccaccio’s works in English translation in that there is absolutely no indication of the identity of the translator anywhere in the edition; and like its most recent preceding edition, the Famous Tragicall Discourse, Boccaccio is not named on the title page, or indeed anywhere in this book. (This is not the case in the 1597 translation, where he is named in the translated address “To The Readers.”)16 The translator is generally identified as being John Florio, following Wright, but this attribution remains problematic, mostly on the grounds of the translator’s anonymity. Florio was a renowned and prolific author and a fixture at the court until the death of Queen Anne in 1618, and his highly regarded translation of Montaigne (1603) was published under his own name.17 Why then would a pre-eminent Italian language expert and translator resident in England not put his name to the prestigious Italian prosifier’s masterpiece? Wright believes this reveals a desire not to be associated with an immoral book, observing that “it must be emphasised that English translators of the Decameron long remained unwilling to state who they were, and, indeed, it was not until the nineteenth century that this responsibility was taken.”18 (This had not been a consideration for the preceding translator of Boccaccio, John Golburne, and his translation of the sensational Famous Tragicall

15 16 17 18

See Kathman, “James Roberts,” in the ODNB. On the name of the author, see Armstrong, “Paratexts,” 49. On Florio as translator, see Wyatt, The Italian Encounter. Wright, The First English Translation, 258.

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Discourse, nor for any of the Decameron’s French translators.) There may be a more pragmatic reason for the lack of attribution, though. It is possible, for example, that the printer had obtained a manuscript made by Florio without indications of authorship, perhaps made at an earlier date; we might even conjecture that this could be linked to John Wolfe’s mysterious disappearing Decameron of 1587.19 Since we cannot know the circumstances of the translation’s production, however, it is probably safest to refer to the “translator,” rather than to Florio, although the linguistic evidence seems to be sufficiently strong as to allow it to be attributed to him. Similarly, in the absence of further information about the production context, I have assumed that the translator also acted in an editorial function with regard to the contents of the text, and was the author of the two dedicatory letters in the edition. Two principal source editions were used in the preparation of the English translation, one Italian and one French. By a process of careful comparison, Wright has shown that the Italian text was that established by Lionardo Salviati, first published in 1582, and the actual source edition was probably one of the Venetian editions of 1597, 1602, or 1614.20 In fact, Salviati’s expurgated Decameron was first published by the Giunta Press in Florence, which may provide a further link between the Italian sending context and John Wolfe’s intentions to publish his own edition in 1587. The second source text was a French version, the relatively new translation made by Antoine Le Maçon at the command of Marguerite de Navarre, first published in 1545, and Wright has shown that it is likely that the English translator used the 1578 Paris edition of this text.21 This edition, unlike those produced under Le Maçon’s supervision in 1545 and 1548, contains additional moralizing rubrics to each novella, which were first inserted into the French text by the Lyonnais printer Guillaume Rouillé in his 1551 edition, and were included in many later editions. Ultimately, these derive from the moral tags inserted by the Florentine editor, Francesco Sansovino, in his 1546 edition of the Decameron, and as such demonstrate a very quick transmission

19 I am grateful to Warren Boutcher for suggesting this possible scenario for the printing of an anonymous Florio manuscript. 20 Wright, The First English Translation, 264–5; on the characteristics of Salviati’s edition and the English translator’s use of it, see chapters 3 and 4. On Salviati’s editing practice, see Brian Richardson, Print Culture in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 168–72. 21 Wright, The First English Translation, 266–9.

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of  the “moralized” Boccaccio out of Italy into France, and then into seventeenth-century England.22 There was a final, separate source for another paratextual element of the book (if not the actual translation copy-text), the woodcuts, which have been recut from those prepared for the 1558 Rouillé edition.23 For the most part, the English Decameron of 1620 follows the Italian source text in its content: the first edition comprises the authorial proemio (the “Author’s Prologue”), the introduction to the First Day (the “Induction”), the frame story, one hundred novellas, and ten songs.24 More interesting are those parts of the source text that are omitted: after the first and second editions of volume 1, the proemio disappears, while the authorial conclusion is nowhere to be found.25 These silent omissions extend beyond the authorial frame to the novellas themselves. Many of the novellas are subtly censored, with the offending material either expunged entirely or rewritten by the translator.26 Two tales (Dec., III, 10, and VI, 6) are substituted in their entirety by more acceptable alternatives. The novella of Alibech and Rustico (III, 10) is perhaps the most notorious of all the tales of the Decameron, and has certainly been subject to the most stringent censorship over the years, as we will see later in this chapter.27 In Salviati’s expurgated text, the offending material is struck out and replaced by asterisks; interestingly, however, the English translator does not allow such editorial transparency into his version of the text. Now, the last tale of the Third Day is devoted to an account of the chaste princess Serictha, taken from Belleforest’s Histoires tragiques (the choice of alternative text being in itself a further example of French influence).28 The offending tale is thus silently removed and substituted with another without a word of explanation. The other tale to be replaced in its entirety (VI, 6, concerning 22 Armstrong, “Paratexts,” 50. 23 The woodcuts are discussed in Wright, The First English Translation, 271–5. 24 The songs appear in the correct place in the frame story, but tend to bear little relation to the Italian text after the first few lines. 25 The Conclusione dell’autore is included in both the source texts for the translation, so its omission here is rather curious. (In fact, it would not be translated into English until John Payne’s 1886 translation.) 26 Wright discusses the English translator’s faithfulness to Salviati’s expurgated text in The First English Translation, 146–64, and his use of Antoine le Maçon’s French translation at 169–88. 27 On the history of this tale’s censorship in English, see McWilliam’s introduction to his translation of the Decameron, 31–4. 28 See Wright, The First English Translation, 52.

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the Baronci family) is a less understandable choice, given that the original novella contains no obscene material. Wright believes that the translator removed this tale because he considered it to be rather dated in its appeal, since it concerns a famous family from fourteenth-century Florence. It is more likely that it was removed, however, because it contains a blasphemous punchline regarding God’s error during the days of Creation.29 Surrounding the translated text are a multitude of visual, organizational, and editorial paratexts. As previously mentioned, the 1620 edition and 1625 edition of volume 1 are de luxe products in folio format, generously illustrated with decorative title pages, woodcuts (a total of ninety-eight in the 1620 edition), ornaments, and illuminated capital letters. Later editions are smaller and less lavishly decorated: the 1634 edition appears as two volumes in duodecimo format, with an engraved frontispiece and title page for each volume and nine woodcuts. The 1620 woodcuts are reused for this edition and that of 1657, but because of the constraints of space, they are set sideways on the page and are very cramped. Likewise, the 1657 edition is another duodecimo, printed as two volumes but often bound as one. The woodcuts are ten in total, one for each Day, and again set sideways on the page. The final edition of the first translation (1684) is in folio format, again produced as two volumes but bound as one, with continuous page numbering throughout. There are no illustrations within the text, but the book contains an engraved frontispiece portrait of Boccaccio (fol. ivr).30 Even in its smaller, later, formats, the book was presented to its readership as primarily a pleasurable read, despite the protestations of utility found in the editorial paratexts. Throughout the seventeenth century, the Decameron is presented as a book worthy of ornate decoration, as can be seen first by the inclusion of illustrations of French derivation, which add a note of continental glamour in the first four editions. In the 1684 edition, the by now old-fashioned woodcuts have gone, to be replaced by a stylish new engraving of the author himself, suggesting a shift in focus from the book as diverting read towards a new concentration on the figure of the author.

29 See Wright, The First English Translation, 32–3. 30 The plate was engraved by Robert White (1645–1703), the leading line engraver of the day. On the visual tradition of Boccaccio’s portrait, see Victoria Kirkham, “John Badmouth: Fortunes of the Poet’s Image,” Studi sul Boccaccio, 20 (1991–2), 355–76 (368).

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Despite this attempt to visually refresh and update the book for its 1684 incarnation, it is striking how little it has changed from its original 1620 production context, and hence how many textual traces there remain of the mid-sixteenth century French and Italian readings of Boccaccio. However, this 1684 edition is the very last manifestation of this particular “Renaissance” presentation of the author, ultimately derived from the French Italophilia of the 1530s and 1540s, and which can be mapped to a greater or lesser extent in the paratexts and target texts of all the English printed editions pre-1700. The Eighteenth Century: Excision and Restoration A new English version of the Decameron was published eighteen years later in 1702, and its material, editorial, and paratextual features reveal it to be the product of a new century and new outlook. A second edition with minor editorial adjustments was then published a decade later, in 1712.31 Once again, the translator is anonymous. The 1620 edition was a florid (if belated) demonstration of the literary taste of the English Renaissance, and in its source texts and orientation as French as it was Italian. As such, it was very much a product of the Stuart court of James I, and endures in this form until the reign of his restored grandson, Charles II. By the time of the second translation, however, the form of the book acknowledges that England had undergone a revolution not only in governance but also in taste, and this is evidenced in a very striking way by the “shape” of this second translation, in which the text of the Decameron is drastically abridged. Like the five editions of the first translation, the book contains copious paratextual matter that frames and mediates the translated text; the paratexts are distinctly different from those which accompanied the first translation, but as will be shown, they too are not entirely original. While De Marco argues that this edition expresses the taste of the times, that is, the turn of the eighteenth century in England, in fact this

31 For a discussion of this translation, see Wright, Boccaccio in England from Chaucer to Tennyson (London: Athlone Press, 1957), 261–2; and Sergio De Marco, “Il Boccaccio nel Settecento inglese,” in Il Boccaccio nella cultura inglese e anglo-americana, ed. Giuseppe Galigani (Florence: Olschki, 1974), 93–111 (95–6). This discussion is based on the copies of these two editions held in Leeds University Library, both shelfmark Brotherton Collection Lt BOC.

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edition and its text are again derived from an intermediary source.32 Just as we have seen for many previous translations of Boccaccio, the source text is not Italian in language but French: in this case the 1697 French edition, printed at Amsterdam by George Gallet under the title Contes et nouvelles de Boccace, with engraved illustrations by Romeyn de Hooghe (figures 8 and 9).33 This edition therefore speaks of a quite different taste of the times, that of the French conte, which was becoming popular during the seventeenth century; the 1702 English Decameron, although masquerading as a translation of an entirely Italian text with its Italian title, therefore also shows continued strong links with French literary culture. It also exemplifies the plurilingual print culture of this period, in which an Italian book can be translated into French and printed in Holland before being imported into England and retranslated very quickly into English. The English edition is split into two volumes, each with an engraved plate and title page each; the volumes are each numbered from page 1, although copies are often bound together as one volume. The title page reads: Il Decamerone. | ONE | HUNDRED | INGENIOUS | NOVELS: WRITTEN BY | JOHN BOCCACIO, | The first Refiner of the Italian | Language . | Now done into English, and accommodated | to the Gust of the present Age. | LONDON: | Printed for John Nicholson, at the King’s Arms | in Little Britain, James Knapton at the Crown | in St. Paul’s Church-Yard, and Benj. Tooke at | the Middle Temple-Gate, Fleetstreet . 1702.

32 “Essa rispetta assai fedelmente i canoni dell’estetica neoclassica; il testo originale viene ‘migliorato,’ ‘abbellito,’ ‘rimoderato.’ Nella prosa di questa traduzione notiamo le tipiche caratteristiche di simmetricità e gusto epigrammatico; nelle canzoni tradotte una notevole regolarità del verso, che si accompagna ad una esposizione concisa, di una certa efficacia. Nel complesso, tuttavia, l’effetto è pur sempre quello di tutte le cose rimodernate” (It respects very faithfully the canons of neoclassical aesthetics; the original text is “improved,” “beautified,” “moderated.” In the prose of this translation we may note the typical characteristics such as symmetricality and a taste for the epigrammatic; there is a notable regularity in the versification of the songs, accompanied by concise exposition, and a certain efficacy. Overall, however, the effect is merely that everything is modernized: De Marco, “Il Boccaccio,” 95). 33 Noted by Wright, Boccaccio in England, 260. The 1697 edition was reprinted in 1698 and 1699.

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The debt to the Dutch source edition can be seen instantly if we compare the titles of the two works. The French version reads: CONTES | ET | NOUVELLES | DE | BOCACE | FLORENTIN. | TRADUCTION LIBRE, | Accommodée au gout de ce temps, & en- | richie de FIGURES en TAILLE- | DOUCE gravées par Mr. ROMAIN | DE HOOGE | TOME PREMIER | A AMSTERDAM, | Chez George Gallet. | M. DC. XCVII. Stories and tales by Bocace, Florentine. Free translation. Accommodated to the taste of the present day, and enriched with copper-plate illustrations engraved by Mr Romain de Hooge. Volume 1 | At Amsterdam | By George Gallet | M. DC. XCVII.

The English version presents the text under the title by which it had become known in England, although the stylistic updating is acknowledged in a word-for-word rendering (“accommodated to the Gust of the present Age”). Since the English edition does not contain the illustrations from the source edition (apart from the frontispiece plate to volume 2), however, the title page paratext does not note their presence nor the involvement of De Hooge. Unlike the 1620 edition, where the title-page advertised the performative aspect of the text of one hundred tales told by ten noble young people, here the focus is entirely on the stories, and this is reflected in the “shape” of the translated text. All three Boccaccian authorial addresses (the proem, introduction to Day IV, and the conclusion) are absent, and most radically, the entire frame narrative has been removed after the introduction to Day I. The account of the plague and the meeting of the brigata has also been drastically abridged. There are no longer any named narrators nor any distinction between the Days of storytelling, and the novellas are merely numbered from one to one hundred in roman numerals. All the songs are omitted, and another lyric, which is not a translation of any of the songs from the Decameron, is inserted between novellas 90 and 91. In this, the edition simply follows the editorial decisions of the source Dutch edition. Apart from the one hundred tales, this English edition also includes two frontispiece plates: an author portrait in volume 1 and a mythological scene in volume 2. The plates are both reused in the 1712 edition (figures 10 and 11). There is also a biography of Boccaccio (“A Short Account of the Author’s Life”; fols. A2–A2v), an address “To the Reader”

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(fols. A3–A5), and two tables of contents, one each for the “first part” and “second part” of the novels (fols. a–a4; fols. [a4v]–[a8]). These paratexts have various provenances: the author portrait is derived from the 1684 English edition, the biography seems to be an original composition (or at least is not linked to the Dutch source edition), while the mythological engraved plate, address to the reader, and tables are derived from the Amsterdam translation. The extensive remodelling of the body of the text is reflected by a number of new reading aids: the  table presents the rubrics for each novella with a page reference, although the individual novellas are not numbered as they are in the main body of the text. Within the main text of the novellas, each page has a running title across the opening that reads “Boccace’s Novels” on the verso and the novella number on the recto thus: “NOVEL I.” Page numbers are included on both verso and recto at the outermost corner.34 Volume 1 contains novellas 1 to 44 and volume 2 contains 45 to 100; the numbers follow the usual ordering but the sequence is altered slightly from Novel 25 onward. Here, instead of III, 5 (Zima), we find the tale of Riccardo Minutolo (III, 6) brought forward. The tales thus run one behind the usual ordering from this point on. The Filippo Balducci tale from the introduction to Day IV is inserted as Novel 29, while Alibech and Rustico continue to be censored out: IV, 1 is brought forward and inserted in their place as Novel 30. (The tale of Serictha, which silently replaced III, 10 in the first English translation, disappears from this edition.) In volume 2, the tale of Zima (III, 5) is inserted as Novel 50, and from this point on the novellas resume their normal sequence. The editorial changes are explained in the address “To The Reader.” This crucial paratext is a close translation of the “Avertissement du Traducteur” in the source text (a retitling in itself that shifts the authority of this text from the first francophone translator to an unspecified and more nebulous editorial entity for the English edition). The opening lines are an arresting statement of the continuing importance of Boccaccio to modern readers: Boccace being an Author of so celebrated a Reputation in the Republick of Learning, and his Decameron having received an universal approbation, I could not conceive but that a new and more accurate Translation of it would

34 The edition also reproduces two marginal glosses that appeared in the earlier editions of the first translation in 1:145, 148. These also appear in the 1712 second edition (2:156, 159).

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be very acceptable to the Publick. The whole Work is very Natural in its construction, and although it was written about three hundred and fifty years ago, yet Italy has never since produced any thing that comes up to it, for the Beauty and Purity of the Diction.

If we compare this to the source paratext, we can see that the English translation is a very close rendering, albeit one with some significant lacunae: Bocace est un Auteur si celebre dans la Republique des lettres, & son Decameron a eu une approbation si générale, qu’on a cru obliger le Public d’en faire une nouvelle traduction. S’il n’avoit été question que de traduire litteralement on l’auroit fait avec assez de facilité. La construction est naturelle; & quoi qu’il y ait du moins 350 ans que ce livre est écrit, les Italiens n’ont encore rien produit qui en approche pour la beauté et la pureté de la diction. (fols. *3r–*4v) Bocace is an Author so famous in the Republic of letters, and his Decameron has had such general approval, that I thought I would oblige the Public by making a new translation of it. If it had just been a question of translating literally I would have been able to do that with ease. The construction is natural, and although it is 350 years since the book was written, the Italians have still not produced anything to compare in its beauty and the purity of its diction.

The English translator simply omits the discussion of the process of translation (“S’il n’avoit été question que de traduire litteralement on l’auroit fait avec assez de facilité”) that introduces the more general presentation of Boccaccio’s style and, subsequently, the editorial changes that have been made. This is of a piece with the editorial decision to rewrite the title page paratexts in such a way as to avoid the technical statement that it is a “traduction libre” (free translation). The English edition, unlike the Dutch French version, is simply not interested in drawing attention to the translation process; the idea that there might be different approaches to translation (in the simplest terms, “free” or not) is outside of the universe of this book. The desire for transparency in this translation is such that, apart from the titular note that the book has been “done into English,” further discussion of the translation process has been excised almost completely: for example, the translator is not named, nor is the French source edition.

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Following this introductory paragraph, the utilitarian aims of this translation are then set out: There are very many particular Graces in it, which the most famous Authors of these times have very successfully amplified; by which they have embellished many of their Writings, and from which they have taken the designs of their most applauded Pieces; but these being often obscure, by reason of the multiplicity of words; and three hundred and fifty years, also making a great alteration in the gust of Men, to render them more entertaining, it was absolutely necessary to abridge them, dress them after the modern Fashion, leave out the superfluous repetitions, and sometimes not only to alter intire Periods, but to change the whole Structure. (fol. A3)

In order to get at the “Graces,” the text has been winnowed down to its essential, functional parts, the one hundred tales. There is no longer any interest in the rhetorical sequences of the authorial frame, or the conceit of the frame narrative. It has become a simple collection of tales to be read for entertainment alone; a Decameron-lite, which privileges the content of the tales over the interplay between the formal levels of narration. A second edition of this translation was published in 1712, which reproduced the same translated text as the 1702 edition, although with some paratextual modifications.35 The title page now shows a classicizing influence in the new subtitle of “Decads,” and there is some description of the new features of this edition (figure 12): Il Decamerone: | OR, | DECADS, | Consisting of | ONE HUNDRED | INGENIOUS | NOVELS: | WRITTEN BY | JOHN BOCCACIO, | First Refiner of the Italian Language. | Now newly done into English, and accommoda - | ted to the Gust of the present Age ; | with an | ARGUMENT and MORAL added to each | NOVEL . | The Second Edition, Carefully Corrected and Amended. | LONDON: | Printed for John Nicholson, at the King’s Arms in Little | Britain, James Knapton at the Crown in St. Paul’s | Churchyard, and Benj. Tooke at the Middle-Temple- | Gate, Fleetstreet. 1712.

35 The British Library and ECCO record this edition as 1721/2, due to an amendment made to the title page. Wright concludes this edition does not exist (Boccaccio in England, 262).

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In particular, the “new” presence of the moralizing rubrics is flagged up: some of these were in fact present in the 1702 edition, but they have been added to all of the novellas in this new version. The classicizing subtitle of Decads (Greek for ten) may represent a corrective to Boccaccio’s imaginative etymology of Decameron, but may equally signal a link back to Roman authors such as Livy, and by extension to recently dead greats such as Dryden (who himself versified some novellas from the Decameron in his Fables Ancient and Modern).36 The moralizing rubrics have been accommodated to the “Gust of the present Age” in their modernized language, but are still recognizably derived from those found in the five editions of the first English translation. In terms of the accompanying discursive paratextual material, this edition also reproduces the two frontispiece plates from the 1702 edition, and the address “To the Reader” (A4r–A5v), while the biography of Boccaccio (“Some Account of the Author’s Life”) is slightly expanded. The Leeds University copy of the 1712 edition has both frontispiece plates bound together at the front of the volume, before the title page (figures 10 and 11). One particular innovation present in the 1712 edition of this translation is the short summary running titles across the top of each page, which provide a shorthand guide to the subject matter of each novella. In fact, these titles, which are often overlooked in the reading history of a book, will go on to have an afterlife of their very own as chapter titles in tables of contents, and even later as short story titles in the numerous future editions and small volumes of selections that are published from the late nineteenth century onward. In the 1702 edition, summary titles occur at the start of each novella, with the function of a rubric, for example, Day I, 7, where the tale of Bergamino and Can Grande della Scala appears as “Novell. VII. The Covetousness of Great Men genteelly bantered.” (This is, in fact, a straight translation of the French 1697 source text: “L’avarice des Grands respectueusement daubée.”) The running headers of the 1712 reprint serve to further localize the English version, and are certainly entertaining in their own right: we find such titles as “The feign’d Paralytick” (Novel XI: II, 1), “The Dumb Gardner” (Novel XXI: III, 1), or “The She-Hypocrite” (Novel XLIX: V, 10). In terms of the textual history of the text, these two heavily abridged early eighteenth-century editions are something of a dead end, as they are never reprinted. They do, however, anticipate a strong future strand in 36 On Dryden’s versions of three Decameron tales, see Wright, Boccaccio in England, 265–77.

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Boccaccio’s print reception, the popular, decidedly non-scholarly collection of tales that become popular in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In fact, an editorial focus on the tale, rather than the governing superstructure of the Decameron, can be one way of distinguishing the different intended readerships of the subsequent editions, as we will see. In 1741, less than forty years after the second English translation, another translation of the Decameron was published. Like its predecessors, the translator is anonymous, although he has been identified as a Derbyshire doctor, Charles Balguy.37 As a response to – and rejection of – the drastically abridged 1702 and 1712 editions, this version restores almost all of the missing content, and is much more accurate in terms of both linguistic renderings and textual completeness. More than any other translation in the Decameron’s English history, this one has endured the longest in its capacity as the basic workmanlike translation of the text; it has been constantly revised and republished up until the very recent past, with its most recent outing the 1999 Decameron Selections that appeared under the Wordsworth Classic Erotica imprint. In keeping with this editorial fresh start, this edition does not contain any residual traces of previous English editions in its paratexts. The title page is stripped down in comparison with the copious explanations of the previous edition, and reads: “THE | DECAMERON, | OR | Ten Days ENTERTAINMENT | OF | BOCCACE. | Translated from the ITALIAN. | LONDON: | Printed for R. DODSLEY, at Tully’s Head in Pall-mall. | MDCCXLI.” Dodsley was a writer and bookseller, whose press was at the centre of London literary life in the mid-eighteenth century.38 His press opened in 1735, publishing works by himself and other notable authors such as Alexander Pope. He began to publish classical and European works in English translation from a relatively early stage of his career, including a translation of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, three of Voltaire’s epistles, and a French edition of Fénelon’s Télémaque in 1738, Christopher Pitt’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid in 1740, this Decameron in 1741, and Marco Girolamo Vida’s De arte poetica 37 S.O. Addy, rev. by Claire L. Nutt, “Balguy, Charles,” in the ODNB. The 1909 edition of the ODNB also provides the source for the attribution of this translation to him: “The statement that he translated the ‘Decameron’ is evidenced by the notes of his school friend, Dr. Samuel Pegge, in the College of Arms, who expressly mentions the fact”: ODNB, ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1908–9), 1:60 (available in the ODNB archive). 38 See James E. Tierney’s entry on Dodsley in the ODNB.

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translated from the Latin, also translated by Pitt, in 1742. As far as I have been able to ascertain, Boccaccio is therefore one of only three Italians to be translated and published by Dodsley, and his selection alongside Tasso and Vida may indicate that at this printing house he was viewed primarily as a Renaissance figure and valued especially for his classical learning. This translation might therefore be inserted into a specific literary moment, the mid-eighteenth-century neoclassical revival (although the other paratexts give very little sign of this being a particular focus of the edition). The text contains translations of the rubrics, but the moralizing rubrics have now been excised, and from this point on will only be included in those editions which reproduce the seventeenth-century text for reasons of historical interest. The summary running headers, a rich source of interpretative material, do not appear in this edition. It is generally thought that Balguy used the Italian text as the basis for this translation, but his preface makes it clear that he is at least aware of the translation and transmission history of the text, referring to both the French translations made by Premierfait (first printed 1485) and Antoine Le Maçon (first printed 1545), as well as the English translations first published in 1620 and 1702:39 Two translations there are in French, that have come to my knowledge, and the same number in our own language, if they may be stiled so; for such liberties are taken everywhere in altering every thing according to the people’s own taste and fancy, that a great part of both bears very little resemblance to the original. (vi–vii)

We may therefore surmise that he also consulted previous translations, if only to verify the accuracy of his own, and so the title page claim “Translated from the Italian” may not tell the whole story of the source texts. In terms of the editorial composition of the text, the translator-editor restores the frame story and the division into days of storytelling, although some important omissions still remain. Parts of the frame story and some of the novellas are abridged; the authorial frame is still missing (the proemio, introduction to Day IV, and authorial conclusion), and two novellas (III, 10 and IX, 10) have been excised in their entirety. It might be expected that the tale of Alibech and Rustico would not be included, since it was left out of the previous two translations; 39 Wright, Boccaccio in England, 262.

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more surprising, perhaps, is the omission of Day IX, 10, which had previously been judged fit for the English reader. (The notoriety of these two tales was of course recognized by Guercin in his French version of the Ninfale fiesolano, when he incorporated their punchlines into his rendering of the rape scene.) Here, the translator openly acknowledges his censorship in the concluding paragraph of his preface to the text: Indeed Boccace is so licentious in many places, that it requires some management to preserve his wit and humour, and render him tolerably decent. This I have attempted with the loss of two novels, which I judged incapable of such treatment; and am apprehensive, it may still be thought by some people, that I have rather omitted too little, than too much.

No attempt is made to conceal the absence of these tales, as was done, for example, in the previous two translations. In both cases, the 1741 edition includes the frame story that surrounds the offending material, but signals the novellas’ excision with suggestive rows of asterisks. This emerging visual “presence” of the “absence” can be seen as the opening salvo of the increasingly ostentatious paratextual display of censorship in the nineteenth century editions. The two very different English presentations of the text in the eighteenth century, one abridged and one restored, therefore anticipate the two distinct future strands in Boccaccio publishing in the anglophone world: on the one hand, the French-derived collection of tales, with a focus on the diversionary aspects of the content, and on the other, a scholarly approach that seeks to assert the author’s intellectual authority and to reproduce the textual integrity of the source text in its translation. The desirability and/or difficulty of achieving this within the bounds of public morality will thus direct editorial choices in the nineteenth century. The Nineteenth Century: Through the Peephole Establishing Canonicity: Dubois’s 1804 Edition The large number and wide variety of different English printings of the Decameron in the nineteenth century demonstrate its increasing popularity and broadening appeal. A major factor in this publishing efflorescence was Balguy’s 1741 translation, which stabilized the English target text sufficiently for editorial energies to be directed elsewhere, into the paratexts that frame and mediate the text to its new audiences. A new

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edition of Balguy’s translation, revised by Edward Dubois, was published in 1804, and signals a move towards a different target audience. (Dubois is nowhere named in the text, but his identity can be easily deduced from the information on the title page and backmatter.)40 Once again, this is a two-volume publication, slightly larger in format than the 1741 edition, with a veritable superabundance of paratextual material. The title page is rather sparer in layout than its predecessor, with less variation in font and type. It reads: THE | DECAMERON | OR | TEN DAYS ENTERTAINMENT | OF | BOCCACCIO. | Translated from the Italian. | IN TWO VOLUMES. | THE SECOND EDITION, CORRECTED AND IMPROVED. | To which are prefixed, | REMARKS ON THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF BOCCACCIO, | AND | AN ADVERTISEMENT, | BY THE AUTHOR OF OLD NICK, A PIECE OF | FAMILY BIOGRAPHY, &c. | VOL. I. | LONDON: | Printed by J. Wright, Denmark Court, Strand, | FOR VERNOR AND HOOD, POULTRY; LONGMAN AND REES, | PATERNOSTER ROW; AND CUTHELL AND | MARTIN, MIDDLE ROW, | HOLBORN. | 1804.

Like the 1741 edition, this title page also contains an engraved illustration, but where the 1741 had the printer’s device, here we find an engraving of the brigata seated together in a garden with a decorative neoclassical fountain. This particular visual device will become one of the key motifs of the art of the English Decamerons, as it was in the Italian visual tradition of the text from the first illustrated edition, the Venice 1492. The volume also boasts a frontispiece portrait of Boccaccio, based on the Gucht engraving in the 1702 edition but now ascribed to Titian; a lengthy biography of Boccaccio (“Remarks on the life and writings of Boccaccio”), mostly culled from Warton’s History of English Poetry; and an address to the reader from the translator, entitled “The Editor’s Advertisement.”41 In terms of the completeness of the text, the authorial paratext continues to be omitted, as are the censored novellas III, 10 and IX, 10. Interestingly, the layout of the page around these areas of censorship

40 See the entry for “Edward Dubois” by W.P. Courtney, rev. by Rebecca Mills, in the ODNB. 41 On the “Titian” portrait, see Kirkham, “John Badmouth,” 367–9. Dubois acknowledges his debt to Warton and others in the “Remarks,” 5–6.

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serves to superficially conceal the omissions: whereas the 1741 edition has a row of asterisks signalling the absent tale, the 1804 edition presents the frame story of that day alone as Novel X. In volume 2 the censorship is more overt: for IX, 10, the frame story between IX, 9 and IX, 10 is excised along with the story (presumably because it contains the internal justification for Dioneo’s tale), but in this case the censorship is indicated by a double row of asterisks. The editor is refreshingly straightforward about the particular problem of censorship and historical solutions to this, and explains, in a very roundabout way, that he has not done anything to the text to hide it, and that (through the aid of a judicious Latin tag) it is preferable to err on the side of modesty rather than immodesty: “Indeed Boccaccio is so licentious in many places,” says the short preface to the first edition, “that it requires some management to preserve his wit and humour, and render him tolerably decent. This I have attempted with the loss of two novels, which I judged incapable of such treatment.” On this “management” the editor has improved, and many words and sentences that trenched on decency although warranted by the original, he has metamorphosed or expunged, without ceremony or compunction. Much the translator has judiciously omitted, and some things he has treated with a freedom of translation that might be justly reprehended; but, holding it not less wise than fit not to assume the character of an index, claramque faceam praeferre pudendis, the editor neglects to point out the former, and not wishing to undertake an invidious and tedious task, passes over the latter unnoticed. The interest and effect of the story are never diminished by the last, and where they suffer by the first, it is a sacrifice at the shrine of modesty, and will not only be excused, but commended, by those from whom it is fame and honour to receive praise. (37–8)

This longwinded exposition of the minutiae of the editorial and translation process is typical of the tone of the volume, but nonetheless represents a major development in comparison with previous editions. For the first time, the English Boccaccio is furnished with a substantial critical apparatus, comprising some twenty-eight pages of “Remarks” ([5]– 33) and the five-page “Editor’s Advertisement” ([35]–40). Boccaccio’s text is therefore situated – quite literally, via editorial explication – within a new English receiving context: one that is scholarly and already orientated towards (and well versed in) Italian literature. The paratextual additions suggest there was an editorial desire to see Boccaccio integrated

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into the English Romantic cultural milieu, and presumably a financial opportunity in this publication.42 There is an attempt to situate Boccaccio not only in an Italian literary context but also in a broader European one, and to highlight, in particular, his long-established presence in English literary culture. Boccaccio is presented primarily as a source for great English authors such as Chaucer, in passages that follow Warton almost word for word. This new edition of the Decameron should therefore be seen as part of a wider movement in English literary culture – expressed in excelsis in Warton’s history – of a scholarly recuperation of sources and a simultaneously new national repositioning of English letters as the culmination of European or even world (i.e., Western) literature. In fact, the actual circumstances of this new publication bear out these cultural associations: in the “Editor’s Advertisement,” Dubois states that “A new edition was recommended to the bookseller, by a particular friend of the present editor, a gentleman whose ardent and vigilant attachment to the interests of literature is greatly honourable to his nature, and has often proved beneficial to the object of his admiration and support” (35). The friend is identified in a footnote as Thomas Hill, Esq. (1760–1840), a book collector and London literary scenester who was friends with famous Italophiles such as Leigh Hunt.43 For the first time, the book includes a historic overview of the transmission and translation history of Boccaccio (abridged from Warton), which includes a detailed presentation of Boccaccio’s reception in the sixteenth century and some notes on the French medieval reception (with an implied but pointed criticism about medieval French morals: “Premierfait translated it, at the command of Queen Jane of Navarre, who seems to have made no kind of conditions about suppressing the licentious stories in the year 1414”).44 This “scientific” attention is also turned to the translation process itself in the five-page “Editor’s Advertisement,” which gives, for example, examples of some passages that have been redone, and the censorship policy on the problematic obscene novellas (cited above). The translator mostly favours an interventionist strategy with regard to proper names, giving some Latin forms, anglicizing some, and leaving others in the Italian form if they are “not far distant.” The editor also rejects the common English

42 This will be discussed in more detail in chapter 5. 43 On Hill, see the entry in the ODNB by H.R. Tedder, rev. by John D. Heigh. 44 P. 24.

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practice of giving Boccaccio’s name in the French form, and deliberately restores it to Italian. The 1804 Decameron is thus an edition that generates multiple narratives of translation and transmission in and of itself: the editor seeks to advertise textual improvements to the translation, whilst also aiming to institutionalize Boccaccio’s writing within the canons of English literature. To this end, the historiography of the English Boccaccio tradition is even inscribed and discussed within this text, in the form of the citation from the 1741 edition’s address “To the Reader”: the template – and textual traces – of this interpretative superstructure will endure in editions up to the present day. The 1820s: Griffin’s Serial Decameron and Sharp’s Decameron The early 1820s saw a cluster of different publications of the Decameron in various formats. These included a second edition of the Duboisedited text, printed in London in 1820; a serial edition, published weekly in twenty issues, beginning 21 October 1821; a duodecimo set in four volumes of the Dubois text in 1822, printed for Sharp and Richards; and two Italian-language Decamerons (one in two volumes, and one in three) published by Pickering in 1825.45 It is hard to pinpoint a particular trigger for this new wave of interest, but perhaps one factor may have been the notorious Roxburghe book sale a decade earlier in June 1812, at which the Valdarfer Decameron was sold for the outrageous sum of £2260 to the Marquess of Blandford. There was a growing interest in Italian medieval literature in this period, and a burgeoning cult of Dante, tied to publication events such as a new edition of Cary’s translation of The Divine Comedy in 1819. Finally, the presence in London of famous Italian authors, such as Ugo Foscolo (who supplied the introduction to Pickering’s Italian-language London edition of 1825) may

45 The Decameron, or Ten Days’ Entertainment (London: Printed by J.F. Dove for R. Priestly and W. Clarke, 1820); The Decameron, or Ten Days’ Entertainment (London: Printed for James Griffin, 1821–2); The Decameron, or Ten Days Entertainment, 4 vols. (London: Printed for William Sharp and son, 1822); The Decameron, or Ten Days Entertainment of Boccaccio: Translated from the Italian, 4 vols. (London: Printed for Samuel Richards and Co., Grocers’ Hall Court, Poultry, 1822); Il Decamerone di Messer Giovanni Boccaccio (London: G. Pickering, 1825). Note that two different editions of the four-volume 1822 edition were printed. The copy consulted was printed for Richards (University of Manchester, John Rylands Library, shelfmark R49737).

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also have contributed to this general appetite for Boccaccio.46 (The nineteenth-century appetite for Italian literature will be discussed in more detail in chapter 5.) The 1820s are significant in the reception history of the text for a number of reasons: they mark the beginning of the recovery of the censored sexually explicit material, the translated text appears in both cheaper and de luxe editions, and in a variety of sizes, while technological advances mean that the translated text can be accompanied for the first time in English by sequences of illustrations, in the form of colour lithographs in the serial publication and engravings in the Pickering edition. I will begin with a brief presentation of the serial edition, before moving on to the 1822 four-volume edition. The serial part-work was intended to form, when complete, a twovolume edition of the Decameron, as the back-wrapper tells us (figure 13): “It will be completed in Twenty Numbers, Duodecimo Size, on Fine Paper, Hotpressed, with a new Type; and will form, when finished, two elegant Pocket Volumes.”47 The first issue is a slim pamphlet, a stitched single quire of only twenty-four pages, with a single leaf of a coloured copper-plate engraving inserted at the front. The leaves are bound in a paper wrapper, with a densely printed title page on the front and an advertising blurb on the back. The wrapper is made of a lower quality paper than the pages of the serialized book contained inside, and we are thus fortunate that this temporary housing has survived along with the first part of the serial run. A comparison of the title page and layout shows that the source edition for the serial was clearly Dubois’s 1804 Decameron: in fact, the paratexts and layout reproduce those of this edition almost exactly, to the extent that they retain now-obsolete information that has no bearing on this serial edition. The only textual changes made are to the publication details, although the visual layout is rather different: the page is now bordered by a chain-link frame, and there is no illustration; likewise, there is much more variation in choice of font and type size for the title page text.48

46 On Foscolo’s exile in London, see Peter Brand’s entry on him in the ODNB. 47 Only one copy of the complete two-volume part-work is still extant, in Yale University Library (shelfmark PQ4272 E5 A355), while a copy of the first issue is held in the Bodleian, Oxford University (shelfmark Harding A 1343 (1)). 48 The Yale copy of the complete part-work has been cropped for binding and has hence lost the decorative border on the title page.

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The title page is followed by a highly coloured lithograph plate illustrating Day II, 6 (the moment when Spina’s mother discovers her daughter and Giannotto embracing in a glade), rather than the “Remarks” as advertised on the cover, while the text of the Decameron itself begins on the recto side of the opening with the “Introduction To The Ladies.” The mediating paratexts of the 1804 edition are therefore not included in this first instalment, but are present in the Yale bound copy of the serial, so we can deduce that they must have been published in a later issue. The ordering of the elements of the text and paratext for serial publication thus reveals the marketing approach of the publisher, enticing the readership with the notorious text itself, and saving the biographical material for later in the run. Indeed, the temporally referenced structure of the Decameron seems to make it such an ideal candidate for serialization that it is astounding that this is the first and only recorded instance of a part-issue of the text in English. If serials are characterized in part by the “creative tension between producer and consumer,” this is surely mirrored in this text in the creative tension between author and reader and between internal narrators and internal auditors.49 Other parts of the paratext are highly suggestive in articulating aspects of contemporary reading practice. The advertising matter on the back wrapper, in particular, gives much useful information about the position – and editorial positioning – of Boccaccio for a serial audience (figure 13). It begins: On Saturday, October 20th, 1821, will be published, the first number of Boccaccio’s Decameron, OR, TEN DAYS ENTERTAINMENT. To be continued Weekly until complete, Price 6d. each, with a highly coloured Copperplate Engraving to every alternate Number, By J. Griffin, 11, Middle Row, Holborn; And may be had of all other Booksellers.

The issuing of the Decameron in serial form itself represents a radical departure in the distribution of the text, and allows readers to acquire 49 Robin Myers and Michael Harris, ed., Serials and Their Readers 1620–1914 (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies and New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1993), viii. On the interrelations between the nineteenth-century serial and book, see Laurel Brake, “‘The Trepidation of the Spheres’: The Serial and the Book in the Nineteenth Century,” in Myers and Harris, Serials and Their Readers, 83–101. See also Brian Maidment, “Periodicals and Serial Publications, 1780–1830,” in the CHBB, vol. 5, 1695–1830, 498–512.

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an illustrated fine-paper edition for a total cost of 10 shillings, spread over twenty weeks at a cost of 6d per issue. For the reader, the impact of the net outlay for the book is therefore substantially eased by its being bought over a long period of time, while for the publisher the publication of the book as a part-work meant that it was more likely to be a profitable “low capital, high yield commodity.”50 Following the publishing details, there is a densely packed presentation of the text, which synthesizes many of the favourite topoi of the Decameron’s English editors: the excellence of Boccaccio’s writing, the necessity to bring him to a British audience, the criticisms levelled against the text for its anticlericalism and licentiousness, and, naturally, the complete and uncensored nature of this particular rendering. The author of this advert strikes some unusual notes in his presentation, which are geared towards his specific production context: that Boccaccio is so apparently little known is the fault of British publishers and not of public taste, with the implication that this serial publication will go some way to rectifying the faults of his competitors. The text is further authorized through a touch of aristocratic glamour and via reference to a display of profligate bibliomania, showing its broad appeal from the 6d subscribers to the ruling classes: It is rather singular, that an author, who has been so deservedly celebrated in other kingdoms, should in this country be so little known to the Public; but, that some have fairly estimated his merits, and that this apparent neglect of Wit and Talent has been more owing to the apathy of the British Publishers, than of the British Public, may be inferred from the extensive sale of those editions which have been printed – as also from the fact of a single Copy producing at a Sale the enormous sum of two thousand two hundred and sixty pounds; which was given for it by the present Duke of Marlborough, when Marquis of Blandford.51

The central part of the piece is the defence of publication in the light of criticism, itself a powerful and much-used trope in the promotion of the Decameron, which dates back as far as Boccaccio’s own authorial conclusion to the text:

50 Bill Bell, “Fiction in the Marketplace: Towards a Study of the Victorian Serial,” in Myers and Harris, Serials and Their Readers, 125–44 (125). 51 The so-called Roxburghe Decameron is now held in the John Rylands Library of the University of Manchester, shelfmark 17659.

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It has been urged against these Tales, that they tend to the subversion of Religion, by bringing its Pastors into disrepute; and also, that they are too licentious to meet the eye of chastity: to the former objection it may be replied, that perhaps the Clergy of his day merited the castigation which he has given them; and with respect to the latter, we will quote the observations of an anonymous writer, with which we entirely coincide: – “Those that read this work as a mere amusement, will find as much satisfaction in that particular, as in any thing of this nature; and those that read it with more serious application, will meet with many examples of virtue to excite them to the imitation of them: but it will also be difficult to prevent such as are inclined to libertinism, from meeting somewhat that will be entertaining likewise to them; though this proceeds not so much from the fault of the Book, as their own depraved inclinations.”

Does this casual criticism of the medieval (Catholic) clergy reveal a touch of anti-Catholicism? The phrasing, in fact, might suggest a Protestant admiration for Boccaccio in taking on the abuses of the church. The “anonymous writer” cited here is, of course, the author of the address “To the Reader” in the 1702 translation of the Decameron, whose words cited here appear in full in the “Remarks on the Life and Writings” of the 1804 source edition for the serial. This flimsy backwrapper therefore provides us with a further example of the selfauthorizing strategies of Decameron editors, who rarely tend to go beyond previous editions when defining their task. The final selling points concern the elevated narrative qualities of the text and the authenticity of this rendering. The first is another naked appeal to the serial reader to keep buying, as the editor assures us that “[Boccaccio’s] imagination seems to improve according to the degree of exercise which he has given it; as it will invariably be found, that every succeeding Tale which he relates, far surpasses those which have preceded: thus increasing the pleasure of his readers until the Volume closes.” Finally, the closing phrases assure those who have heard of the censorship that more of the controversial matter is contained here: “As it is the intention of the Publisher to present the Public with Boccaccio as he wrote himself, and not with Boccaccio as mutilated by all recent editors, – he will insert, in their proper places, those Tales which have been omitted in all, but the very oldest editions; thus rendering it the only true Edition of his Works extant, in the English Language.” The claim is technically correct, in that this serial edition does contain the text of the censored novellas III, 10 and IX, 10, but it fails to mention

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that the sexually explicit material is given in Italian, and thus a nontranslation strategy still controls access to this part of the text. Another contemporary English publication is the first printed book to contain the two notorious tales for the first time. This is the fourvolume 1822 Decameron, published in London by William Sharp and Son.52 One of the most striking characteristics of this edition is its tiny size: the volumes are small duodecimos of about 13 cm in height. This is very much a fine, pocket-sized Decameron that would be much easier to handle than the rather unwieldy octavo volumes of the 1804 edition. The title advertises at once the links back to the preceding edition and the improvements made therein: THE | DECAMERON, | OR, | TEN DAYS’ ENTERTAINMENT, | OF | BOCCACCIO: | TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN. | A NEW EDITION; | IN WHICH ARE RESTORED MANY PASSAGES | OMITTED IN FORMER EDITIONS. | IN FOUR VOLUMES | VOL. I. | LONDON: | PRINTED FOR WILLIAM SHARP AND SON, | KING STREET, COVENT GARDEN. | 1822.

Each of the four volumes contains this title page (itself preceded by a half-title page), with appropriate volume number, while the volumes are made up of quires of six with signatures. Volume 1 begins with a lengthy “Notice of the life and writings of Boccaccio” (13–41) and then the “Introduction to the Ladies” (43). There are no other paratextual addresses or organizational material such as translator’s prefaces, tables of contents, or scholarly notes; the whole seems designed to provide an attractive, informative, but not particularly learned package for a general readership in the most portable format to date. As might be surmised from the similarity in their titles, the accompanying biographical paratexts of both the 1804 and 1822 edition demonstrate a continuity of material. The newer edition’s “Notice” summarizes and reuses large chunks of the previous edition’s “Remarks,” although its author makes great claims about its scholarliness in comparison to the imaginative biographies of the past.53 Rather than base his authorizing strategies on Warton and other English literary historians, this editor claims to have returned to the source culture, citing Girolamo Tiraboschi as his principal source for the life and writings. The first part 52 This edition is briefly discussed by McWilliam in his introduction, 27–8. 53 “Notice,” 13.

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of the “Notice” is given over to Boccaccio’s life, and covers much of the same topics as found in the 1804 “Remarks”; it is, however, sufficiently different that it seems to have been derived from another source, and presumably this is Tiraboschi’s life (whether contained in one of the source editions for this text or from his monumental Storia). As will be shown, this editor obviously had access to both an Italian and French edition when preparing the 1822 edition, as the Italian is preserved in the censored tales and a French version is also provided. However, the section devoted to Boccaccio’s writings and his place in European and English literary culture is taken virtually word for word from the previous edition; some paragraphs and footnotes have been cut out, and other parts reordered, but the majority of the material remains in substantially the same form.54 The effect of these reworkings of the editorial paratext on the presentation of Boccaccio and his work is subtle but important: the updated critical approach based on Tiraboschi now highlights Boccaccio’s Italianity and stresses his relevance to modern literary historiography. By unpacking some of the intertextual baggage in these commentary paratexts that are attached to Balguy’s translation, we can thus learn more about the way in which literary reputations are constructed. The transmission mechanisms between the various incarnations of the literary text are relatively well known and, in the case of the Decameron, well documented; however, the migration of other elements of the book – such as the editorial paratexts – have been little discussed. As I show, while the translator of every generation’s Decameron approaches the task in the light of his or her particular cultural context, so does every generation’s editor. Certain motifs such as the biographical life of Boccaccio, or the importance of his writings and their place in various canons, as well as other elements such as the titles, subtitles, or features of the mise-en-page, are canonized into the paratextual framework that accompanies the translated text. Some elements have a real “stickiness” that can endure sometimes over centuries; it is for this reason, for example, that a trope such as the enticing myth of Boccaccio lover of the illegitimate daughter of King Robert of Anjou can appear in an early

54 The shared passages start at p. 28 in the 1822 edition (from p. 13 onward in the 1804 edition), beginning: “Boccaccio composed, in Latin, An Abridgement of the Roman History” (1822, I, 28); compare “He composed an abridgement of the Roman History” (1804, I, 13).

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eighteenth-century edition and appear virtually unchanged two hundred and fifty years later in a cheap paperback selection.55 The principal importance of the 1822 edition, however, lies not only in its paratextual positioning but also in its editorial completeness. For the first time, the censored novellas of III, 10 and IX, 10 are included in their full form.56 With the exception of the previously discussed serial edition, the tale of Alibech and Rustico had never before appeared in any of the English translations, while IX, 10, was removed in the 1741 translation and its 1804 edition. The remainder of this chapter will therefore consider this dynamic trend towards greater sexual explicitness in the English publications through an investigation of the management of these contested sites. Although they are present for the first time in the text of the 1822 edition, these notorious novellas are still censored for the purely anglophone reader, since the controversial passages are given in Italian and French rather than plain English. In the case of Alibech and Rustico (III, 10), the offending paragraphs are left in the original Italian, untranslated. This is a fairly extensive sequence, extending from “Alla quale Rustico disse” (“and Rustico replied”; §12 in the modern edition) to the sentence “Ma mentre che tra il diavolo di Rustico, e l’inferno d’Alibech era, per troppo disiderio, e per men potere, questa questione” (“But at the height of this dispute between Alibech’s Hell and Rustico’s devil, brought about by a surplus of desire on the one hand and a shortage of power on the other”; §31).57 For the uninitiated, the tale describes an innocent and highly religious young girl who is persuaded by the hermit monk Rustico to help him “rimettere il diavolo in inferno,” to “put the devil back in hell,” which is to be understood as a metaphor for the 55 For example, see the “Short Account of the Author’s Life” in the 1702 edition, and the postscript to Tales from the Decameron, ed. Mark Cohen (London: Four Square Press, 1962). 56 For an overview of the censorship history of these novellas, see McWilliam, 27–31; Kleinhenz supplies an overview of some translation solutions to IX, 10 in his review article “The Art of Translation.” For more detailed studies, see Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, “Not in Front of the Servants: Forms of Bowdlerism and Censorship in Translation,” in The Practices of Literary Translation: Constraints and Creativity, ed. Jean Boase-Beier and Michael Holman (Manchester: St. Jerome, 1999), 31–44; Theo Hermans, “Irony’s Echo,” chap. 3 in The Conference of the Tongues (Manchester: St. Jerome, 2007), 52–85, esp. 60–5; Carol O’Sullivan, “Margin and the Third-Person Effect in Bohn’s Extra Volumes,” in The Power of the Pen: Translation and Censorship in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Münster: LIT, 2010), 119–39. 57 All translations from the Decameron are taken from McWilliam’s translation.

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sex act. The comedy of the story essentially centres on the fact that this devout young girl believes she is performing a religious ritual, and zealously badgers Rustico to assist her in her devotions, all expressed through the combination of euphemistic speech and blasphemous metaphor, climaxing in the notorious “resurrezion della carne” (“resurrection of the flesh”) metaphor (§13). This edition preserves the modesty of the exclusively anglophone reader, at least, by the deployment of a judicious transition into Italian just before Rustico begins to disrobe. An asterisk directs the reader to an explanation in the footnotes at the bottom of the page (figure 14): The translators regret that the disuse into which magic has fallen makes it impossible to render the technichals of that mysterious art into tolerable English: they have therefore found it necessary to insert several passages in the original Italian. To those who are acquainted with the French language, the version of a few passages by Mirabeau, will be sufficient to throw some light on these difficulties. (II, 150)

This artful solution cloaks the obscenity within a spurious historical and linguistic context: there being apparently no words to express this process in “tolerable English.” The construction allows for a humorous assertion of English probity in behaviour and language: the task is impossible either because magic is no longer practised in England, or because it is intolerable to express it. These degenerate practices (sexual permissiveness, witchcraft) are thus cheerfully marked out as the domain of other languages and, by extension, other linguistic cultures. Of course, if the meaning of this is not clear enough in the original Italian, then a recent French translation will be supplied to enlighten the audience.58 Either by design or accident, the French text supplied is substantially more titillating than the Italian, with lots of explanatory amplifications. The source text is Mirabeau’s “traduction libre” of 1802, also published in four volumes; that edition also contains Tiraboschi’s life of Boccaccio, and thus may also be the source for this element of the paratext.59 From

58 There is a brief notice on Mirabeau’s translation in Gathercole, “The French Translators of Boccaccio,” Italica, 46 (1969), 300–9 (306). 59 Nouvelles de Jean Boccace, traduction libre, ornée de la vie de Boccace (par Tiraboschi), des contes que Lafontaine a empruntés de cet auteur et de figures gravées sous la direction de Ponce, d’après les dessins de Marillier, par Mirabeau (Paris: L. Duprat, Letellier et Cie,

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his “Avis de l’editeur” (editor’s introduction), Mirabeau seems to be no fan of Boccaccio’s writings, but allows himself to be persuaded to enliven this unpromising source text with a new rendering: Ce n’est certainement pas pour nous que Boccace est un auteur classique, et le public, qui veut qu’on l’amuse, donnera toujours tort au traducteur, quand une version littérale et entière l’ennuiera. J’ai donc pensé qu’il falloit renoncer à donner une traduction fidèle de Boccace; se borner, en l’abrégeant beaucoup, à prendre ses sujets et ses principales idées, et s’efforcer de les rajeunir, si l’on vouloit faire lire avec plaisir un recueil de ses Nouvelles. (I, [vi]) Boccace is certainly not a classical author for us, and the public, which wants to be entertained, will always blame the translator when a complete and literal version bores them. I therefore thought that it was necessary to give up the idea of making a literal translation of Boccace; and instead, by abridging it greatly, to content myself with taking his subjects and his principal ideas, and to try to rejuvenate them, if one wanted a collection of his Tales to be read with pleasure.

In line with his specific aim to increase the audience’s pleasure, Mirabeau’s rendering is highly sexed-up relative to the source text, with the effect of giving a less textually grounded (but probably not unwelcome) account of the action for an English reader who can read French. The degree of authorial intervention found in the French rendering can be clearly seen if we compare the main text Italian and footnote French text in the English edition: [E] cominciossi a spogliare quegli pochi vestimenti, che aveva, e rimase tutto ignudo, e cosi ancora fece la fanciulla, e posesi in ginocchione a guisa, che adorar volesse; e dirimpetto a se fece star lei. E cosi stando, essendo Rustico, piu che mai, nel suo disidero acceso, per lo vederla cosi bella, venne la resurrezioni della carne (II, 150–1, main text)

1802) (The Stories by Jean Boccace, a free translation, adorned with the life of Boccace (by Tiraboschi), those tales which Lafontaine borrowed from this author and engraved with illustrations under the supervision of Ponce, from Marillier’s drawings, by Mirabeau). I discuss the implications of this editorial choice in a forthcoming article in Word and Image, “Eroticism à la française: Text, Image, and Display in Nineteenth-Century Editions of Boccaccio’s Decameron.”

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He began to divest himself of the few clothes he was wearing, leaving himself completely naked. The girl followed his example, and he sank to his knees as though he were about to pray, getting her to kneel directly opposite. In this posture, the girl’s beauty was displayed to Rustico in all its glory, and his longings blazed more fiercely than ever, bringing about the resurrection of the flesh. Aussitot l’ermite quitte ces vêtemens, et la docile Alibech en fait autant. Les voila nus l’un et l’autre: Rustique promène ses regardes avides sur ce corps d’albâtre, dont l’Amour sembloit avoir arrondi les formes ...... et le diable se déchaisne avec une indomptable fureur. (II, 150, footnote text) The hermit immediately takes off his clothes, and docile Alibech does the same. There they are, both of them naked: Rustique allows his greedy gaze to wander all over that alabaster body, whose curves seemed have been rounded out by Love ... and the devil unleashes himself with an uncontrollable fury.

The French version loses the rhythms of Boccaccio’s cursus, being written in an entirely different narrative style and in the historic present tense. The narrative point of view of the Italian text is deliberately neutral and descriptive, even deadpan, in order to highlight the high seriousness with which Alibech approaches her religious duty and the ironic distance between her understanding of the situation and the reader’s. Mirabeau’s version, meanwhile, is entirely complicit with the (male) reader, and very much more prurient in tone. Alibech, like all proper sex objects, is “docile,” while Rustique can take the time to appraise her alabaster curves with “ses regardes avides.” There is a frank (and male-oriented) appreciation of her youthful charms and sexual innocence in the fetishization of her white body, none of which appears directly in the original Italian text. At the same time that the titillation and sexual predation is increased, however, the blasphemy is removed: there is no longer any mention of Alibech’s prayer posture, nor the infamous resurrection-of-the-flesh joke. Interestingly, the French text – brought in here to allow a francophone reader to access the sexually explicit material – is itself censored from the religious point of view. Another feature of Mirabeau’s rendering is to write in much more dialogue and very direct descriptions of their physical contact, as can be seen here:

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[L]a quale riguardando Alibech, e maravigliatasti, disse: Rustico, quella che cosa e, che io ti veggio, che cosi si pigne in fuori, e non l’ho io? O figliuola mia, disse Rustico, questo e il diavolo, di che io t’ ho parlato, e vedi tu ora: egli mi da grandissima molestia, tanta, che appena la posso sofferire. Allora disse la giovane. O lodato sia Iddio, che io veggio, che io sto meglio, che non stai tu, che non ho cotesto diavolo io. Disse Rustico, tu di vero; ma tu hai un’ altra cosa, che non l’ho io, e haila in iscambio di questo. Disse Alibech: O che? A cui Rustico disse: Hai l’inferno[.] (II, 151– 2, main text) Alibech stared at this in amazement, and said: “Rustico, what is that thing I see sticking out in front of you, which I do not possess?” “Oh, my daughter,” said Rustico, “this is the devil I was telling you about. Do you see what he is doing? He’s hurting me so much that I can hardly endure it.” “Oh, praise be to God,” said the girl, “I can see that I am better off than you are, for I have no such devil to contend with.” “You’re right there,” said Rustico. “But you have something else instead, that I haven’t.” “Oh?” said Alibech. “And what’s that?” “You have Hell,” said Rustico. Eh! mon Dieu, mon père, s’écrie Alibech toute [sic] étonnée, qu’est-ce donc que je vois la [sic]? Je n’ai rien de pareil ... (En disant ces mots, elle touche le diable, et vous jugez qu’il lève avec plus d’audace sa crête altière.) Mon amie, c’est précisément là le diable dont je t’ai parlé, et qui me livre en cet instant de cruels assauts. O que je suis heureuse de n’avoir pas un diable comme celapour [sic] me tourmenter! Ma fille, tu as beaucoup plus; tu portes l’enfer où il faut le précipiter. (Et le rusé papelard presse d’une main ardente le sanctuaire de l’amour, qu’il appeloit l’enfer.) (II, 150–1, footnote text) “Eh! My God, Father,” cries Alibech, all surprised, “what’s that, then, that I see there? I’ve got nothing like that” ... (While saying these words, she touches the devil, and you may judge whether he raised his cockscomb higher with even more audacity.) “My dear friend, that thing there is precisely the devil about which I spoke to you, and who is even at this moment subjecting me to cruel assaults.” “Oh, how happy I am not to have a devil like that to torment me!” “My girl, you have much more than that: you have the hell into which he must be cast.” (And the crafty old hypocrite presses a passionate hand against the sanctuary of love, which he was calling Hell.)

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Mirabeau’s rendering is much more narrative and sensational in pace, and uses the dialogue, in particular, to emphasize Alibech’s astonishment and Rustique’s persuasive tactics, alongside a fair amount of additional and graphic physical description (his editorial additions contained within parentheses). Whereas the Italian text plays on understatement and the blasphemous play on words, the French rendering is much more prurient and at the same time less blasphemous. The miseen-page with its sudden climactic switch from English into Italian, and underlying French footnote text, immediately highlights the problematic nature of this moment in the translation, and it is interesting to note the inverse proportion between sexual explicitness and size of type: while the main censorship seems to be happening in the main text with its pronounced and prissy refusal to translate the Italian for sensitive English readers, the sexual activity takes place in the lower quarters of the page with the strongly worded (and presumably more easily accessible) French text. A similar method, albeit less extensive in the additions, is used to render the other censored tale, Day IX, 10. Once again, the humour centres on a sexually predatory cleric using wordplay to fool a gullible woman into having sex with him; the premise this time is that the priest can change Gemmata into a horse by a magic spell, and there is much play on both the sexual position and the affixing of the “tail.” Whereas the 1804 version simply excised the whole novella, here the narrative is given in English right up to the preliminary spell-casting and patting of the mare’s body. At this point, the editor once again resorts to a combination of Italian and French to simultaneously mask and reveal the sexual metaphor, and the manipulation of the target text is signalled by various elements in the mise-en-page. The text continues in English until the phrase “and there remained nothing else to make but the tail” (IV, 123), which is immediately succeeded by an asterisk. The lower third of the page is given over to the French rendering, which reads: Pierre regardoit attentivement tout son manege, et s’inquietoit du peu de progrès de l’opération magique. En effet le plus difficile restoit à arranger; une jument ne peut se passer de queue; une femme n’a rien que [sic] puisse aider à cette metamorphose; l’obligeant ami se voyait obligé d’y suppléer, et ce dénouement étoit vraiment le moment le plus intéressant de la pièce; mais à l’instant où Barolle attachoit cette queue tant attendue, et sentoit ce délire, cette fureur, ces transports qui annonce [sic] que le charme va se consommer, ne voilàt-il pas le benêt de mari qui s’écrie: “Alte là, messire

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Barolle, je n’y veux point de queue; et qui diable attacha jamais une queue si bas? messire Barolle, je n’y veux point de queue.” Tant que Pierre se contenta de parler, l’opération continua; mais lorsque impatienté de l’obstination du magicien, il alla le tirer pas [sic] sa soutane.’ (IV, 123) Pierre watched attentively all the horsemanship, and worried about the lack of progress in the magic exercise. In effect, the most difficult part was still to be done; you can’t have a mare without a tail; a woman has nothing which could help with this transformation; his obliging friend found himself obliged to supply one, and this conclusion was really the most interesting moment of the whole thing; but at the moment when Barolle was attaching this long-awaited tail, and experiencing that frenzy, that fury, those transports which signal that the spell is about to be consummated, the simple-minded husband didn’t want it any more, and he cried: “Stop there, my Lord Barolle, I don’t want a tail.” As long as Pierre was content to talk, the exercise continued; but when he lost his patience with the magician’s stubbornness, he went to pull him off her by his cassock.

Meanwhile, over the page on the verso of the leaf, the tale continues in the main text with a riot of censoring italics, here translated immediately below: levata la camiscia, e presso il piuolo col quale egli piantava gli uomini, e prestamente nel solco per cio fatto messolo, saying, and this will be a fine mare’s tail. Peter, who to this moment had silently regarded every thing that was done, seeing this conclusion, and thinking every thing was not right, cried, “Stop, Don John, I will not have a tail – I will not have a tail.” Era già l’umido radicale, per lo quale tutte le piante s’appiccano, venuto, quando Donno Gianni tiratolo indietro, saying, “Alas, my dear friend Peter, what have you done! did I not tell you not to utter a word about what you saw. (IV, 124) he lifted his shirt, took hold of the dibber that he did his planting with, and stuck it straight in the appropriate furrow The vital sap which all plants need to make them grow had already arrived, when he pulled Father Gianni back

Despite the provision of an alternative French version of this tale in the footnote, the key sexual (and horticultural) metaphors of the Italian text – here highlighted in italics – are not actually translated in the French. Mirabeau’s French rendering amplifies the question of the tale

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from the point of view of the ingenuous Pierre, as well as stressing at some length “ce délire, cette fureur, ces transports qui annonce que le charme va se consommer,” which, just as in the previous example, are not actually present in Boccaccio’s source text. (In fact, in the original text, the wife rages at Pietro for spoiling her chance of getting a horse and making some money.) The provision of the French text thus adds little to the understanding of the key sexual metaphor of the tool for planting; and so its function should perhaps be reconsidered beyond the purely textual. The provision of a titillating, more sexually explicit rendering of the key passage in a more widely understood language (with cultural connotations of the exotic erotic) should therefore be seen not as a way of reducing access to the explicit material, but precisely the opposite. In the case of this tale, in particular, the anglophone reader can perfectly well piece together the whole business of the tailfixing from the English alone; the italicized Italian text and footnote French version serve therefore to amplify and highlight the transgressive nature of this passage and its naughty continental practices. Mid-century Editions and Popular Readerships: Daly, Bohn, and Blanchard Another book that draws on the 1741 text is the 1845[?] edition, published in London by Charles Daly.60 This is a small octavo singlevolume edition, whose title page reads: THE | DECAMERON, | OR | TEN DAYS’ ENTERTAINMENT; | FROM THE ITALIAN OF | BOCCACCIO. | NEW EDITION, | IN WHICH ARE RESTORED MANY PASSAGES | OMITTED IN FORMER EDITIONS. | EMBELLISHED WITH | TWENTY ONE ENGRAVINGS ON STEEL, | BY G. STANDFAST. | LONDON: CHARLES DALY, 17, GREVILLE, STREET, | HATTON GARDEN.

The claim to have restored “many passages” is of course itself transmitted from the previous editions of this translation, and the text is recognizably that of the 1741 version, with only some minor adjustments such as quotation marks around direct speech and some 60 This edition is undated, although the British Library catalogue supplies a dating of 1845. It appears erroneously dated as [1825] on some US OCLC Worldcat records.

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modernization of language. In comparison with its preceding edition, discussed above, the book has very little paratext: only five pages of front matter, comprising a frontispiece engraving of the brigata (iv) and illustrated title page (protected with interleaved tissue paper, ii) (figure 15); and a further full-text title page. In addition, there is a thirteen-page introduction, “Notice of the Life and Writings of Boccaccio,” which draws on the “Remarks on the Life and Writings of Boccaccio” of the 1804 edition. However, there is little discussion of this text in its capacity as a translation: there are no translator’s paratexts, and the discussion of Boccaccio’s works in translation is largely limited to their being the means by which English greats such as Shakespeare and Chaucer were able to access Boccaccio’s work. The copy viewed is bound in blue cloth, with an embossed gilt floral decoration on boards and spine and with all edges gilded. The decorative features of this book (binding and illustrations), as well as the informative – but not too scholarly – discursive paratexts suggest that this book was intended for a middle-brow audience: one interested in accessing the classics of other European literatures but not wanting too much learned discussion; one that was interested in foreign literature primarily for its function as the building blocks for the great English imperialist literary mission; and, perhaps, an audience equally interested in having a handsome book on the shelf as a material expression of wealth and erudition. This edition is in marked contrast to the 1804, 1820, and 1822 editions, for example, which seem to be directed towards the neoclassical scholar (or aspirant), as evidenced by their scholarly introductions full of Latin and Greek tags and their discussion of the transmission and translation history of the text. Although missing the authorial framework (like all previous editions of the 1741 translation), this edition does include versions of the previously censored novellas III, 10 and IX, 10 (which were originally restored in the 1822 edition). The tale of Alibech and Rustico is presented here in the same way as the 1822 edition, with the Italian text replacing English in the obscene section of the tale, and Mirabeau’s French text in a footnote. Day IX, 10 is also included in English in this edition. Here, however, the French rendering is not included, and the italicized Italian sentences have been silently excised in order to give a rather more sedate (and less obviously visually transgressive) account. The technicalities of the tail-pinning are therefore subsumed within some general all-over patting and the protestations of Peter:

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After this, Don John made Gemmata go down on all fours, after the manner of a mare. He then began with his hands to rub her face and head, saying, this will be a fine mare’s head; and touching her hair, this will be a fine mare’s main [sic]: examining her arms, these will be fine legs and fine feet for a mare; there now remained nothing else but to make but the tail. Peter, who to this moment had silently regarded everything that was done, seeing this conclusion, and thinking everything was not right, cried, “Stop, Don John, I will not have a tail – I will not have a tail.” (458–9)

The excision of the visible censorship strategies in this tale has the effect of further sanitizing the Decameron for the broader readership signalled by the material features of this book. The most notorious material is now corralled in a single novel, hidden beneath (yet revealed within) the Italian and French renderings. The illustrations now mediate the book as a Victorian gothic extravaganza of knights and damsels, the whole now quite suitable for the family bookshelf. The 1741 edition also forms the basis for the next “new” translation of the Decameron by Walter Keating Kelly, which was published in 1855.61 Reverting to a seventeenth-century title, the book appears as The Decameron or Ten Days’ Entertainment of Boccaccio, revised translation by W.K. Kelly (London: Bohn, 1855). The book was published by Henry George Bohn, who, along with his competitor David Bogue, was one of the first to open up the classic book market to a mass readership with his 150-volume Standard Library series, which began to publish works in 1845.62 The Bohn Boccaccio is part of the expansion of this series, under the imprint “Extra Volumes Uniform with the Standard Library,” and thus we can see that Boccaccio has now attained some status as a classic, although perhaps not quite one of the first rank (of the first 150  essential reads).63 This edition is a cheap, mass-market publication, which is overtly directed towards a more popular audience rather than towards a scholarly or middle-brow readership; and in fact, the

61 On the publisher Henry George Bohn’s career, see David B. Mock’s entry in British Literary Publishing Houses, 1820–1880, ed. Patricia J. Anderson and Jonathan Rose, Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale, 1991), 6:59–62; and Alexis Weedon’s entry in the ODNB. 62 On Bohn’s translations, see O’Sullivan, “Margin and the Third-Person Effect”; this excellent essay includes a detailed case-study of the Bohn Decameron and other nineteenth-century English editions. 63 Mock, entry in British Literary Publishing Houses, 59.

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popularity of Bohn’s various series had a direct economic impact on the average price of a book in England, with books almost being halved in price over the period 1828–53.64 Carol O’ Sullivan has shown that the Bohn Decameron was “the earliest and most established of the Extra Volumes, and by a long way the best-selling of them.”65 The edition is notable primarily for two features: first, that the translator has dared to attach his name to the Decameron for the first time, and second, for its inclusion of the two notorious censored novellas in a more explicit form than before. However, the naming of the translator is perhaps not the great leap forward in sexual licence that it has sometimes been made out to be, but appears instead to have been standard practice for the Bohn series. Walter Keating Kelly translated a number of works for Bohn, and seems to have specialized in European romance and a little light erotica. He translated Catullus, Tibellus, the Pervigilium Veneris (Classical Library, 54), and a volume of classical erotica, Erotica: The Elegies of Propertius, The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter, and The Kisses of Johannes Secundus (Bohn’s Classical Library, 60; 1854). In 1855, apart from his translation of the Decameron (Extra Volume, 5), he also supplied translations of Cervantes (Extra Volume, 6) and Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron (Extra Volume, 7). Italian literature was by no means widely represented in translation in the Bohn libraries, and so the inclusion (and placing) of the Decameron in the Extra Volume series alongside these other works is significant.66 By comparison, only Machiavelli and Dante make it into the (first, and pre-eminent) Standard Library series with, respectively, The history of Florence, and of the affairs of Italy, from the earliest times to the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent, together with The Prince, and various historical tracts by Niccolo Machiavelli (Standard

64 “One significant consequence of Bohn’s Standard Library and his subsequent series was the reduction in the average cost of all titles published in England. Between 1828 and 1853 the average price of a book declined from sixteen shillings to eight shillings, four and half pence. The initial price of Bohn’s standard Library was three shillings, sixpence per volume; subsequent volumes were priced at five shillings per volume. Bohn’s prices became the standard for the market for twenty years”: Mock, entry in British Literary Publishing Houses, 60. 65 O’Sullivan, “Margin and the Third-Person Effect,” 130. 66 This information was taken from the online Bohn Bibliography, a detailed annotated catalogue of Bohn’s publications prepared by Derek Jones, which has now disappeared: http://www.derekjones.org/The%20Bohn%20Bibliography%201.htm (accessed 21 February 2007).

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Library, 24; 1847) and Cary’s translation of the Commedia (Volumes Uniform with Bohn’s Standard Library, 1847). Dante, Tasso, and Ariosto are also published in the Illustrated Library series: Ichabod Wright’s verse translation of the Commedia (Illustrated Library, 27; 1854), Wiffen’s translation of the Gerusalemme liberata (Illustrated Library, 30; 1854), and William Stewart Rose’s translation of the Orlando Furioso (Illustrated Library, 48 and 52; 1858). All of the other Italian works apart from the Decameron published by Bohn use earlier translations, and so from this survey of this publisher’s list we can surmise that there was a growing interest in Italian literature between the mid-1840s and mid-1850s; that Boccaccio was considered by the series editor to fit generically alongside works by Cervantes and Marguerite de Navarre; and that the best person to translate him was the same translator who also translated these last two works and classical erotica. The Bohn Decameron is a rather streamlined affair, with limited paratextual matter. The book comprises a half-title page, frontispiece author portrait, full title page, short two-page preface (by the translator), and a table of contents. In addition, brief notes have been added at the end of some tales, indicating their function as sources for other literary works. This feature is explicitly highlighted in the conclusion to the preface: “Brief critical and historical notices have been appended to most of the novels. In many instances these will be found interesting to the English student, as indicating the parentage of some of the choicest portions of our early literature” (vi). The preface expresses this overall aim very clearly, situating Boccaccio in European literature, and especially in relation to the monuments of English literature, as evidenced through references to the Romantics, Dunlop’s history of fiction, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and of course Shakespeare. The streamlining of the critical apparatus thus reduces Boccaccio’s importance to his role as a key source for English literature, a perceptible narrowing of focus for the Bohn readership. Perhaps as a result of his earlier work on classical erotica, in this new translation Kelly succeeds in managing the censorship of the two tales in a more titillating way. Several sentences more of the Italian text are translated into English, and the action is thus able to build to a climax – albeit one that is then suddenly withdrawn when the discourse switches into Italian: The girl asked him how that was to be done. “You shall know that forthwith,” said Rustico; “you have only to do as you see me do.” With that he

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began to strip off the few garments he had on, till he was stark naked. The girl does the same: down goes Rustico on his knees as if he had a mind to say his prayers, and makes her place himself in the same posture before him. “E così stando, essendo Rustico, piu che mai, nel suo disidero acceso, per lo vederla cosi bella, venne la resurrezion della carne.” (193)

Of course (and perhaps this is the intention of this editorial decision), the means of censorship succeeds only in drawing attention to the problem. The expressive form of the page and the linguistic grapplings necessary to negotiate the obscene material show how the editor struggles with the question of how much access to allow. Clearly it would not be desirable to restrict access completely, or the whole tale would have been omitted; indeed, the translation of more of the “censored” material is a clear selling point for all the nineteenth-century editions. With that in mind, it is easy to follow the reasoning that to allow more people to access the censored passages, they should also include the full French translation in the footnote (just in case readers cannot crib their way through the Italian). The practical effect of this editorial decision is to restrict access to the tale to all but a certain sector of the reading public. A high level of education would be required to read a text in Italian; perhaps slightly less so for French, which would have been among the required accomplishments of educated people. This level of education would more likely have been available to men than women and to those of the middle to upper classes rather than the working classes; to reach the level of French required to read this passage would take some time, which would prevent younger children from reading it. Thanks to Kelly, however, the lower orders and less linguistically equipped would at least be able to get a better understanding of the second censored tale in the Decameron. Kelly’s rendering provides more anatomical description of the priest’s preparations, although the crucial act is somewhat glossed over, with a dash to signal the missing sentence: And so he went on with her arms and legs, breast, back, belly, and sides. Nothing now remained but to stick on the tail. Donno Gianni posted himself behind Gemmata, holding the tail ready made in one hand, and laying the other on her croupe, he – But hardly had he begun when Pietro, who had hitherto watched all the proceedings with great attention and without a word, not liking this part of the ceremony cried out, “Stop!”

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During the 1840s and 1850s, the first North American editions of the Decameron were also being published. The very first Decameron publication is the suggestively titled Decameron, or, Frailties of Human Nature (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1843). Only one copy of this is still extant, held in Yale University Library (shelfmark Hc74 43m), and at only fifty-nine pages, it is a heavily abridged selection of tales rather than the entire book. However, in the 1850s two further editions were published. Both of these editions reproduce earlier English editions under an American imprint: the first is The Decameron, or Ten days of Entertainment of Boccaccio, Including the Suppressed Novels (Hartford: S.  Andrus, 1851), while the second is undated and was published in New York by Calvin Blanchard.67 It was common practice in the USA to publish “pirated” editions of British books, which were sometimes then imported back into the UK by publishers such as Bohn and sold as remainders.68 Although the Blanchard edition is undated, it must have been published after the 1845? Daly edition since it is, in fact, an almost complete facsimile of this edition. The quality of the print is slightly worse than that of the English edition, but the principal bibliographical difference is the removal of the London imprint details and the addition of the New York publication information in their place. The edition contains one remarkable paratextual addition, on bright yellow paper bound into the text of the tale of Alibech and Rustico. This is the “Note by the Publisher,” Calvin Blanchard, who styles himself “Professor of Theo-Religio Political-Physics” at the foot of the page. Blanchard was a libertarian positivist publisher and bookseller, an advocate of free love and tireless enemy of censorship, whose position is well summed up in the title of his 1861 work Religio-political physics: or, The science and art of man’s deliverance from ignorance-engendered mysticism, and its resulting theo-moral quackery and governmental brigandage (New York: Calvin Blanchard, 1861).69 As part of his libertarian mission,

67 The copy consulted for this book at Harvard’s Widener Library is dated [1858?]; it has also been catalogued as 1851 and 1855 on OCLC Worldcat. 68 On this, see Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 69 For information on Blanchard, see the Two-Gun Mutualism and the Golden Rule website (formerly the The Libertarian Labyrinth), http://libertarian-labyrinth.blogspot. com/2006/12/calvin-blanchard-miscellany.html (accessed August 30 2012). The website cites a nineteenth-century view of Blanchard: “Calvin Blanchard, a disreputable publisher who kept a shop on Nassau Street, where you could buy any kind of book that your minister would frown upon – whether for free thought or

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Blanchard also published Kelly’s edition of Petronius’s Satyricon, splendidly retitled as The Satyricon, or, Trebly voluptuous / by Titus Petronius Arbiter, minister of pleasure to the Emperor Nero (New York: Calvin Blanchard, 1866). His only other foray into publishing “fiction” was Voltaire, which becomes Candide: The Spiciest, Wittiest, and Most Exciting Book in the French Language (New York: Calvin Blanchard, 1864). Blanchard’s prose style is both dense and impassioned, as he makes his fantastic case for his crusade on repressive sexuality: The story of Alibech and Rusticus is a true and very instructive chapter in the history of superstition, hypocrisy, and folly. The most pernicious of all possible delusions, is a “religion” that rejects the testimony of the senses; and the wildest Utopia that ignorance can stumble into, is a “morality,” the necessary counterpart to this “religion,” which requires the violation, the conquest even, of the natural passions [...] This religio-moral phrenzy raged highest in the “Middle Ages,” up to the time of Boccaccio. Its madest [sic] victims held that to fly from love’s temptations involved criminal distrust of the sustaining power of their “holy faith.” “The virgins of the warm climate of Africa,” says Gibbon, “encountered the enemy [the “Devil” that Alibech and Rusticus combatted] in the closest engagement. They permitted priests and deacons to share their beds, and gloried amidst the flames in their unsullied purity.” But there is abundant evidence, apart from that so gaily furnished in “The Decameron,” that “the flesh” generally conquered “the spirit” without a second fight. “Oh God, give me all I can desire,” is the holiest prayer that the holiest saint can raise; the practical meaning of which prayer is “Oh for a Paradise, with all the women perfectly enchanting, all the men faultless, all the children real angels. Where lovers can freely and securely luxuriate in each others [sic] embraces. Where everybody can have all their senses fully gratified. [...] I have shown how the world can be transformed to just such a Paradise; and as great passions stimulate to great efforts for their satisfaction, I look to the gallant readers of “The Decameron” and other gay books that I publish, to help put my theory into practice.

for obscenity made little difference to this unsavoury Calvin”: John Fiske, Edward Livingston Youmans: Interpreter of Science for the People (New York: Appleton, 1895), 156–7.

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There is plenty more of this, but this excerpt shows this particular editor’s very particular idea about the possible uses and functions of this text. The editorial aims and appeal to the readership of this particular edition are highly idiosyncratic: Blanchard entreats his readership to overcome society’s “religio-moral phrenzy” and seize the opportunity to enjoy some sensual gratification; the “gallant readers” of the Decameron and his other “gay books” must, after the example of Alibech and Rustico, “help put my theory into practice.” Blanchard’s yellow-paper editorial interpolation provides this Decameron with a dramatically rich reading context, and is thus one of the most notable and unusual manifestations of one particular editorial culture. However, if we exclude this paratextual intervention, and the list of other Blanchard publications bound at the end of the book, this edition is virtually identical to the 1845 London edition. (Indeed, his booklist is in itself highly suggestive of his particular libertarian cultural milieu.) The comparison of these two editions therefore demonstrates without a doubt the importance that the paratext can make to the presentation of the artwork and its public reception. It is no wonder that Boccaccio’s Decameron was characterized primarily in terms of sexual licence in North America when one of its very earliest American editions was published by people such the notorious Calvin Blanchard and framed in such explicit terms. After Blanchard, many more “respectable” editions were printed in North America, primarily as a result of the close collaboration of the American firm George Putnam and Sons with other London booksellers. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it seems that North American editions were brought out either simultaneously with or shortly after British editions, with the only material difference often being a change of imprint details.70 But of course, although the editions were often almost identical, the cultural contexts into which they were delivered were often very different, and we need only contrast the paratexts of the Bohn edition of 1855, with its literary preface and notes on the afterlife of the novellas, with the Blanchard manifesto to see a distinct difference in the way these texts were sold and marketed to their

70 On the links between British and American publishing, see Michael Winship, “The Transatlantic Book Trade and Anglo-American Literary Culture in the Nineteenth Century,” in Reciprocal Influences: Literary Production, Distribution, and Consumption in America, ed. Steven Fink and Susan S. Williams (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 98–122.

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readerships. Future American editions were certainly more respectable in their paratextual freight, but the damage to Boccaccio’s reputation may well already have been done by association with this libertarian free-love publisher. A Limited Licentiousness: John Payne’s Translation A landmark in the history of the Decameron in English was the 1886 translation by John Payne, which was the very first complete and unexpurgated version.71 This three-volume edition was published by private subscription and for private circulation only, in a limited edition for the Villon Society.72 The sexually explicit material was thus circumscribed by “protective firewalls” which kept the material safely out of the public domain and the reach of the obscenity prosecutors.73 With access restricted by exorbitant pricing and the hyper-archaic English, Payne was able to foreground other material aspects of his edition. The privately printed edition was issued as a limited edition of 750 copies in two different de luxe formats: one, the “Holland Paper” edition, with eleven illustrations by the famous French engraver Léopold Flameng, and one without.74 A second edition of Payne’s translation then followed in 1893, issued in a larger print run of a thousand copies, published by Lawrence and Bullen, although this was expurgated, with the tale of Alibech and Rustico appearing in French for the wider audience. Payne had founded the Villon Society in 1878 to publish his first

71 The most detailed account of Payne and his work can be found in Ó Cuilleanáin’s excellent “Editor’s Introduction” to his 2004 revision of this translation, liii–lxviii. On Payne’s particular bigotries, see lxiv–lxvi: “It is clear that he was not particularly keen on the poor, the elderly, the liberals (whom he calls Jacobins), the Irish, the Welsh, the Scots, the Jews (whom he calls vermin), Tchaikovsky (whom he calls Ikey-Tchikey), equality, mass education, church bells, and singing milkmen” (lxiv). James H. McGregor’s review of Charles S. Singleton’s 1982 revision of the Payne translation also contains useful information about Payne’s translational practice: Romance Philology, 41 (1988), 364–8. 72 On this, see Ó Cuilleanáin, “Editor’s Introduction,” liv. This was Payne’s typical practice for the diffusion of his translations: “As in the case of the Decameron, he generally issued his translations in successive eds. The first was always limited and sold by subscription [...]. The second ed. was expurgated and published for the trade”: McGregor, review in Romance Philology, 365. 73 Hermans, “Irony’s Echo,” 62. 74 I discuss these editions in more details in my forthcoming article “Eroticism à la française.”

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complete translation of the fifteenth-century French poet François Villon, and he subsequently published many more of his translations under this imprint.75 His choice of texts to translate tended towards the archaic, compendious, and exotic: he translated not only from Italian but also from French, German, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, and apart from the Decameron, also translated the complete poems of Villon, The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Bandello’s novelle, the Quatrains of Omar Kheyyam, and poetry by Hafiz and Heinrich Heine, as well as an anthology of French poetry.76 In addition to his remarkable linguistic facility, Payne’s editions are also notable for their detailed attention to the wider bibliographical and scholarly hinterlands, which had not been a typical feature of the nineteenth-century editions of Boccaccio since the 1822 edition. In terms of its editorial completeness, Payne’s translation is significant beyond the fact that this is the first translation to include a full English rendering of the two censored tales. For the first time, an English Decameron also contains the complete text of the Authorial framework, the proemio, introduction to Day 4, and the authorial conclusion, as well as the title and subtitle of the work in its entirety. The book also contains considerable scholarly material, including a biographical study of Boccaccio’s life and works, and comprehensive notes. The following discussion of its material and editorial features will be based on an examination of the first (unexpurgated) edition.77 Payne’s taste for the archaic – and self-regard – can be seen everywhere in this first edition of his translation. Both of the three-volume editions are very fine, as befits the discerning tastes (and not inconsiderable means) of Villon Society subscribers.78 The unillustrated edition is a square octavo, bound in vellum, with a gilt embossed cover decoration and top edges in gilt, while the illustrated edition has a beautiful scarlet and white binding of cloth over boards, with gilt tooling and lettering on front boards and spine, with a scarlet cloth dust jacket.79 Apart from the inclusion of plates and different bindings, both editions are the same. The paper is heavy rough cut with visible chainlines, and 75 76 77 78

Ó Cuilleanáin, “Editor’s Introduction,” lxi. Ó Cuilleanáin, “Editor’s Introduction,” lx. Copy 430 of 750. Ó Cuilleanáin notes that the Villon Society’s subscription rate was one guinea, a large amount in the late nineteenth century, and that the book cost a further three guineas (“Editor’s Introduction,” lxii, liv). 79 John Rylands Library, Deansgate, University of Manchester, shelfmark R217444.

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the layout and mise-en-page seeks to follow early modern typographical conventions, as can be seen, for example, in the use of black-letter type and centred triangular layout of title text. The text itself is printed very small, with wide margins to the outer edge and bottom, perhaps in imitation of early printed books. Payne’s sense of his centrality to this production can be seen immediately in the first title page of the volume (figure 16), which reads: The Decameron of Giovanni | Boccacci (Il Boccaccio) now | first completely done into English | Prose and Verse by John Payne | Author of The Masque of Shadows | Intaglios Songs of Life and Death | Lautrec New Poems etc. and | Translator of The Poems of | Master Francis Villon | of Paris The Book of | the Thousand Nights | and One Night | and Tales from | the Arabic | Volume | One ([iii])

The publication details are given in small italic capitals below: “london: mdccclxxxvi: printed for the | villon society by private subscription | and for private circulation only.” The title page thus provides much important contextual information about Payne’s conception of his task, and we are fortunate that this book is self-published by its translator, for the degree of coherency of vision that this entails. The archaicizing impulse of Payne’s prose is reflected in the historic layout style, with the titular information given in black-letter type that tapers in a triangle, and also in subtle details such as the lack of punctuation in the title and the genitive ending of Boccaccio’s surname. Boccaccio and his Decameron merit only the first two lines of the title page, with the next fourteen given over to Payne’s achievements. The translations he chooses to present seem selected especially to complement the Decameron and can be seen as a way of introducing it generically; the previously censored poetry of Villon, the recursive frame narrative of the Thousand and One Nights, and the short story genre of Tales from the Arabic, the last two also pregnant with promise of some exotic orientalist loving. Finally, the ostentatiously limited and exclusive nature of the enterprise is signalled in the publication data: “by private subscription and for private circulation only.” The dedication then follows, another ostentatious piece of self-presentation, which reads “To My Friend Stéphane Mallarmé” ([v]). This is followed by the table of contents, which provides the rubrics and page numbers (vii– xi), and then the proemio (here “Pröem”). The title and subtitle of the text are given at the top of the page in bold black-letter arranged in a

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tapering triangle as on the title page, and it should be noted that this is the very first instance of their translation into English in any edition to date: “Here beginneth the Book called Decameron and surnamed Prince Galehalt* wherein are contained an hundred Stories in ten Days told by seven Ladies and three young Men” (3). Below this is the text of the proemio (itself present for the first time since the “Authorial Prologue” of the 1620 and 1625 editions), and beneath that, in a slightly more compressed footnote type, is a detailed explanation of the Galeotto reference, which even includes a discussion of Inferno, V. These typographical features continue throughout the book, with organizational and titular paratexts in black-letter, and scholarly notes below the main text in smaller type. Payne often elucidates his translational choices in these, and also provides much contextual information about Boccaccio’s literary culture and Italian usage.80 His decision not to include additional paratextual interventions (or at least to keep them to a discreet but impressive minimum, as in his dedication to his friend Mallarmé), is surely a result of his desire to maintain the original integrity of the text; but those editorial interventions that remain are copious enough and uniformly telling. The first volume contains all the material up to Day III, story 7; volume 2 runs from III, 8 to VII, 7; and volume 3 from VII, 8 to the end. As previously stated, this translation contains a full and unexpurgated rendering of the previously censored passages in III, 10 and IX, 10, although Payne’s relentlessly archaic idiom does still serve to obfuscate the meaning, especially in the dialogue sequences. See for example, the passage in III, 10, which had until now been rendered in French or Italian: So saying, he proceeded to put off the few garments he had and abode stark naked, as likewise did the girl, whereupon he fell on his knees, as he would pray, and caused her abide over against himself. Matters standing thus and Rustico being more than ever inflamed in his desires to see her so fair, there came the resurrection of the flesh, which Alibech observing and marvelling, “Rustico,” quoth she, “what is that I see on thee which thrusteth forth thus and which I have not?” “Faith, daughter mine,” answered he, “this is the devil whereof I bespoke thee; and see now, he giveth me such sore annoy that I can scarce put up with it.” (II, 31) 80 For a detailed discussion of Payne’s translation practice, see Ó Cuilleanáin, “Editor’s Introduction,” lxvi–lxviii.

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The rendering of Day IX, 10 is similarly full and, unlike previous versions, leaves little to the imagination: And coming presently to her breast and finding it round and firm, such a one awoke that was not called and started up on end,* whereupon quoth he, “be this a fine mare’s chest.” And on like wise he did with her back and belly and crupper and thighs and legs. Ultimately, nothing remaining to do but the tail, he pulled up his shirt and taking the dibble with which he planted men, he thrust it hastily into the furrow made therefor and said, “And be this a fine mare’s tail.” Pietro, who had thitherto watched everything intently, seeing this last proceeding and himseeming it was ill done, said “Ho, Dom Gianni, I won’t have a tail there, I won’t have a tail there!” The radical moisture, wherewith all plants are made fast, was by this come, and Dom Gianni drew it forth. (III, 219)

In case there should be any misunderstanding, the edition also contains a helpful explanation in Latin as a footnote: “* i.e. arrectus est penis ejus.” Nonetheless, the unrestricted access to the sexual content of the Italian text provided by Payne’s complete translation was severely limited by other factors. Although the text itself was perfectly comprehensible, one had to be a member of the Villon Society (or at least a snooping relative in the library) to access it. Many subsequent editions of Payne’s translation were printed, but decency was preserved in these by recourse to the usual solution of concealing the text in another language. The implication of this is clear: at the very least, one had to be in a certain income bracket, and of sufficiently refined tastes to be a member of the Villon Society, to be able to access this sexually explicit material in English. (And, as has been shown, even when the text is in English, all the sexual material is still couched within a pseudo-Elizabethan archaic language, or even Latin, and thus perhaps provides a very rarified kind of stimulation.) The 1890s: Eroticism and Display The second edition of Payne’s translation, although slightly expurgated, ingeniously maintained its appeal to the gentleman connoisseur through a tactical amplification of the sexual interest via another paratextual device, illustrations. The 1893 two-volume large quarto edition

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published by Lawrence & Bullen represents a very interesting moment in the history of the Decameron in English, being the point where the most scholarly and accurate text available intersects with the most sexually explicit illustrations of the text to date, to create a very special publication for the gentleman scholar. (In fact, Italian and then French editions had included suggestive illustrative sequences from the late fifteenth century onward, but they were still unusual among anglophone editions.) The firm of Lawrence & Bullen had been established in 1891 by H.W. Lawrence and Arthur Henry Bullen, and “quickly acquired a reputation for fine books and sympathetic treatment of its authors, who included George Gissing and W.B. Yeats.”81 The Lawrence and Bullen edition of Payne’s translation was published in a bigger but still limited print run of one thousand copies, and it seems that there were two ranges of illustrations included: the full set of twenty, with some nudity and depictions of sexual acts, and the more restrained (but still titillating) basic set of fifteen, which would be reproduced widely in the twentieth century. The culminating plate of Griselda (figure 17) was, however, included in both. It is interesting to compare the textual presentation of the sexually explicit material in this second edition of Payne’s translation. The obscenity of the tale of Alibech and Rustico is again managed via the tactical deployment of a French text, although, interestingly, this is a more archaic version than that found in previous English translations, and one that is closer textually to the syntax of the source text than Mirabeau’s free translation. A footnote explains the reasoning for the change into French: “It being usual, for obvious reasons, to omit this story, it has been thought well, for the sake of completeness, to substitute the French version from the fine sixteenth century translation of Antoine le Maçon, secretary to Marguerite de Navarre, authoress of the Heptameron” (I, 247). We might note here that the use of Renaissance French, with its archaic spelling and syntax, represents a further device distancing the reader from the matter at hand (although this problem is mitigated in one edition I viewed by a plate of the nubile Alibech kneeling in prayer in front of Rustico, both of them naked). The version of IX, 10 is silently censored, with the excision of the crucial pinning on of the tail: “Ultimately, nothing remaining but the tail, he said, ‘And be this a fine mare’s tail.’ Pietro, who had thitherto watched everything intently,

81 Richard Storer, “Arthur Henry Bullen,” in the ODNB.

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him-seeming this last was ill done, said, ‘Ho there, Dom Gianni, I won’t have a tail!’” (II, 290). In contrast to Payne’s first edition, this second edition also contains a long biographical essay about Boccaccio’s life and works, thereby opening up the text to a less specialist readership than that of the Villon Society, and providing further intellectual cover for the erotic plates. In fact, the book’s appearance under the Lawrence & Bullen imprint signals an interesting new cultural positioning for Boccaccio, one that situates the Decameron somewhere between the world of the European fairy story and classical erotica, to judge by its companions on the booklist.82 All these editions share similar characteristics, with scholarly introductions and a spacious and elegant mise-en-page. Furthermore, some works in what has been termed the “gallant” genre (that is, the sexually explicit classics) are often complemented by a series of plates exhibiting tasteful nudity.83 Examples of these last include Catullus, with the Pervigilium Veneris (1893), Rabelais’s Five Books of the Lives, Heroic Deeds and Sayings of Gargantua and his Son Pantagruel (1892, also illustrated by Louis Chalon), and a number of further Italian novella collections, presumably selected for publication following the success of the 1893 Decameron edition, such as The Nights of Straparola (1894), The Novellino of Masuccio (1895), and The Pecorone of Ser Giovanni (1897). Although from our vantage point, the Payne translation is a crucial moment in the history of the Decameron, this translation was not particularly influential beyond these two publications in the nineteenth century; in fact, it was not reproduced again in the British Isles until Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin’s 2004 version.84 The target texts of the two last English Decamerons of the century show no dependence on Payne’s

82 Selections of tales from the Decameron had been circulating throughout the nineteenth century, and were sometimes marketed as fairy tales or improving children’s literature, but this series imprint is the first one to explicitly situate the Decameron alongside illustrated editions of Hans Christian Anderson, Perrault, Sinbad the sailor, Cossack Fairy Tales, and so on. 83 Gallant literature, or “gallantiana,” “denotes ‘those marginal elements of unexpurgated literature such as jest-books and balladry, works on (and against) women and love, facetious treatises in prose and verse, and the hinterland of scatalogica.’ ‘Gallant’ literature also includes many novels and literary classics that had, or were perceived as having, erotic themes”: Jay Gertzman, citing Gershon Legman, in Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica, 1920–1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 62. 84 It was, however, reprinted several times in North America.

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work, and both base their translations instead on the text of the 1855 Decameron, which as we have seen was ultimately derived from the third translation of 1741. (One reason for this may be a copyright or licensing issue, as it would be far easier and cheaper to lightly revise the Bohn edition than license the archaic and highly individual Payne text, if indeed Payne would ever agree to such a thing.) However, if the target text is not a particular consideration, these editions do nonetheless respond to the 1893 publication in other ways. The first of these was published in 1896 by Gibbings in four volumes, and is a moderately priced octavo edition, bound in maroon cloth with a gilt embossed title design on the front cover in the art nouveau style. It seems as though this was intended as a middle-brow “popular” edition, rather smaller and cheaper than the Laurence & Bullen one. It includes plenty of explanatory (but not too scholarly) material and, most significantly, an extensive series of engravings originally designed for the 1757–61 French Decameron.85 In terms of the composition of the text, it is virtually complete, although the tale of Alibech and Rustico appears in French (and the Renaissance French of Antoine le Maçon, to boot). Unlike previous editions, there is no explanation given for this editorial decision in situ (as seen, for example, in the note about magical practices that occurs up to the 1855 edition), although it is mentioned in the Publisher’s Note that begins volume 1: “With the exception of part of one novel, given in the French rendering of Antoine Le Maçon, the whole of the Decameron is here presented in English” (iv). The presentation of the tail episode in IX, 10 is glossed over, but with an interesting interpolation that allows the reader to construe what this tail might be: Then touching with his hands her face and head, he began, saying, “Let this be a fine mare’s mane”; and so with her limbs, saying, “Let these be fine mare’s legs.” Having thus passed over her person, he proceeded to the most important part of the enchantment – the affixing of a tail, which nature has denied to womankind – but before he could complete his incarnation Pietro suspected that all was not well, and exclaimed, “Donno Gianni, I will not – no, I will not have a tail!” (IV, 172–3)

85 The title page reads: “THE | DECAMERON | By | M. GIOVANNI | BOCCACCIO | GIBBINGS & CO. | LIMITED | LONDON, 1896 | IN FOUR VOLUMES.” The source edition reproduces Le Maçon’s translation: Le Decameron de Jean Boccace (Londres [i.e., Paris, Prault]: 1757–61).

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Although the translated text is not directly derived from Payne’s rendering, the editor must have had it to hand to ensure editorial completeness. This edition, for example, includes the original title and subtitle (albeit in a footnote), which reproduces almost exactly Payne’s formulation: “In the original this preface is preceded by the following title: ‘Here beginneth the book called Decameron, surnamed Prencipe Galeotto, wherein are contained one hundred novels, told in ten days by seven ladies and three gentlemen’” (I, 1). (The presence of the original Italian name “Prencipe Galeotto,” however, might suggest that the translator or editor also had access to an Italian edition at the same time.) Since the Bohn translation did not include the proemio, the translation of it here, then, is original to this edition, and it is to be presumed that this, along with the introduction to Day IV, is the work of the Mr S.W. Olson named in the publisher’s note “for his valuable services in revision and in the retranslation of many passages” (iv). As well as a relatively complete target text, the Gibbings Decameron contains some useful paratextual material. The first volume begins with two plates in the first opening, taken from the French source edition: a neoclassical relief portrait of Boccaccio entitled “J. Boccaccius. Flor” on the verso, and an engraved title page with cherubs cavorting before an ornate frame that encloses the publication details on the recto. The publisher’s note summarizes the translation history of the text and rehearses the improvements that have been made: “among numerous other restorations may be mentioned the ‘Proem,’ the ‘Conclusion,’ and the reply to his critics and censors with which Boccaccio commences the Fourth day” (iii–iv). There is a long introduction by Alfred Wallis, FRSL (Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature) (v–xxv) that frames the Decameron immediately in terms of its influence on English letters: The Decameron of Boccaccio is now presented to English readers as a classic – a position to which it is entitled, not alone by its graces of style, its wit, and its interesting pictures of social life at and about the epoch of the great Revival of Letters and Arts, but also on account of the influence which it has exercised upon English literature from the days of Chaucer down to our own time. (v)

This is followed by a table of contents, organized in the now customary way with summary rubrics and page numbers (xxvii–xxx), and then by a paratextual innovation, the synopsis of persons and subjects (xxxi–xxxii). To my knowledge this is the first (and perhaps only)

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English Decameron to contain such a thing: the table presents the days in order with their theme and ruler, and the ruler’s subsequent tales are then enumerated below. This is a very interesting manifestation of a new assumption on the part of the editorship, and by extension, readership: that the reader might seek to find correspondences between the tales of the individual narrators rather than merely viewing the text as a repository of stories. It thus represents one of the first assertions of the “textuality” of Boccaccio over the content or (im)moral import of his works. The second of these Decamerons is a cheaper, mass-produced edition, published by Mathieson and Company in London.86 The date has been conjectured as 1896, but this is probably the edition that was the subject of the Mathieson obscenity trial in 1888, or a reprint of it.87 The layout is very basic, with little ornamentation, very cramped type, and no biographical or critical material. However, despite this unpromising format, this mean little Decameron provides – pound for pound – more erotic material than any other widely available edition to date, if we exclude the two limited editions of the Payne translation. On the title page, it claims to be “The First Complete English Edition,” a claim that is still untrue, since the subtitle and proemio are missing. However, the full text of the introduction to Day IV is included, although divided into two parts, each with their own header: the “Author’s Preface,” and “To My Critics. | FATHER PHILLIP’S GEESE” (which also includes the rest of IV. Intr, even after the end of the extra tale). The tale of Alibech and Rustico is presented in French again, although, interestingly, the French section begins some way further through the tale than in previous editions, with the result that the famous “Resurrection of the Flesh” joke appears in the English text. In a

86 The volume consulted is bound as two volumes in one; the title page reads: “THE | DECAMERON | OF | GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO. | NEW TRANSLATION FROM THE ITALIAN. | First Complete English Edition. | VOL. I. | LONDON: | MATHIESON & COMPANY | NEW INN CHAMBERS, 41 WYCH STREET, W. C.” 87 This edition is discussed in O’Sullivan, “Margin and the Third-Person Effect”: “It was published in 1888 in an edition marked ‘unexpurgated’ by the publisher Mathieson & Co., owned and operated by W.M. Thomson. In 1888 the National Vigilance Association brought a case against Thomson for obscene libel in respect of this publication. The case was thrown out when the defendant was able to argue successfully that the text was already widely available in other editions in the British Library and indeed in the Guildhall Library of the London Corporation itself (Times, 8 September 1884: 4)” (132).

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further gesture towards acccessibility, the French reproduces that of the Bohn edition (i.e., the Mirabeau rendering, rather than that of Antoine le Maçon). Likewise, the translation of Day IX, story 10 is very accurately translated, without Payne’s pseudo-Elizabethan delicacy: Coming down to the bosom and finding it firm and round, he felt himself excited, and a certain unmentionable article raise itself, and he said, “Let this be the fine chest of a mare.” He did the same with the back, belly, and sides. At length, nothing remained but to make the tail. Then he raised his shirt, and taking the dibble with which men are planted, he placed it in the place for that purpose, saying: “Let this be the beautiful tail of a mare.” Gossip Pietro, who up to this point had looked on attentively, seeing the strange operation, and not finding it to his taste, said: “Oh, Master Giovanni, I don’t want the tail – I don’t want the tail!” Already the humid radical, from which all plants take root, had appeared, when Master Giovanni, taking the utensil away, exclaimed: “Ah, gossip Pietro, what have you done?”

Kelly’s censored text with its excisions is thus much expanded here. Because of the dearth of paratextual information available within the volume, it is hard to know to whom to ascribe these changes: the only clue is a note on the spine, which simply reads “Revised by W.M. Thomson” (the owner of the press). Given that this more explicit rendering was the subject of an obscenity court case, the minimal information about the agents involved may also have been a strategy to negotiate the censorship system.88 There are no other paratexts relating to the translation or bibliographical history of the book. Nonetheless, this edition is particularly notable because of the discrepancy between the high level of textual accuracy and the rather lowly vehicle in which it is delivered to the readership. (This was not presumably too much of a concern for those readers who saw the text primarily as a repository of dirty stories.) Even though this is a modest edition, relative to the splendors of those editions in which John Payne’s translation were published, it similarly points the way forward to the dominant trends of twentieth-century Decameron publishing, and, all in all, is a very good-value, sexually explicit Decameron with which to close the century. 88 In her article “Margin and the Third-Person Effect,” O’Sullivan considers how the many agents involved in nineteenth-century book production are able to maintain and subvert censorship.

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The Twentieth Century: A Multitude of Decamerons The concluding part of this chapter covers the anglophone publishing history of the Decameron during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Three new translations of the text are made during this time period, each of which will go on to have successful and varied textual afterlives; this final section will thus consider the development of new themes in the reception and presentation of Boccaccio, and close with a snapshot of Boccaccio publishing in 1930. The first, and most long lived of these three translations, that of James McMullen Rigg, was published in 1903.89 Outside of Boccaccio studies, Rigg is primarily known for his work as biographer and historian, and was the author of more than six hundred entries in the Dictionary of National Biography.90 Since, apparently, his “greatest interest in life was the history and philosophy of religion,” his translation into English of Boccaccio’s Decameron is something of an aberration in a career whose print outputs were characterized by their extreme scholarliness. However, an early interest in translation can be seen in his 1890 edition of Thomas More’s translation of the Latin life of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, which may have induced the publishers Lawrence & Bullen to approach him to make a new translation of the Decameron for them.91 The first edition of Rigg’s translation was another handsome, twovolume illustrated edition published by A.H. Bullen in London in 1903, a decade after his first edition.92 In fact, this new edition is remarkably

89 In his “Translator’s Introduction” to his 1972 translation of the Decameron, McWilliam describes Rigg’s rendering as “by far the most important” of the three twentieth-century translations that preceded his (29–30), a view with which Laura Lepschy concurs in her review for Studi sul Boccaccio, 8 (1974), 329–35. For a comparison of Rigg’s and McWilliam’s translations, see in the first instance the Lepschy review and, for a detailed reappraisal, Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin’s “‘Boccaccio Could Be Better Served.’” 90 On Rigg’s life and works, see G.J. Turner’s entry in the ODNB. 91 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: His Life by His Nephew Giovanni Francesco Pico: Also Three of his Letters; His Interpretation of Psalm XVI; His Twelve Rules of a Christian Life; His Twelve Points of a Perfect Lover; and his Deprecatory Hymn to God. Translated from the Latin by Sir Thomas More, ed. J.M. Rigg, The Tudor Library (London: David Nutt, 1890). 92 The Lawrence & Bullen publishing house folded in 1900, but Bullen continued to publish under his own name, and in 1904 founded the Shakespeare’s Head Press with Frank Sidgwick. The Shakespeare’s Head Press would publish a new fine press edition of the 1620 and 1625 editions of the first English translation in 1934–35, in a limited edition of 325 copies. See Storer, “Arthur Henry Bullen,” in the ODNB.

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similar to its predecessor. The 1903 edition is slightly smaller (25 cm high to the 1893’s 29 cm), and contains plates by Louis Chalon, although the number of illustrations is reduced from twenty to twelve. The similarities between the two editions suggest that the publisher sought to reissue his successful 1893 limited edition of the Decameron in roughly the same format, but with a broader appeal. The principal obstacles to a wider circulation of their edition lay in both its visual and textual features; accordingly, the most sexually explicit of the notorious Chalon plates were omitted in the second edition, while the tamer ones remaining still succeeded in transmitting a degree of medievalized eroticism. A second and more profound problem lay in the language of Payne’s target text, and it was this that led to the publishers’ commissioning an entirely new translation, as explained in the closing paragraph of the introduction: The first Englishman to render the whole Decameron direct from the Italian was Mr. John Payne; but his work, printed for the Villon Society in 1886, was only for private circulation, and those least inclined to disparage its merits may deem its style somewhat too archaic and stilted adequately to render the vigour and vivacity of the original. Accordingly in the present version an attempt has been made to hit the mean between archaism and modernism, and to secure as much freedom and spirit as is compatible with substantial accuracy.93

Similarly, the extensive scholarly paratext of the 1893 Payne edition is somewhat pruned, although the new edition still provides considerable information for the reader in the introduction, which contains biographical details of the author, a description of his works, some references to Italian criticism on Boccaccio, and his literary influence on Renaissance literature in Italy and England. (Bullen was a scholar of Elizabethan literature, and the paratextual framing may thus reflect his own interests.) In addition, the introduction contains some reproductions of woodcuts from the very first illustrated edition of the Decameron, the Venice 1492, which serve to highlight the historicity of the text as a counterbalance to the rather more sensational interpretations of Chalon. Like Payne, Rigg translates the whole of the text, and includes the proem, introduction to Day 4, and the conclusion, as well as the full title and subtitle. Modesty prevailed, however, in his (or his publisher’s) 93 The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio, faithfully translated by J.M. Rigg, with illustrations by Louis Chalon (London: Bullen, 1903), xxi.

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treatment of the two obscene novellas, and so the tale of Alibech and Rustico appears with the offending section in Italian, with a note reading: “No apology is necessary for leaving, in accordance with precedent, the subsequent detail untranslated.” If the publisher is serious about restricting the readership for this passage, then the decision to leave the obscene section of the tale in Italian at least has some logic to it, and is in contrast with those earlier editions that supplied the passage in French, a language much more widely understood in Britain. The effects of this decision to leave the passage untranslated have been far-reaching for the reputation of Boccaccio in the British Isles at least. Until the publication of G.H. McWilliam’s 1972 translation in the Penguin Classics series, this was the de facto British Decameron, and the editorial decision to demarcate the censorship in this way has no doubt contributed to the notorious reputation of this book as a repository of obscenity.94 The effect of this censorship extends even into cyberspace: the Decameron Web, at Brown University, offers a number of online editions of Boccaccio’s text, including Rigg’s English translation. However, the edition used as the source text for the digital text preserves Rigg’s decision to leave some of the novella untranslated, and so the online reader is still not able to access a reliable English version of this tale via an authoritative institutional source. The marked difference in prose style between Payne and Rigg can be seen in a direct comparison of the critical passage of the second obscene novella, IX, 10: Pietro, who had thitherto watched everything intently, seeing this last proceeding and himseeming it was ill done, said “Ho, Dom Gianni, I won’t have a tail there, I won’t have a tail there!” The radical moisture, wherewith all plants are made fast, was by this come, and Dom Gianni drew it forth, saying, “Alack, gossip Pietro, what hast thou done?” (Payne, III, 219–20) Whereat Gossip Pietro, who had followed everything very heedfully to this point, disapproving that last particular, exclaimed: – “No! Dom Gianni, I’ll have no tail, I’ll have no tail.” The essential juice, by which all plants are propagated, was already discharged, when Dom Gianni withdrew the tool, saying: – “Alas! Gossip Pietro, what has thou done?” (Rigg, II, xx)

94 In fact, the 1968 reprint of the Everyman edition does offer a complete English version of the text, although this novelty is not highlighted within the book.

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Rigg’s rendering, while still containing archaicizing elements such as the use of “thou,” nonetheless succeeds in transmitting the details of the procedure much better than Payne’s, and his treatment of dialogue and regular punctuation also better clarify the meaning. Rigg’s translation has had a long afterlife in print and now digital media. After its 1903 publication by Bullen, a number of further editions comprising the same Rigg translation, editorial paratexts, and Chalon illustrations were reprinted in 1905, 1906, 1920, and 1921, by different publishers such as Routledge, Nutt, Bumpus, and the Navarre Society. It then became institutionalized as the “standard” British English Boccaccio in 1930, when it was adopted as the translation used for the Everyman’s Library series, which will be discussed in the final part of this chapter. Rigg’s translation (although unattributed to him) was also used for the Chatto & Windus fine-paper editions, editions of which were published in 1905, 1909, 1912, 1914, 1922, [1924?], and 1927. In comparison, Rigg’s translation was rather less popular in North America than Payne’s version, which was reprinted a number of times in the 1920s, but a small number of editions were nonetheless printed by American print houses that had an agreement with London publishers, such as New York’s Dutton. One of the most interesting features of the first thirty years of this translation’s afterlife is the way in which its reception (as measured via its dissemination) broadens: radiating out from the prestigious de luxe edition, through reprints and reissues by less well-known publishing houses, and eventually arriving at the cheaper, private presses dealing in erotica, such as the Navarre Society in the UK and the Bibliophilist’s Library in the United States. The Navarre Society edition, in particular, would go into many further editions (all undated). These private presses will be discussed in more detail in the final chapter of this book. Another significant moment in Boccaccio’s translated history in the early twentieth century is the republication of the first English translation, which appears as part of the Tudor Translations series. The series was founded by W.E. Henley in 1892, and two series were printed in 1892–1909 and 1924–7 by the David Nutt Press of London.95 The

95 On Nutt’s press, see the entry for Alfred Trübner Nutt (by H.R. Tedder, rev. Sayoni Basu) in the ODNB. Warren Boutcher suggests it is time for a reappraisal of this series for their role in the historiography of the canon: “How, then, should we approach anew the legacy of editorial and critical work on English Renaissance translation left to us by the Victorians and the modernists, but largely ignored in

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Decameron appears as volumes 41–4 in the series, and an examination of the physical aspects of the books clearly shows that this was a substantial intellectual and commercial investment. The books are octavo in size, bound in red cloth with an elaborate ornament of a portcullis surrounded by Tudor roses, with the title and series title embossed in gold on the spine; the paper is high-quality heavyweight with deckle edges. In addition to the imposing format, the book is further glorified with a long (113-page) introduction to Boccaccio’s life and works by Edward Hutton, who would go on to publish his well-known biography of Boccaccio the next year.96 At the conclusion of Hutton’s introduction there is a brief history of the text’s fortune in English translation, with a sentence about the provenance of the translation reprinted here: “In 1620 the first practically complete edition appeared, translated inaccurately, but very splendidly, apparently from the French version of Antoine Le Maçon. It is this version that appears here in the Tudor Translations.”97 A note after Hutton’s introduction reveals that the text of the Tudor Translations edition is in fact a composite of the first two editions of the Decameron: “The First Part of this Translation, containing the First Five Days, is reprinted from the Edition of 1625; the Second Part, containing the Last Five Days, from that of 1620.”98 In general, the original paratexts of the 1625 and 1620 editions are preserved here in approximately the same place in the text (e.g., the epistle dedicatory and table precede the beginning of the translated text itself), but some elements are missing, most notably the proemio, or “Author’s Prologue”

the postwar period? One approach would simply to revive critical appreciation of the canon of literary, mostly Elizabethan and Jacobean translations (c. 1570–1620) put in place by the Victorians, and enthusiastically assessed in the era of T. S. Eliot (Eliot 1960: 33–6). This canon, published in the ‘Tudor Translations’ series, provided a home-grown version of the classical, linguistic, and intellectual background need for serious exposition of the literature of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The Victorians saw these rediscovered translations as adventurous, pioneering works. They were thought to represent early progress towards the later literary supremacy of English as the medium of world literature and world empire (Whibley 1909)”: “The Renaissance,” in The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, ed. Peter France, 46. 96 On Hutton, see in the first instance Michael John Partington’s entry in the ODNB. 97 The Decameron preserved to posterity by Giovanni Boccaccio and translated into English Anno 1620, with an Introduction by Edward Hutton, 4 vols. (London: David Nutt, 1909), 1:cxxiv. 98 This is presumably the source edition for the 1934/5 Shakespeare’s Head edition of the Decameron, which reproduces exactly the same volumes.

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as it was titled in the 1620 and 1625 editions. The typographical arrangement is often different, for example when the original running headers in the original text are relegated to a marginal gloss, as in the epistle dedicatory (I, 3–7). In addition, a further dedication is inserted into the first volume after the title page: “To Robert George, Earl of Plymouth, this presentation of these stories of old Italy Englished by an unknown hand” (vii). Visually, the overall effect of the book is historicizing, rather than actually historic: the edition strives for authenticity and to give a sense of the original typographical conventions of the seventeenth century, even to the extent of using large decorated capitals at the start of each section. However, produced as it is on a modern press and with modern type, the effect is never quite consistent. Nonetheless, this edition remains the starting point for the recuperation of the historic English Boccaccio, and anticipates what will become a strong trend in his twentieth-century reception, the production of handsome (and expensive) reprints of historic translations in a fauxRenaissance style.99 We will see a similar impulse in the minor works in chapter 6. The Decameron in 1930 The year 1930 is the end point of this study, not least because it marks the publication of three key editions of the Decameron. This is the year of two new translations, by Richard Aldington and Frances Winwar, and the year in which the by-now-canonical translation by Rigg finds its definitive institutionalization under the Everyman imprint, published by Dent in London and by E.P. Dutton in New York. I will begin with this edition, before moving onto the two American publications. Boccaccio’s entry into the Everyman’s Library in 1930 represents an assertion of a mainstream scholarly, classic, status, and one that is quite distinct from the view of the author as an “erotic classic” expressed in other imprints. In terms of editorial motivation, the Everyman edition is much closer in spirit to the great nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century series such as Bohn’s Library and Morley’s Universal

99 At the finer end of the market, this trend is exemplified by books such as the Shakespeare’s Head edition, or the 1940 edition illustrated by Fritz Kredel “in the Renaissance style”; the trickle-down visual influence of such trends can also be seen in many postwar editions, which use gothic typography and medievalizing elements on their covers to signal Boccaccio’s status as a saucy classic.

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Library than to the privately printed gentleman’s limited editions, such as those of the Villon Society, or popular illustrated editions such as those characterized by the Chalon illustrations. The series was conceived of by the publisher Joseph Malaby Dent as a comprehensive survey of the classics: A library arranged to cover the whole field of English literature, including translations of the ancient classics and outstanding foreign works; a series to make widely available those great books which appeal [...] to every kind of reader: the worker, the student, the cultured man, the child, the man, and the woman [...]. The aim and scope of the series was crystallized in the title Everyman’s Library.100

The admirably egalitarian principles of the Everyman imprint are evidenced in every edition by their motto, which appears at the start of every volume: “Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide, | In thy most need to go by thy side.” Physically, too, the Everyman edition speaks of an austere intellectualism rather than extravagant sensualism, and this Decameron is very different from its preceding large-format illustrated editions. The text is presented in two small volumes (18 cm high), with characteristic art nouveau–style endpapers designed around the Everyman motto; the book is then classified on the series title page as number 846 in the Romance genre, an enduring relic from its sixteenth-century presentation.101 Overall, the presentation is sober rather than extravagant: the type is small but well proportioned; each volume contains a full-page illustration, but they are depictions of villas in the Tuscan countryside rather than scenes from the text itself. The text also contains a short but informative introduction to Boccaccio’s life and works by the recognized British Boccaccio expert of the day, Edward Hutton. Although a rather understated object in itself, the Everyman edition is hugely significant in its influence, in that it would go on to 100 For more details about the history of the imprint, see the two-page editors’ note at the end of the second volume of the text: Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron (London: Dent, 1955), 2:353–4. On J.M. Dent, see Jonathan Rose’s entry in the ODNB in the first instance. Further information on the Everyman series can be found online at http://www.everymanslibrarycollecting.com (accessed 10 July 2012). 101 The Everyman Library classified books according to the following genres: “Biography, Greek and Latin classics, Essays and Belles-lettres, Fiction, History, Poetry and Drama, Romance, Science, Religion and Philosophy, Travel and Topography, For Young People.” See the editors’ note, 2:353.

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become the template for a certain strand of Boccaccio publication – the inexpensive, authorized version of the classic – which extends up to the Penguin Classic paperback and beyond. The year 1930 is significant not only for the Everyman edition, but also for the fact that two other brand-new translations of the Decameron were published in that year. The period around 1930 was an unusually fecund time for the publication of Boccaccio editions on both sides of the Atlantic, and I will explore some reasons for this efflorescence of activity in the final chapter of this book. This is perhaps the last time when Boccaccian publishing activity was roughly comparable in outputs between the UK and USA, as in years to come the USA would far outstrip British production in both the range and numbers of published translations. The first of these translations to be discussed is Richard Aldington’s rendering, which was printed under a number of different imprints in 1930, while the second and final one is that of the first (and to date only) female translator of the Decameron, Frances Winwar, whose translation was published in a de luxe two-volume boxed set for the Limited Editions Club in the same year. At the time of the publication of his translation, Richard Aldington was well known as a poet, translator, and all-round leading figure of the European avant-garde.102 He was a founding member of the Imagist movement with Ezra Pound and the American poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), and assistant editor for T.S. Eliot’s journal Criterion from 1921, all achievements that made him an attractive choice as a translator for a new, self-consciously “modern” edition of the Decameron. Aldington’s translation appears in a number of different editions in the same year, some illustrated and some not, some in one volume, others in two; as de luxe limited editions printed on luxury paper, or as special editions for book clubs. For the purposes of this chapter, I will base my discussion on only one of these, which includes many of the key features of this batch of editions, the one-volume 1930 Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio, with a new sequence of illustrations by Jean de Boschère (New York: Garden City Publishing Company, 1930).103

102 See Max Saunders, “Aldington, Edward Godfree [Richard],” in the ODNB. 103 Other editions include an alternative edition from the Garden City Publishing Company; a smaller, thicker, volume for the Dell Company in New York; and a two-volume de luxe edition printed by the Quinn and Boden Company for Covici and Friede in New York, for simultaneous publication in America and England.

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On its dust jacket (figure 18), the edition trumpets its claim to be “complete and unexpurgated,” and this is largely true: an academic nitpicker might note the absence of the concluding rubric at the end of the authorial conclusion, but in all fairness, this is only one sentence. To all intents and purposes, then, this is the first mass-market, easily available full English translation of the text, published some 580 years after it was originally written. The blurb inside the dust jacket again stresses the novelty of this new translation, situating it against the English translation history of the text: This edition, translated by Richard Aldington, and hitherto available only in a privately printed edition, presents a careful, complete, and unexpurgated version of the famous classic, generously illustrated with superb coloured plates by Jean de Bosschère. It is worthy of a place in any library, and some knowledge of its contents is a prime requisite of a liberal education.

The mission of the Garden City Publishing Company with regard to Boccaccio is clear: the book has great merit, and “some knowledge of its contents” is even a necessity for the well-rounded liberal mind. Like the Everyman edition, this edition has aspirations to bring the classics to the avid autodidact reader who resides outside the traditional literary classes, but this formulation, combined with the direct promotion of the uncensored target text, suggests that this edition can be seen as a direct descendent of Calvin Blanchard’s libertarian Decameron of the previous century. Apart from the promotional material preserved on the dust jacket, there is virtually no further editorial paratextual information within the book. Aldington’s translation has been the subject of some harsh assessments since its publication, but it is certainly successful on its own terms. For a modern reader, the prose style is by far the most readable of any English translation so far, despite the well-documented infelicities of lexical choice and lack of stylistic variation. McWilliam was particularly scathing in his assessment of the translation, considering that it “has more faults than the servant of Friar Cipolla, and which it would be kindest to pass over in silence, except that for a large number of English readers it alone has served as their means of judging Boccaccio’s worth.”104 Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin has, however, recently mounted a very sensible defence of Aldington’s worth as a translator, noting that “though far from perfect, and nothing like as good as 104 McWilliam, “Translator’s Introduction,” 31.

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McWilliam, Aldington is not in fact all that bad. His style is literate and usually well-balanced; the resulting Decameron is at least readable by a normal citizen, which is more than can be said for the previous version by J.M. Rigg (1903). Thus, in its day, Aldington represented a kind of advance.”105 Whatever the scholarly criticisms, Aldington’s translation would go on to have a most productive afterlife, reissued in the USA in 1938, 1949, 1966, and 1972 by the Garden City Publishing Company, in 1957 by Elek, and 1962 and 1968 by Dell. Interestingly, while the translation itself is not perceived to date, editorial taste in illustrations does: Jean de Boschère’s plates are not reproduced after 1938, but are substituted instead by new illustrations by the iconic illustrator of Americana Rockwell Kent. In Britain, the translation is chosen by the Folio Society for their two-volume edition of the Decameron in 1954–5, no doubt because of Aldington’s fame as a poet and member of the European literary avant-garde as well as for the readability of the translation; the London Elek edition follows shortly afterwards, illustrated with reproductions of Renaissance paintings.106 It is therefore highly significant that Aldington’s translation virtually always appears in an illustrated edition; the combination of transparent target text, a famous name for a translator, and a large-format illustrated presentation make for an emblematically accessible Decameron suitable for a general popular readership. The second Decameron translation to be published in 1930 is a markedly different kind of book from the Aldington editions, appearing as a beautifully designed two-volume edition produced for the Limited Editions Club of New York.107 The translator, Frances Winwar, was an American writer of Italian origin. Born in Taormina in Sicily, she moved to America at the age of eight, and she holds the distinction of being the first and only female translator of the Decameron into English to date.

105 Ó Cuilleanáin, “Boccaccio Could Be Better Served,” 50. 106 The Decameron, translated by Richard Aldington with aquatints by Buckland-Wright (London: Folio Society, 1954–5); The Decameron (London: Elek, 1957). A second edition of the Folio Society edition is issued in 1969, while another version of the Elek edition is published by Sphere Books in 1972 (presumably to cash in on the newly raised profile of the text as a result of the new Penguin Classic edition). The Folio Society published a third edition in 2007. 107 On American fine press publishing in the interwar period, see Megan L. Benton, Beauty and the Book: Fine Editions and Cultural Distinctions in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

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Apparently forced by her first editor to anglicize her given Italian name, Francesca Vinciguerra, she was a successful romance novelist and biographer, and it was presumably her fame, proven competency in the romance genre, and Italian background that suggested her as a potential translator of Boccaccio.108 The Limited Editions Club Decameron is a two-volume folio edition, presented in a slipcase. Rather than being on general sale, it was offered via subscription: subscribers would sign up for the club for an annual fee of $120, and in return received twelve fine editions over the year.109 The club was founded in 1929 by George Macy, a noted bibliophile and entrepreneur, who sought to offer an aspirational literary experience (nothing so simple as a reading experience) to the fifteen hundred subscribers necessary to cover the costs: “Although the club was pitched in a manner similar to that of other book clubs, it encouraged its membership to buy books not in order to read the latest and best books but to acquire the social stature that accompanied ownership of aristocratic editions of classics.”110 The Winwar Decameron appeared in the first year’s selection, alongside other non-intimidating classics such as Robinson Crusoe, The Surprising Adventures of Rip Van Winkle, and Gulliver’s Travels; the only other translated text to be included was The Fables of La Fontaine, which sits very comfortably alongside Boccaccio as an example of the European semi-erotic tale.111 Although sniffed at by more elite bibliophiles, the finished product is a very handsome edition. The title page – like the rest of the book – is beautifully designed by Thomas Cleland, with a spare yet generous use of blank space (figure 19). A classical architectural frame surrounds the

108 For a brief biography of Winwar, see her entry in The Oxford Companion to American Literature, ed. James D. Hart, rev. Phillip W. Leininger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 732. 109 On the marketing strategies of the Limited Editions Club, see Benton, Beauty and the Book, 225–7 (225). 110 Benton, Beauty and the Book, 225. 111 “In its first year, for example, the club published the following fine editions: Robinson Crusoe, designed by the Grabhorns; The Fables of LaFontaine, designed by Updike; The Surprising Adventures of Rip Van Winkle, designed by Goudy; The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, designed by Nash; The Decameron, designed by Cleland; Tartarin of Tarascon, designed by Dwiggins; Leaves of Grass, designed by Warde; A Lodging for the Night, designed by Hal Marchbanks; Snowbound, designed by Rollines; Undine, designed by John Fass; and Gulliver’s Travels, designed at the Plandôme Press”: Benton, Beauty and the Book, 228.

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title and publication details, while within the frame we see the ten figures of the brigata. The edition contains substantially more paratextual matter than the editions of the Aldington translation, in the form of a splendidly disingenuous introduction by the American writer Burton Rascoe.112 Rascoe was clearly a believer in the strong opening statement, beginning his introduction with the erroneous but nonetheless arresting assertion that “Giovanni Boccaccio was a bastard born in Paris some time during the year 1313” (I, ix). The first part of the introduction is given over to a fairly standard, if romanticized, summary of the life and works of Boccaccio (ix–xi), which Rascoe cheerfully admits is gleaned from Hutton; much more rewarding is the second part (xi–xiii), where Rascoe presents a kind of Bildungsroman of his sexual comingof-age through Boccaccio. It is worth quoting it at some length, so as to illustrate the editorial intentions implicit in the commissioning of Rascoe to introduce the book: Now, although I make no pretense to original research in the life and times of Boccaccio, I am very well acquainted with the decameron. I have brought to it over a period of years practically every mood and degree of receptivity any male reader of my time and circumstance can bring to the book, except the mood and degree of receptivity experienced in advanced middle-age and senility. My first acquaintance with the decameron came in early adolescence. Curiosity, says Aristotle, is the strongest urge experienced by human beings, surpassing love and hunger in intensity and duration; and curiosity in an adolescent is particularly strong concerning the nature and functions of male and female. Time has consecrated the decameron as one of the textbooks for adolescents in such matters, and this is all the more interesting in that it is a tradition which has evidently been handed down by word of mouth through the ages. Just the other night I learned, by asking, that the decameron had occupied precisely the same place, in the early education of seven men gathered together, as it had in mine. [...] Frankly, I must say that, tradition or no tradition, the decameron is disappointing as a textbook of information to the adolescent confronted with the mysteries of his early sexual promptings; for the information is of a nature such as he can only regard as academic and of very little practical

112 According to his literary biographer, “from the decade before 1920 and through the 1920’s [Rascoe] had a reputation as an avant-garde critic and editor”: Donald M. Hensley, Burton Rascoe (New York: Twayne, 1970).

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use to him. [...] What the adolescent wants to know is this and that, specifically, very little light on which is thrown anywhere by the decameron. And so he learns to avoid the tedious prologues to each story and reads through the hundred tales with the desperate hope of a bio-chemist seeking the meaning of life.113

Rascoe, then, invites his (presumably male) readers to admit that they share his complicity as adolescents hunting through the library; the choice of a female translator known for her romance novels, alongside such an unashamedly anti-intellectual reader of Boccaccio, certainly makes this one of the more original presentations of the Decameron. Although the edition seems superficially to be both attractive and reasonably informative (by the presence of an introduction, at least), there are some significant textual omissions. The translation does not include the incipit to the text, nor the proemio, although the editor or translators must have been aware of it, as the introduction to Day I is entitled “Preface to the Ladies” (1). Textual omissions notwithstanding, Winwar’s translation is generally considered to be a good one, even by McWilliam, who nonetheless notes the lack of stylistic variation in register: “Miss Winwar’s translation, whilst fairly accurate and eminently readable, fails to do justice to those more ornate and rhetorical passages in the work, where a formal and ‘literary’ style such as that adopted by Rigg is much more appropriate.”114 However, Winwar’s fluent and idiomatic prose style is clearly exactly the kind of rendering desired for the subscribers of the Limited Editions Club, and Rascoe himself makes a virtue of it in the closing paragraph of his introduction: “In 1903 was published a version in more modern English by J.M. Rigg; but while Rigg’s version is admirable in many respects it is somewhat stiff, archaic, and ‘literary.’ In making the present translation for this edition Frances Winwar, herself a novelist, has endeavored to render Boccaccio’s fluid Tuscan vernacular into a correspondingly simple and fluid conversational English.”115 Like Aldington’s, Winwar’s rendering translates both the controversial sexual novelle, although there is some glossing in strategic areas (e.g., she does not translate the notorious phrase “resurrezion della carne” in III, 10).

113 Rascoe, “Introduction to This Edition,” xi–xii. 114 McWilliam, “Translator’s Introduction,” 30–1. 115 Rascoe, “Introduction,” xiii.

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Despite the criticisms of both the vehicle in which it appeared and the stylistic qualities of the translation itself, Winwar’s translation also had a successful afterlife. It was selected to replace John Payne’s archaic rendering in the widely distributed Modern Library series in 1955, and ran to a further edition in 1958; it was then in print continuously for a total of fifteen years.116 The only female translator of the Decameron thus had a fair amount of success, becoming the official English voice of Boccaccio in a major “classic” series similar in size and scope to the Everyman. Nonetheless, it is striking that her translation appears in a total of only three editions, far fewer than any of the other named, male, translators, and this despite the fact that she was a famous novelist in her own right. Even now at the time of writing in 2012, Winwar remains the only female translator of the Decameron and one of only ten women ever to contribute to a commercially published English translation of Boccaccio’s works (of which only five, including Winwar, are single authors). Conclusion A diachronic survey such as this of the changing forms and functions of the Decameron between 1620 and 1930 reminds us that each material iteration is an individual textual event. Each book articulates a specific editorial and translational intention, and is directed towards a specific receiving context; and the translated, target text itself – the focus of most of the previous studies of the Decameron’s textual history – is but one of many factors by which the agents involved in the book’s production respond to a perceived need in their audience. But if the translated book-object must be seen primarily in its synchronic context, as a single performance firmly located in time and space, then the mapping of these textual events, these retranslations and republications, offers us the means to create diachronic narratives of the translated history of the text, as seen in this chapter. These narratives might be formulated in various ways, for example, the changes in the “shape” of the translated text; or the historical movement from greater to lesser censorship of perceived obscenity; or the diminishing textual reliance on French

116 The Modern Library published two different translations of the Decameron: the first, in Payne’s translation from 1927 onward, and two editions of Winwar’s rendering in 1955 and 1958 (in print until 1970). For information on the Modern Library, see the collectors’ website: http://www.modernlib.com/ (accessed 12 June 2010).

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source editions, and the simultaneous increase in the presence of unmediated French elements inserted within the English book; or a gendered narrative that culminates in the first female translator of this text. Every act of translation, and retranslation, activates a narrative arc in and of itself: every new rendering, or new edition, situates itself within the book’s historiographical tradition, each claiming a perfected adequacy, perhaps in textual completeness, in register, in stylistic transparency, or in their enlightened amplification of authorial intentions. Venuti suggests that the most suitable narrative genre deployed in these translational narratives is in fact “romance,” “where the historical narrative is evolutionary, or progressive, culminating in some form of transcendence, not of the difficulties in translating the foreign text, but of the defects that are perceived to have marred an earlier rendering.”117 The translation history of this text is thus a romance of the romance, with all the erotic associations that that brings. The story of the slow unveiling of the censored obscene content to the English reading public seems to reflect some iconic revelatory moments within the novellas themselves, and becomes a key selling point of the book itself. Arguably the most gratuitous examples of this are the voyeuristic illustrative sequences that are included in certain English translated editions, such as those of Louis Chalon, who offers images of Alatiel’s seductive dance and Griselda’s transformational disrobing (figure 17). Perhaps this is the reason why Boccaccio’s Decameron in English has had such extensive and rich textual adventures: the text’s erotic content has somehow become superimposed on the translation history, with the effect that it becomes one of the publishing world’s causes celèbres, indeed, one of the great “banned books” of all time.

117 Venuti, “Retranslations,” 35–6.

5 The Minor Works in the Nineteenth Century: Dante and Chaucer

The last two chapters of this book are dedicated to the reception history of Boccaccio’s minor works in the nineteenth century and the first thirty years of the twentieth. This little-studied period of his reception is in fact a time of extraordinary translation activity relative to earlier centuries, when many of the minor works are recovered, translated into English, and printed for the first time. There is therefore much continuity with the preceding chapters, and a deliberate chronological overlap with the latter part of the Decameron history, in particular. This chapter will take as its subject those translations of Boccaccio’s minor works that emerge from the English interest in Boccaccio-dantista and as a source for Chaucer.1 Zelig-like, Boccaccio is made by his nineteenthcentury translators and editors to intersect with contemporary fashions such as Romantic Italomania and Victorian neo-medievalism, and is rediscovered again in the cultural turn to academic literary studies towards the end of the century and into the twentieth.2 The story of the 1 Parts of this chapter have been previously published in my article “NineteenthCentury Translations and the Invention of Boccaccio-dantista,” in Dante in the Nineteenth Century: Reception, Portrayal, Popularization, ed. Nick Havely (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), 201–20; and in my 2004 review article on the history of the Trattatello in English, in Heliotropia, 2.2. 2 For a detailed presentation of the nineteenth-century reception of Boccaccio, see Wright, Boccaccio in England from Chaucer to Tennyson (London: Athlone Press, 1957), 331–478. The bibliography on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reception of Dante is vast and ever expanding: significant recent studies include Nicholas Havely, ed., Dante in the Nineteenth Century: Reception, Portrayal, Popularization (Bern: Lang, 2011) and Dante’s Modern Afterlife: Reception and Response from Blake to Heaney (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998); Alison Milbank, Dante and the Victorians (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Eric Haywood, ed., Dante

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“minor” Boccaccio, more than any other part of this study to date, is also the story of literary professionals, be they public intellectuals (Leigh Hunt), poet-artists (Dante Gabriel Rossetti), independent scholars (Philip Wicksteed), university professors (Israel Gollancz), or publishers of all genres, from the scholarly to the pornographic. One of the most striking features of the anglophone reception of the minor works is how far Boccaccio has automatically been defined in relation to other – implicitly greater and more interesting – authors. Just as in the late sixteenth century he was presented as “like Petrarch,” in the nineteenth century his minor works are translated only to illuminate the figures and writings of Dante and Chaucer. The “Dante connection” is the longest continuous relationship of his literary afterlife, with five different translations of the Trattatello having been made at the time of writing, published in nineteen different editions. The “Chaucer connection” is no less enduring, although less comprehensive, with at least thirteen editions of selections from the Filostrato and Teseida having been published, generally directed towards an audience of Chaucer scholars and students. Neo-medievalism, Dante, and Chaucer The fortune of Boccaccio’s minor works in English translation in the nineteenth century begins, perhaps not surprisingly, with the writings of the notable Italophile poet and journalist Leigh Hunt (1784–1859).3 In his youth Hunt was a radical journalist, who was imprisoned in 1813–15 for libelling the Prince Regent in his newspaper The Examiner; following his release from jail he became close friends with leading Romantic figures such as Keats, Shelley, and their familial and intellectual circles, in 1822 even going to live in Italy with the Shelleys. Hunt’s Romantic Italophilia bursts into the public sphere in 1816 with

metamorphoses: Episodes in a Literary Afterlife (Dublin: Four Courts, 2003); Antonella Braida, Dante and the Romantics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004); A. Braida and Luisa Calè, eds., Dante on View: The Reception of Dante in the Visual and Performing Arts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 3 On Hunt’s life and works, see in the first instance Nicholas Roe’s entry on him in the ODNB; for a longer study, see Anthony Holden’s The Wit in the Dungeon: A Life of Leigh Hunt (London: Little, Brown, 2005). Hunt also wrote his own autobiography towards the end of his life, which describes his Italophilia in copious detail: The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, with reminiscences of friends and contemporaries (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1850).

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his narrative four-canto poem The Story of Rimini, a retelling in couplets of the tale of Paolo and Francesca from Inferno V of the Commedia, which was heavily influenced by Boccaccio’s novelistic account of the affair in  his Esposizioni.4 The Story of Rimini has been described as “Hunt’s greatest poem,” which it may well be.5 Peter Brand is more direct in his assessment: Hunt’s imagination and style are generally quite unsuited to reproduce the pathos of the Italian original, and Dante’s art of leaving things unsaid quite escapes Hunt, who fills in the details with merciless thoroughness: “May I come in? said he: it made her start, – That smiling voice; – she coloured, pressed her heart A moment, as for breath and then with free And usual tone said, ‘O yes – certainly.” (C.iii, ll. 581–4)6

The Romantic interest in Dante can be measured in the amount of translation and other related literary activity on this subject in the twenty years either side of the turn of the century: between 1780 and 1814 no fewer than twelve different translations of the Commedia were published, with the first English translation of the entire poem, by Henry Boyd, appearing in 1802.7 Apart from the Danteana, there is also a rise in English-language guides to Italian literature in this era, and a continued and considerable interest in Petrarch as the consummate lyric poet.8 Boccaccio had his enthusiasts, chiefly William Hazlitt and

4 Hunt, Leigh, The Story of Rimini: A Poem (London: Printed by T. Davison for J. Murray; W. Blackwood, Edinburgh; and Cumming, Dublin, 1816). In the last years of his life, Boccaccio was invited by the Florentine commune to give a series of lectures explicating Dante’s Commedia, which he undertook between 1373 and 1375. The lectures were suspended at Inferno XVII when he became ill. All references to the Esposizioni are taken from the critical edition (1965). On the Romantic knowledge of Boccaccio’s commentary, see Nick Havely, “Francesca Observed: Painting and Illustration, c. 1790–1840,” in Dante on View, 95–108 (96–8, 100–2 on Boccaccio as a source for Hunt’s Story of Rimini). 5 By Roe, in ODNB. 6 C.P. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics: The Italianate Fashion in Early NineteenthCentury England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 57. 7 Brand suggests that Hunt’s inspiration may have been triggered by the publication of the Rev. H.F. Cary’s new blank-verse translation of the Commedia in 1814: Italy and the English Romantics, 55. On Dante’s nineteenth-century reception, see Havely, Dante in the Nineteenth Century. 8 On Romantic Petrarchism, see Brand, Italy and the English Romantics, 94–101.

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Walter Savage Landor, but was known and read primarily for his Decameron rather than any other works: as we have seen in chapter 4, six different editions of the Decameron were published in London between 1804 and 1825.9 It is interesting to consider the way in which English literary culture admits Boccaccio in this period: he is used primarily as a source of tragic or chivalric narratives for appropriation rather than esteemed as a writer. John Keats, the author of perhaps the most famous Boccaccio adaptation Isabella and the Pot of Basil (1820), is only one of the English Romantics retelling Boccaccio in English verse at the time; similar publications include the anonymous Spirit of Boccaccio’s Decameron (1812), J.H. Reynolds’s The Garden of Florence and other Poems (1821), and Coleridge’s Garden of Boccaccio (1829).10 It is notable that all of these individuals formed part of Hunt’s literary circles, as did the next generation of English poets and artists to be interested in Boccaccio, the Pre-Raphaelites.11 Hunt knew (or at least knew of) several of Boccaccio’s works beyond the Decameron, mentioning the Ameto, Ninfale fiesolano and Genealogia in his autobiography.12 He seems to have appreciated the prose works rather more than the poetry, claiming that “[Boccaccio’s] heart and nature were poems; but he could not develop them well in verse.”13 It is thus perhaps not surprising that he is the first person to make a new English translation of any of the minor works since the sixteenth century, and it is equally unsurprising that his Boccaccio translation should be highly targeted to his own interests, comprising only a small part of the commentary on the Paolo and Francesca episode in the Esposizioni. The translation appears in a rather paternalistic anthology by the great Italophile, his two-volume Stories from the Italian Poets: with Lives of the Writers (London: Chapman and Hall, 1846), in which the selection and 9 Brand, Italy and the English Romantics, 110–12. On Landor (“probably the best nineteenth-century Boccaccio translator the English language never got”), see Jon Usher, “Walter Savage Landor as Creative Critic of Boccaccio,” in Caro Vitto: Essays in Memory of Vittore Branca, ed. Jill Kraye and Laura Lepschy in collaboration with Nicola Jones, The Italianist, 27 (2007), 241–55 (253). Wright also briefly discusses Boccaccio in relation to Hazlitt and Landor: Boccaccio in England, 344–9, 357–61. 10 Brand, Italy and the English Romantics, 113–18. See also Wright, Boccaccio in England, on all of these. 11 Poems based on Boccaccian (i.e., Decameronian) themes in Italianate octave metre, such as those of Thomas Powell and Alexander Knox, continued to be published in the 1830s and 1840s: Brand, Italy and the English Romantics, 87. 12 Wright, Boccaccio in England, 350–2. 13 Cited in Wright, Boccaccio in England, 353.

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presentation of Italian material is highly circumscribed by the editor’s view of where the interest should lie for his intended audience.14 The tendency towards literality and exhaustiveness seen in the Story of Rimini informs every inch of the collection in which his translation of Boccaccio appears, and his aim is clearly stated in his preface: The purpose of the these tales is, to add to the stock of tales from the Italian writers; to retain as much of the poetry of the originals as it is in the power of the writer’s prose to compass; and to furnish careful biographical notices of the authors. There have been several collections of stories from the Novellists, but none from the Poets; and it struck me that prose versions from these, of the kind here offered to the public, might not be unwillingly received.

The first volume is devoted to Dante and Pulci, the second to Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, and Hunt is blithely direct about the editorial changes he has wrought on these authors to make them fit into his collection: The stories are selected from the five principal narrative poets, Dante, Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso; they comprise the most popular of such as are fit for translation; are reduced into one continuous narrative, when diffused and interrupted, as in the instances of those of Angelica, and Armida; are accompanied with critical and explanatory notes; and, in the case of Dante, consist of an abstract of the poet’s whole work.

Perhaps mentally classifying Boccaccio only as a “Novellist,” Hunt dismisses his very extensive works of narrative poetry as unworthy of mention here, and in fact, a brief glance at the paratextual apparatus clearly shows us exactly how tangential Boccaccio is to the whole enterprise. He appears only in the supporting material of the text, relegated to the second appendix, and is not even highlighted in the introductory description of the volume. The first volume is almost entirely centred on Dante. The book begins with a biography of the poet, “Dante: Critical Notice of his Life and Genius” (1–77), followed by a kind of Englishlanguage précis of the Commedia as “The Italian Pilgrim’s Progress,” which is presented divided into sections entitled “The journey through 14 An American edition was published shortly afterwards, by Wiley and Putnam in New York in 1846.

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Hell,” “The journey through Purgatory,” and “The journey through Heaven” (79–279). (It is particularly interesting to note that the Divine Comedy is here reframed as “The Italian Pilgrim’s Progress,” as if it were the target text influenced by Bunyan’s book, instead of the other way round.) This is followed by 107 pages of Pulci-related material, before moving back to the more important business of Dante in the appendices. The purpose of these are given in the author’s preface: In the Appendix, for the study of the Italian language, are given entire stories, also in the original, and occasionally rendered in like manner. The book is particularly intended for such students or other lovers of the language as are pleased with any fresh endeavours to recommend it; and, at the same time, for such purely English readers as wish to know something about Italian poetry, without having leisure to cultivate its acquaintance. (vii)

Here, perhaps not surprisingly, the author of The Story of Rimini focuses almost exclusively on Paolo and Francesca: Part 1 of the appendix gives the text of canto V in the original Italian (391–3), and this is followed by a “Translation in the terza rima of the original” (393–5). Boccaccio appears in part II of the appendix: “Accounts given by different writers of the circumstances relating to Paolo and Francesca; concluding with the only facts ascertained. Boccaccio’s account: Translated from his Commentary on the Passage” (396). Although Hunt claims to be using “different writers,” it is soon clear that Boccaccio is his only source (although this may derive from Boccaccio’s own common stylistic device in the Esposizioni of using “altri” as a way of proposing his own views). The excerpt translated is only a small part of the whole sequence, beginning “You must know that this lady, Madonna Francesca,” and ending “were buried together in the same grave” (Esposizioni, V, i, 147–55), and once again reflects Hunt’s interest in the “factual details” rather than an interest in the literary merits of Boccaccio’s writing. Hunt’s comparison of Dante and Boccaccio is interesting precisely because he follows the critical trope of Boccaccio as “Giovanni della Tranquillità,” the rather sunny and simple-minded one of the tre corone: The reader of this account will have observed, that while Dante assumes the guilt of all parties, and puts them into the infernal regions, the goodnatured Boccaccio is for doubting it, and consequently for sending them all to heaven. He will ignore as much of the business as a gentleman can;

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boldly doubts any guilt in the case; says nothing of the circumstance of the book; and affirms that the husband loved his wife, and was miserable at having slain her.

It is hard to escape the feeling that Hunt considered Boccaccio to be rather a decent chap, who might comfortably have turned a blind eye (like the author) to the baroque marital shenanigans of the Romantic set with whom he was so well acquainted. Following the translation of the Esposizioni passage, Hunt then concludes this section with a list of “facts” about the case, “The only particulars hitherto really ascertained respecting the history of Paulo and Francesca” (400–1). A similar paratextual offering is created for another infamously popular episode from the poem, the tale of Ugolino. This comprises “The Story of Ugolino” from Inferno XXXIII, its “Translation in the Heroic Couplet” (which features the timeless lines “And fasten’d on the skull, over a groan, | With teeth as strong as a mastiff’s on a bone”), and the “Real Story of Ugolino and Chaucer’s Feeling Respecting The Poem” (407–9). Here, as before, Hunt broadens his field of reference to include another great English medieval authority, and in so doing contributes to the prevailing folk understanding that Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer can be somehow directly associated by virtue of all being alive at around the same time, albeit in different countries. The final part of the appendix is another selection and translation from the Commedia, this time chosen for providing a “Picture of Florence in the time of Dante’s Ancestors” (Par., lines 97–129 of Canto 15). The excerpt is short (probably because the rest of the canto does not fit under this heading), and is translated in blank verse. Perhaps Hunt had no further taste for composition in the terza rima form after struggling with a whole canto of Paolo and Francesca. The overall impression is of a whistle-stop tour through those parts of Dante’s poem that were most familiar to the British audience, with Dante’s invented eyewitness account giving a little exotic medieval colour at the end, its moralizing function entirely excised along with its extraction from the poem.15 The next translations to be made of Boccaccio were made by other members of Leigh Hunt’s extended circle, the Pre-Raphaelite (and actual) brothers Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82) and William Michael 15 In the source text the sequence is voiced by Dante’s great-great-grandfather, and is used to contrast this golden age of Florentine probity with the degenerated society of Dante’s own times.

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Rossetti (1829–1919). The lives of the Rossettis have been exhaustively documented elsewhere, but it is fair to say that their activity as translators of Boccaccio has not to date been one of the things for which they have been best known.16 Their translation work is not extensive, but it is nonetheless important not only in terms of their work in situating Boccaccio within various literary traditions both Italian and English, but also because of what this translation activity can reveal about avantgarde English cultural history and the development of medieval studies as an academic discipline. One might even argue that the two brothers exemplify two different and competing strands in Boccaccio’s anglophone reception history, the one (Dante Gabriel) focusing on Boccaccio-dantista and his “romance” output, the other (William) beginning the process of English Quellenforschung with his examination of the intertextual links between Boccaccio and Chaucer. The Rossetti children were three-quarters Italian by birth; their mother was Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori, the daughter of Gaetano Polidori and his English wife Anna Pierce, and their father was Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti, a former Carbonaro who had fled Italy due to his opposition to the Austrian occupation of Lombardy and Venetia.17 Their father taught Italian at King’s College London, and was an idiosyncratic Dantist even among Dantists, espousing an anti-papal reading of the Commedia.18 It is therefore not surprising that in this climate of professional and semi-professional Italian studies, the bilingual and bicultural Rossetti brothers were able to go further than their artistic and literary contemporaries into Boccaccio’s other works, and create translations that present new works to their target anglophone audiences.

16 The bibliography on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is so vast as to verge on the unmanageable. For a survey of the field, see the introductory essay by David Latham, “Haunted Texts: The Invention of Pre-Raphaelite Studies,” in Haunted Texts: Studies in Pre-Raphaelitism in Honour of William E. Fredeman, ed. David Latham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 1–33. On the Rossetti family, see in the first instance their entries in the ODNB, and for a detailed study of William and his wife Lucy Madox Brown, see Angela Thirlwell, William and Lucy: The Other Rossettis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). 17 J.B. Bullen, “Rossetti, Dante Gabriel” in the ODNB. 18 See, for example, his Disquisitions on the Antipapal Spirit which produced the Reformation; Its secret influence on the literature of Europe in general, and of Italy in particular. Translated from the Italian by Miss Caroline Ward (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1834). See also Pompeo Giannantonio, “Gabriele Rossetti dantista,” in Dantismo russo e cornice europea, ed. Egidio Guidubaldi SJ (Florence: Olschki, 1989), 1:55–80.

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s fascination with Dante Alighieri is well known, and was a presiding interest in both his textual and visual outputs over his career, but his first (and only) textual engagement with Boccaccio is found in his 1861 anthology of translated Italian lyrics, The Early Italian Poets from Ciullo d’Alcamo to Dante Alighieri (1100–1200– 1300) in the original metres together with Dante’s Vita Nuova.19 Dante Gabriel Rossetti began to translate from the Italian in his late teens, experimenting with metrical renditions of Italian lyrics alongside his own poetic compositions. He began his translation of Dante’s Vita Nuova in 1850 (at the age of 21–22), but it remained unpublished until its inclusion in this collection in 1861.20 Rossetti’s work as a translator has been somewhat overshadowed by his other poetic compositions and especially by his art, which has now come to dominate both the popular and scholarly conceptions of his work and importance.21 However, Jerome McGann has suggested that his volume of translations “is at least as impressive, and was easily as influential, as his more celebrated book of ‘original’ poetry,” not only bringing a vast range of early Italian poets to an anglophone readership for the first time, but also in that it would inform conceptions of Italian and “Italianate” literature as well as translation for many years to come.22 For example, Rossetti’s ideas about translation practice were to be taken up by Ezra Pound in the twentieth century, and would therefore become highly

19 The full title page reads: “The Early Italian Poets from Ciullo d’Alcamo to Dante Alighieri (1100–1200–1300) in the original metres together with Dante’s Vita Nuova translated by D.G. Rossetti. Part I. Poets chiefly before Dante. Part II. Dante and his Circle. London: Smith, Elder and Co. 65, Cornhill. 1861. The rights of translation and reproduction, as regards all editorial parts of this work, are reserved.” Boccaccio famously provided Rossetti with the title of one of his paintings, Bocca baciata (1859), taken from the closing lines of Dec., II, 7, 122: “Bocca basciata non perde ventura, anzi rinnuova come fa la luna.” On Rossetti and Boccaccio, see Wright, Boccaccio in England, 363–4. 20 Bullen, “Rossetti,” in ODNB. 21 Jerome McGann, “A Commentary on Some of Rossetti’s Translations from Dante,” in Latham, Haunted Texts, 35–52 (18). On Rossetti as a translator, see also Helen M. Dennis, “The Translation Strategies of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ezra Pound and Paul Blackburn,” in Ezra Pound and Poetic Influence, ed. Helen M. Dennis (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 29–38; Roxana Preda, “D.G. Rossetti and Ezra Pound as Translators of Cavalcanti: Poetic Choices and the Representation of Woman,” Translation and Literature, 8.2 (1999), 217–34; Anne Paolucci, “Ezra Pound and D.G. Rossetti as Translators of Guido Cavalcanti,” Romanic Review, 51.4 (1960), 256–67. 22 McGann, “Commentary,” 18.

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influential in modernist translation theory.23 His translation practice is highly aestheticized, whereby the target text object (i.e., the translated poem) may aspire to transmit the meaning of the source text, but, more importantly, must possess equivalence in aesthetic and formal terms. As McGann states: Rossetti’s translations will be in verse forms that aspire to match the aesthetic resources that were their initial source and inspiration. [He] adds a further interesting requirement to the pursuit of that aspiration. Though the verse translations were freed from an obligation to strict semantic “literality,” they were bound to an obligation of close metrical equivalence. This obligation was in many ways a far more demanding one. In the particular case of the poetry Rossetti was choosing to translate, it meant (a) finding accentual equivalences for syllabic Italian measures and (b) adhering closely to rhyme schemes that would be difficult in English. The result would prove astonishing – one of the greatest works in translation in the language precisely because it is a book of poetry.24

Rossetti presents his ideological position in undertaking this work in the opening preface. His aim is ambitious: to provide a “complete view” of the early Italian lyric for his readers, because of its supreme aesthetic beauty and technical perfection I need not dilate here on the characteristics of the first epoch of Italian Poetry; since the extent of my translated selections is sufficient to afford a complete view of it. Its great beauties may often remain unapproached in the versions here attempted; but, at the same time, its imperfections are not all to be charged to the translator. Among these I may refer to its limited range of subject and continual obscurity, as well to its monotony in the use of rhymes or frequent substitutions of assonances. But to compensate for much that is incomplete and inexperienced, these poems possess, in their degree, beauties of a kind which can never again exist in art; and offer, besides, a treasure of grace and variety in the formation of their metres.25

23 See in the first instance the discussions of Pound’s translation practice in the Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation. 24 McGann, Commentary,” 18. 25 D.G. Rossetti, The Early Italian Poets, vii.

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While there are manifold difficulties with the material and the question of how it should be translated, the task is urgent due to the state of neglect into which these works have fallen. Rossetti conceives of his task as twofold, to rescue these works from the philological corruption and paratextual degradation into which they have fallen, and to reframe them anew for his generation. The proposal of a new version of them in translation is a more direct and preferable means of explication than the turgid way in which they are currently presented in his source editions:26 Much has been said, and in many respects justly, against the value of metrical translation. But I think it would be admitted that the tributary art might find a not illegitimate use in the case of poems which come down to us in such a form as do these early Italian ones. Struggling originally with corrupt dialect and imperfect expression, and hardly kept alive through centuries of neglect, they have reached that last and worst state in which the coup-de-grace has almost been dealt them by clumsy transcription and pedantic superstructure. At this stage the task of talking much more about them in any language is hardly to be entered upon; and a translation (involving, as it does, the necessity of settling many points without discussion,) remains perhaps the most direct form of commentary.27

The Early Italian Poets as a whole is governed by a teleological focus on Dante as a summa of medieval Italian literary achievement, and this is borne out not only in Rossetti’s paratexts, which mediate the volume, but also in the selection of material and its disposition. Closing his preface, Rossetti recalls the fervently Dantean atmosphere of his youth that this work has resuscitated: In relinquishing this work (which, small as it is, is the only contribution I expect to make to our English knowledge of old Italy), I feel, as it were, divided from my youth. The first associations I have are connected with my father’s devoted studies, which, from his own point of view, have done so much towards the general investigation of Dante’s writings. Thus, in those early days, all around me partook of the influence of the great Florentine; till, from viewing it as a natural element, I also, growing older, was drawn within the circle. I trust that from this the reader may place 26 The source editions are listed at the end of the preface at p. xii. 27 Rossetti, Early Italian Poets, vii–viii.

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more confidence in a work not carelessly undertaken, though produced in the spare-time of other pursuits more closely followed. (x)

The book itself is divided into two parts: “Part I. Poets chiefly before Dante,” and “Part II. Dante and his Circle.” Part 1 begins with a “Table of Poets in Part I” (xxiii–xxxvii) that provides brief biographical notices where they are available, followed by the selection of the poems, in chronological order. Part 2 begins with an extensive introduction, and then the section proper begins with the Vita Nuova, followed by other poems by Dante, and then those of his circle in turn. Rossetti’s translation of the Vita Nuova therefore forms the centrepiece to the collection as a whole, and he stakes his claim to originality in this introduction: The Vita Nuova (or Autobiography of Dante’s youth till about his twentyseventh year) is already well known to many in the original, or by means of essays and of English versions partial or entire; though I believe there is not one of the latter which has been published in any full sense of the word (189–90).28

Although not a professional academic as his father was, Rossetti’s aims and achievements with this collection are admirably thorough. For the first time in the anglophone world, someone has sought to illuminate Dante not only through reference to his own literary output but also to that of others in his historical context. Whilst his aim is clearly autobiographical, he nonetheless pulls together a corpus of complementary material through which to reconstruct the world of the early Italian poets: All that seems necessary to be done here for the work was to translate it in as free and clear a form as was consistent with fidelity to its meaning; to  ease it, as far as possible, from notes and encumbrances; and to

28 Roxana Preda has suggested that “Rossetti’s main purpose was to provide a context for his translation of the Vita Nuova, a context which would show how Dante’s poetry originated, to what extent he had adopted existing poetic practices, and how he transcended them in a new synthesis” (“D.G. Rossetti and Ezra Pound,” 219). It should be noted here that Dante Gabriel only translated the poems of the Vita Nuova, while his brother William tackled the prose; William would then go on to make his own English translation of the Inferno, published in London by Macmillan in 1865. On this translation, see Thirlwell, William and Lucy, 188–93.

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accompany it for the first time with those poems from Dante’s own lyrical series which have reference to its events, as well as with such native commentary (so to speak) as might be afforded by the writings of those with whom its author was at that time in familiar intercourse. Not chiefly to Dante, then, of whom so much is known to all or may readily be found written, but to the various other members of his circle, these few pages should be devoted. (190)

Boccaccio is incorporated into this support material to illuminate Dante, just as he was in Leigh Hunt’s anthology. Although he is afforded a greater presence in the text than in Hunt’s volume, he is still strictly marginal, and valued purely in an informational, biographical sense rather than as an esteemed author in himself who would merit inclusion in the substantive part of the text (i.e., the lyrics). He is cited twice in this introduction to the second part: first, as the author of the Life of Dante (191), and second, as a source of information about Dante’s friend Guido Cavalcanti.29 Rossetti draws on a number of near-contemporary accounts to round out the biography of Cavalcanti – Dino Compagni’s Chronicle, Villani’s History of Florence, two references to him in the Commedia (Purg. XI and Inferno X, the Inferno passages taken from an unpublished blank verse translation by his brother William), and Franco Sacchetti’s Tales – but Boccaccio’s tale Decameron, VI, 9 is the most extensive of these (202–3). Rossetti is disparaging of the entertainment value of this tale (perhaps revealing a certain intellectual distaste towards Boccaccio, or at least his Decameron), but includes it nonetheless: The ninth Tale of the sixth Day of the Decameron relates a repartee of Guido’s, which has all the profound platitude of mediæval wit. As the anecdote, however, is interesting on other grounds, I translate it here.30

29 “Boccaccio, in his Life of Dante, tells us that the great poet, in later life, was ashamed of this work of his youth. Such a statement hardly seems reconcilable with the allusions to it made or implied in the Commedia; but it is true that the Vita Nuova is a book which only youth could have produced, and which much chiefly remain sacred to the young” (191). (Rossetti was all of thirty-three when he wrote this.) 30 Rossetti, Early Italian Poets, 202. His dismissal of Boccaccio as demonstrating “the profound platitude of mediæval wit” has in fact been immortalized in the Oxford English Dictionary as an exemplary usage of “platitude.”

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While Rossetti may have taken a certain interest in Boccaccio’s works as a source for the subject matter for his paintings (or at least in one of the most notorious tales of female sexual activity in the Decameron, II, 7, the tale of the kidnapped and raped Alatiel, which provided the title for Bocca baciata), in textual terms he is important to him only as a source of incidental historical detail about Dante, rather than as a poet in his own right. This is evidenced not only in the liminal placement of Rossetti’s translations of Boccaccio, but also in the very status that he accords them: his translation from the Decameron is workmanlike, “literal,” and set very much against his poetic, “aesthetic” translations of the minor poets. His translations of six Boccaccian sonnets, on the other hand, do conform to his “aesthetic” translation practice, being metrical translations, but their placement and their accompanying paratexts betray this same construction of the author. The six Boccaccio sonnets appear in the closing appendix to the volume (437–51), which seems to be mostly dedicated to poetry about and from Dante. The first part of the section is given over to Forese Donati and Cecco d’Ascoli, and includes the tenzone between Dante and Forese, with a commentary by Rossetti. Rossetti is clearly uncomfortable with this material, which, try as he might, he cannot make conform to his governing editorial construction of poems that “offer [...] a treasure of grace and variety in the formation of their metres.”31 He is simply perplexed by the tenzone, reading it as the material manifestation of a historical vendetta, and basing this on “Ubaldini in his Glossary to Barberino (1640)”, who, glossing “vendetta,” mentions Forese “sneer[ing] at Dante, who did not avenge his father Alighieri.”32 Rossetti finds little to praise in the tenzone, and is even forced to criticize his beloved Dante (although he maintains he is still a better poet than Forese): “The insults heaped on Dante have of course no weight, as coming from one who shows every sign of being both foul-mouthed and a fool. The two sonnets bearing Dante’s name [i.e., in the tenzone], if not less offensive than the others, are rather more pointed; but seem still very unworthy even of his least exalted mood.”33 Worse still is the fate of Cecco d’Ascoli, whose poem about Dante is judged unworthy of inclusion at all:

31 Rossetti, Early Italian Poets, vii. 32 Rossetti, Early Italian Poets, 437. The reference is to the Documenti d’amore di M. F. Barberino (Rome: Vitale Mascardi, 1640). 33 Rossetti, Early Italian Poets, 442.

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He [Cecco] was a narrow, discontented and self-sufficient writer; and his incongruous poem in sesta rima, called L’Acerba, contains various references to the poetry of Dante (whom he knew personally) as well as to that of Guido Cavalcanti, made chiefly in a supercilious spirit. These allusions have no poetical or biographical value whatever, so I need say no more of them or their author. And indeed perhaps the “Bicci” sonnets [the tenzone] are quite enough of themselves in the way of absolute trash.34

This, then, is the context that introduces the Boccaccio section, Part 2 of the appendix. The primary motivation for the inclusion of six sonnets of Boccaccio here, as before, is their relevance to Dante, and Rossetti explains that they must be placed in this marginal position due to the fact that they were written too late to be included in an anthology of “early poets”: “Several of the little-known sonnets of Boccaccio have reference to Dante, but being written in the generation which followed his, do not belong in the body of my second division. I therefore place three of them here, together with a few more specimens from the same poet.”35 Rossetti’s introduction to these sonnets is a marvellous statement that embodies the nineteenth-century Dantean reception of Boccaccio in nuce. This Boccaccio is valuable especially because of his veneration of Dante and the Dantean literary activity that arose from this love. His other works are otherwise uninteresting, but the fact that he was a source for Chaucer might be a further point of interest for the English audience to whom this book is addressed (and we should note that the works cited here are those which Rossetti’s brother William will translate for the Chaucer Society): There is nothing which gives Boccaccio a greater claim to our regard than the enthusiastic reverence with which he loved to dwell on the Commedia and on the memory of Dante, who died when he was seven years old. This is amply proved by his Life of the Poet and Commentary on the Poem, as well as by other passages in his writings both in prose and poetry. I cannot pretend to have achieved a knowledge of his (both to writer and reader) more arduous poetical undertakings, the Teseide, the Nimfale Fiesolano, &c: and indeed these belong to that class of works regarding which most men can feel equally certain that they never did read them and that they never

34 Rossetti, Early Italian Poets, 445. 35 Rossetti, Early Italian Poets, 446.

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will. However, the use of which Chaucer has made of the Teseide and Filostrato might alone induce us to regard them with some interest.

Rossetti then goes on to describe the three Dantean sonnets in more detail: The first of the three following sonnets relates to Boccaccio’s public reading and elucidation of Dante, which took place at Florence, by a decree of the state, in 1373. The second sonnet shows how the greatest minds of the generation which immediately succeeded Dante already paid unhesitating tribute to his political as well as poetical greatness. In the third sonnet, it is interesting to note the personal love and confidence with which Boccaccio could address the spirit of his mighty master, unknown to him in the flesh.36

The small sequence of six sonnets translated here is particularly revealing because it is essentially an editorial invention of Rossetti’s, and as such, betrays his underlying processes of compilation. The six poems do not exist as a discrete grouping anywhere in the Italian textual tradition, and therefore reflect only Rossetti’s perception of Boccaccio’s literary importance. To better position them within the thematic superstructure of the Early Italian Poets, Rossetti splits them into two groups of three, and invents a new English title for each poem. The first group are all explicitly concerned with Dante, while the second are conventional love lyrics framed in such a way as to suggest an imitation of Dante. The first of these sonnets, entitled by Rossetti “To one who had censured his public Exposition of Dante,” is one of the last poems of Boccaccio’s life, written in 1373 and numbered CXXIII in the modern critical edition.37 Boccaccio’s final elegiac sequence of four sonnets (CXXII–CXXV) have conventionally been figured as an expression of 36 Rossetti, Early Italian Poets, 446–7. 37 It is interesting to consider the placement of these poems in Rossetti’s source edition. At the end of his preface, he provides a list of editions used in the preparation of his translations (xii), and it seems likely that one of these was the source for his Boccaccio poems, the Raccolta di rime antiche toscane, 4 vols. (Palermo: Dalla tipografia di Giuseppe Assenzio, 1817). Vol. 4 includes an extensive Boccaccio section (5–164), comprising “Notizie istoriche,” and the poems, subdivided into their various verse forms, and also including poems that are integrated into his other works, such as the acrostic from the Amorosa visione, the poems from Day X of the

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regret for his vulgarization project of bringing literature to the masses, which stands in opposition to the Petrarchan template of poetic achievement.38 It was perhaps as a response to this trend that, in 1374, Boccaccio wrote the four sonnets accepting blame for his public lectures on the Commedia. They appear to be in response to criticism from a friend for having expounded a work of literature to a popular audience, and the tone is abject. In the first sonnet, he accepts his illness as a punishment from God for having debased the Muses: “S’io ho le Muse vilmente prostrate | nelle fornice del vulgo dolente, | e le lor parte occulte ho palesate | alla feccia plebeia scioccamente” (If I have vilely humiliated the Muses in the brothels of the wretched masses, and I have stupidly revealed their mysteries to the dregs of society; CXXII). In the second, Boccaccio imagines Dante weeping as a result of his actions: “Se Dante piange, dove ch’el si sia, | che li concetti del suo alto ingegno | aperti sieno stati al vulgo indegno, | come tu di’, della lettura mia” (If Dante weeps, wherever he may be, that the concepts of his lofty intellect have been laid open to the unworthy masses, as you say, by my reading; CXXIII). The third sonnet describes how Boccaccio has rejected his earlier vernacular output, while the final one describes these vernacular works setting sail in a boat where few may follow, in a clear reference to Dante’s invocatory maritime metaphor of Paradiso II. However, it is not clear whether Rossetti is entirely aware of the apologetic context of this group of poems; certainly he chooses to gloss over it and present the poem he has selected for translation as a defence rather than a selfexculpation via his invented title:

Decameron, the Argomenti to the Commedia, verse chapters of the Ameto, and an index of first lines. The six sonnets translated by Rossetti are all contained in the first section, “Sonetti,” although in a different order. 38 For the text of the four sonnets, see Rime, ed. Vittore Branca, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Branca (Milan: Mondadori, 1992), 5:1.95–6; for discussion of the debate about the late sonnets, see Padoan’s entry on “Boccaccio” in the Enciclopedia dantesca, ed. Giorgio Petrocchi et al. (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970–8), 1:645–50 (649). It seems hard to believe that Boccaccio is as devastated as he claims to be in these poems. The second sonnet, in particular, is problematic. If Dante weeps, he must subscribe to the theories of Petrarch and others about the superiority of Latin. These sonnets simply cannot be taken as Boccaccio’s final statements on Dante, poetry, and the “vulgo.” It is more likely that they merely represent a literary pose, assumed in response to a (specific?) irate acquaintance who had no liking for Dante, or that they express the humanistic contempt of the vulgar herd.

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I. To one who had censured his public Exposition of Dante. IF Dante mourns, there wheresoe’er he be, That such high fancies of a soul so proud Should be laid open to the vulgar crowd, (As, touching my Discourse, I’m told by thee,) This were my grievous pain; and certainly My proper blame should not be disavow’d; Though hereof somewhat, I declare aloud, Were due to others, not alone to me. False hopes, true poverty, and therewithal The blinded judgment of a host of friends, And their entreaties, made that I did thus. But of all this there is no gain at all Unto the thankless souls with whose base ends Nothing agrees that’s great or generous.39

Rossetti’s principles of translation practice mean that the particularly vicious/targeted nature of Boccaccio’s complaint are lost in his quest for English tail-rhymes: “soul so proud” | “vulgar crowd” lacks the precise correspondence found in Boccaccio’s “del suo alto ingegno | [...] al vulgo indegno,” in addition to losing the deliberate Dantean allusions in Boccaccio’s composition. It is now accepted that the second Boccaccio sonnet selected by Rossetti may actually be nothing of the sort. The poem, entitled “Inscription for a portrait of Dante,” first appeared in the 1477 Venice edition published by Wendolin de Spira, and was included in Henry Parker, Lord Morley’s translation of the De mulieribus, as discussed in chapter 2. II. Inscription for a portrait of Dante Dante Alighieri, a dark oracle Of wisdom and of art, I am; whose mind Has to my country such great gifts assign’d That men account my powers a miracle. My lofty fancy pass’d as low as Hell, As high as Heaven, secure and unconfined; And in my noble book doth every kind 39 Raccolta, IV, 12 (number VIII).

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Of earthly lore and heavenly doctrine dwell. Renownèd Florence was my mother, – nay, Stepmother unto her piteous son, Through sin of cursed slander’s tongue and tooth. Ravenna shelter’d me so cast away; My body is with her, – my soul with One For whom no envy can make dim the truth.40

The third “Dante” sonnet, entitled “To Dante in Paradise, after Fiammetta’s death,” is at least of secure Boccaccian authorship, and its deliberately Dantean setting, morbid fascination with the deceased beloved, allusions to the Petrarchan model, and implied construction of a pantheon of sorrowing abandoned poets is almost guaranteed to appeal to Rossetti’s tastes as poet and artist, and his self-figuration as a lover in this genre. Massèra has suggested that this sonnet forms part of a sequence of nine poems that may have been composed in imitation of the “in morte” group of poems in Petrarch’s Canzoniere, and there are manifold allusions also to the Commedia and other works in Boccaccio’s corpus.41 III. To Dante in Paradise, after Fiammetta’s death. Dante, if thou within the sphere of Love, As I believe, remain’st contemplating Beautiful Beatrice, whom thou didst sing Erewhile, and so wast drawn to her above; – Unless from false life true life thee remove So far that Love’s forgotten, let me bring One prayer before thee: for an easy thing This were, to thee whom I do ask it of. I know that where all joy doth most abound In the third Heaven, my own Fiammetta sees The grief which I have borne since she is dead. 40 Raccolta, IV, 62–3 (number CVIII). 41 “Questi [XCVIII] e gli otto seguenti sonetti ‘possiamo chiamare in morte a imitazione di quelli di Petrarca, come a imitazioni d’essi, forse e senza forse, furono composti’” (This [XCVIII] and the eight following sonnets “we may term in morte in imitation of those by Petrarch, whether they actually were or were not composed in imitation of them”), cited in Branca, Rime, 281n1. For the allusions in this poem, see the notes to it, Rime, 284.

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O pray her (if mine image be not drown’d In Lethe) that her prayers may never cease Until I reach her and am comforted.42

The Dantean trifecta is then followed (in a moment of crashingly symbolic Dantean symmetry) by three more poems by Boccaccio. If the selection of the first three is governed primarily by Rossetti’s Dantecompletist tendency, then the next three that follow them may have been chosen in order to respond to the volume’s overriding Vita Nuova theme (448–9), and also because they conform to his highly aestheticized view of Italian poetic and visual culture: I add three further examples of Boccaccio’s poetry, chosen for their beauty alone. Two of these relate to Maria d’Aquino, the lady whom, in his writings, he calls Fiammetta. The last has a playful charm very characteristic of the author of the Decameron; while its beauty of colour (to our modern minds, privileged to review the whole pageant of Italian Art,) might recall the painted pastorals of Giorgione.

The mention of the Decameron here is highly suggestive, and goes further to support the thesis that Rossetti could not help but see Boccaccio as an inferior, later practitioner of Italian culture. It is impossible to say how far this viewpoint is influenced by the popular reception of the Decameron in this period, but his dismissal of Boccaccio’s “medieval wit” in his appendix to Part 1 should not go unremembered. The title of the fourth poem, Of Fiammetta singing, shows the extent to which Rossetti is imposing his Dantean narrative onto Boccaccio. The title (like all the others) is an invention, since the presumed source edition merely presents Boccaccio’s poems with a number. Fiammetta is nowhere mentioned in the poem, nor in the poems that surround it in the edition; the poem does, however, mention a woman coming out of the woods to sit with others, in a similar vein to the final poem of his selection: Love steer’d my course, while yet the sun rode high, On Scylla’s waters to a myrtle-grove: The heaven was still and the sea did not move; Yet now and then a little breeze went by 42 Raccolta, IV, 38 (number LX).

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Stirring the tops of trees against the sky: And then I heard a song as glad as love, So sweet that never yet the like thereof Was heard in any mortal company. “A nymph, a goddess, or an angel sings Unto herself, within this chosen place, Of ancient loves”; so said I at that sound. And there my lady, ’mid the shadowings Of myrtle-trees, ’mid flowers and grassy space, Singing I saw, with others who sat round.43

The fifth poem in Rossetti’s selection, “Of his last sight of Fiammetta,” immediately precedes the “in morte” sequence in which the third Dante poem is found (XCVII in the modern numbering).44 The poem shows strong affinities with the Vita Nuova in both its subject matter and its formal allusions; and Rossetti is trying to fit it into a similar framework with his title.45 Indeed, the mini-Boccaccio selection presented here is predicated on similar principles as the Vita Nuova, with the emphasis on the poetic continuum (Boccaccio on Dante, just as Dante wrote about his poetic tradition), followed by the adoration, then anticipated loss, of the lady with her symbolic senhal: V. Of his last sight of Fiammetta. Round her red garland and her golden hair I saw a fire about Fiammetta’s head; Thence to a little cloud I watch’d it fade, Than silver or than gold more brightly fair; And like a pearl that a gold ring doth bear, Even so an angel sat therein, who sped Alone and glorious throughout heaven, array’d In sapphires and in gold that lit the air. Then I rejoiced as hoping happy things,

43 Rossetti, Early Italian Poets, 449; Raccolta, IV, 17 (number XVII). This poem is number IV in the modern critical edition, 34, and see also 211nn. Note that Rossetti’s “Scylla’s waters” is a rendering of “l’acque di Scilio” (the waters of Scilio) in the Raccolta (IV, 17); the modern edition reads instead “l’acque di Giulio” (the waters of Giulio), now understood to be a reference to Lake Lucrino (Rime, 211n2). 44 Branca, Rime, 83–4. 45 Branca has termed it a “visione annunciatrice della morte dell’amata” (prophetic vision of the death of the beloved): Rime, 280n1.

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Who rather should have then discern’d how God Had haste to make my lady all his own, Even as it came to pass. And with these stings Of sorrow, and with life’s most weary load I dwell, who fain would be where she is gone.46

The final, “Giorgione-esque” poem, entitled “Of three Girls and of their Talk,” is an interesting reframing of one of Boccaccio’s most famous lyrics “Intorno ad un fonte in un pratello,” the first poem in Branca’s critical edition.47 VI. Of three Girls and of their Talk By a clear well, within a little field Full of green grass and flowers of every hue, Sat three young girls, relating (as I knew) Their loves. And each had twined a bough to shield Her lovely face; and the green leaves did yield The golden hair their shadow; while the two Sweet colours mingled, both blown lightly through With a soft wind for ever stirr’d and still’d. After a little while one of them said, (I heard her,) “Think! If, ere the next hour struck, Each of our lovers should come here to-day, Think you that we should fly or feel afraid?” To whom the others answer’d, “From such luck A girl would be a fool to run away.”48

Strangely, Rossetti has removed one of the overtly stilnovist devices of Boccaccio’s poem, changing “tre angiolette” to “three young girls,” perhaps with the intention to reframe the poem in a more traditionally Decameronian or pastoral way. Dante Gabriel Rossetti thus played a small but significant part in the  mid-nineteenth-century English reception of Boccaccio’s “minor works.” Taken in its totality, his use of Boccaccio goes well beyond Leigh Hunt’s simple fact-finding translations into a more literarycritical direction, but despite the grace of some of his translated lines, 46 Rossetti, Early Italian Poets, 449–50; Raccolta, IV, 42 (number LXVII). 47 Branca, Rime, 33. 48 Raccolta, IV, 14 (number XII).

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there is still little sense of these works having an integral worth beyond their debt to and discussion of Dante. However, the contribution of his lesser-known brother William was equally, if not more, important. While for Dante Gabriel, Boccaccio was useful primarily as a source of information about Dante Alighieri and his circle, William focused on Boccaccio not as a derivative of Dante but as an author in his own right (albeit as a source for another great man, Geoffrey Chaucer).49 William’s first forays into translating Boccaccio may well be contemporaneous with his brother’s translations of the early Italian poets in the 1840s (as Dante Gabriel’s paratextual note seems to indicate), but they did not see publication until two decades later. His translations are generally characterized in most modest terms, and always humbly presented as the handmaidens to another’s endeavour. The first of these to be published is found in Frederick Furnivall’s 1871 volume Trial-Forewords to my Parallel-Text edition of Chaucer’s Minor Poems for the Chaucer Society (with a try to set Chaucer’s works in their right order of Time).50 Like so many of the individuals involved in the nineteenthand early twentieth-century reception of Boccaccio in English, Furnivall (1825–1910) was a semi-professional medievalist, who taught English and grammar at the Working Men’s College before dedicating himself full time to writing and textual editing.51 Furnivall considered himself a disciple of Ruskin, and was also on the fringes of pre-Raphaelite circles through his friendship with William Rossetti, but is especially remembered today for his founding of numerous literary and philological societies such as the Early English Text Society (founded 1864) and the Chaucer Society (1868). Furnivall and his societies were notably prolific, although later scholarship has not always been kind to either his idiosyncratic writing style or editorial practice. A more favourable assessment is provided by his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) biographer, who notes that “though Furnivall’s occasional attempts at literary criticism are mawkishly sentimental, his pioneering editorial achievements are so massive that they cannot be easily dismissed.”52 49 On William’s scholarly work, see Thirlwell, William and Lucy, 204–6. 50 Chaucer Society, Second Series, 6 (1871), reprinted 1888. 51 See William S. Peterson, “Furnivall, Frederick James,” in the ODNB. For a detailed analysis of Furnivall’s role in the development of the academic discipline of medieval English studies, see David Matthews, The Making of Middle English, 1765–1910 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 52 Peterson, “Furnivall.”

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William Rossetti’s translation of Boccaccio’s Teseida is almost silently inserted into Furnivall’s meditations on Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules in his Trial-Forewords. The translation is not highlighted or advertised anywhere in the prefatory or situating paratexts of the volumes, but merely noted after Furnivall’s almost-documentary reading of the dream vision: Chaucer then fell asleep, and dreamt that Aufrikan took him to a parkgate [...]. The poet hesitated to enter, but Aufrikan “shoofe” or shoved him in at the gates, and there he saw some glorious trees with everlasting leaves. [...] He also saw a garden, the description of which he englishes freely, or adapts, from stanzas 51–66 of the seventh book of Boccaccio’s Teseide, of which stanzas a literal translation by our good friend Mr William Michael Rossetti follows.53

William Rossetti’s translation is relatively short but, in terms of miseen-page, is presented in an innovative way. The source and target texts are presented as a parallel text, with Boccaccio’s text on the verso of the opening and Chaucer’s poem on the recto.54 Each stanza is numbered, and they are arranged so that they can be seen to correspond (60–7). Rossetti (we presume) also offers a number of footnotes that provide other sources, manuscript variants, and comments about the way in which Chaucer has modified the source material in his English rendering (e.g., “In comparing the succeeding stanzas of Boccaccio with those of Chaucer, note the transpositions which the latter has introduced in the sequence of stanzas”).55 This is the first instance of this kind of visual presentation – and indeed comparative function – being applied to any translation of Boccaccio’s works, and as an editorial template for the treatment of Boccaccio as a source for Chaucer, it is still in use today.56 The disposition and mise-en-page of the two brothers’ Boccaccio translations is therefore highly revealing about the different uses and functions to which these two comparably small translations were intended 53 54 55 56

Furnivall, Trial-Forewords, 59. The whole sequence is only eight pages long (four parallel-text openings). Furnivall, Trial-Forewords, 64n1. For example, this format is followed in the new parallel-text edition of Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Stephen A. Barney (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), where ApRoberts and Bruni’s translation faces the text of the Troilus. (This is in fact the first facing English translation since Rossetti’s nineteenth-century Boccaccio translations.)

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to be put. In Dante Gabriel’s edition, Boccaccio appears only in the appendices, a marginal figure subsumed to the greatness of its primary subject, Dante. William’s translation (although not highlighted as his work in the front matter of the volume) is found in the main text of the book, albeit presented strictly in relation to another author, Chaucer. The dissemination routes of the two texts also demonstrate a fundamental divergence in intended audience and artistic purpose. Dante Gabriel’s book is directed towards a non-specialist audience, interested in early Italian literary culture but with no taste for scholarly notes and every taste for having the material remediated in a completely domesticated Victorian English form.57 His brother’s translation is published under the auspices of a learned society, with scholarly notes, with details of manuscript variants and an attempt at textual editing (even if Furnivall’s philological practices have been surpassed by later standards). Although William’s text is presented in parallel to Chaucer’s text, his domesticating tendencies are at least as advanced as his brother’s, and perhaps more so, since his translation is made purely in the service of a second-order English rendering of parts of Boccaccio’s Teseida. In Furnivall’s Trial-Forewords there is no information about the specific Italian source text used. All names are anglicized, although the Italian original is sometimes given in square brackets, and Rossetti’s rendering sometimes shows evidence of a cross-contamination from Chaucer’s target text, as exemplified in this stanza:58 And then she saw in that pass Grace [Leggiadria], With Adorning [Adornezza] and Affability, And the wholly estrayed Courtesy; And she saw the Arts that have power To make others perforce do folly, In their aspect much disfigured. The Vain Delight of our form She saw standing along with Gentilesse. (§55) 57 Discussing Rossetti’s translations of Cavalcanti in the same book, Preda has noted his overbearing domesticating tendencies: “The Italian of the thirteenth century, with its poetic possibilities, musical melodiousness, and linguistic nuances, was fully erased in favour of ‘modern’ Victorian English. A second effect derives from the first: the complete erasure of Italian, which made these poems read like modern Victorian poems, made the translations natural and transparent for Rossetti’s contemporaries” (“D.G. Rossetti and Ezra Pound,” 221). 58 Pp. 62–3.

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Compare the Chaucer: Tho was I war of Pleasaunce a-non ryght, And of Aray, and Lust, & Curtesie, And of the Craft that can & hath the myght To don be-fore a wight to don folye, – Disfigurat was she, I nyl nat lye; – And by hem self vnder an ok, I gesse, Saw I Delyt that stod with Gentilesse. (§32)

After this prototype exercise, William Rossetti would soon go on to produce a much larger (but still partial) translation of Boccaccio’s Filostrato for the Chaucer Society, published in 1873.59 As is obvious from the auspices under which it emerged, this translation was produced with the single and restricted aim of illuminating one of Chaucer’s works, all clearly explained on the title page of the volume: Chaucer’s Troylus and Cryseyde (from the Harl. MS 3943) compared with Boccaccio’s Filostrato translated by Wm. Michael Rossetti. (Those lines of the Filostrato that Chaucer translated or adapted are englisht here: those which Chaucer did not use – more than half – are only summarized.) London: published for the Chaucer Society by N. Trübner & Co., 57 & 59, Ludgate Hill. MDCCCLXXIII60

The primary text in this volume is chronologically the secondary text, Chaucer’s retelling of Boccaccio’s original, which is to be “compared with Boccaccio,” affirmed further by Rossetti’s choosing to transcribe here a particular manuscript, the Harley 3943. The function of Rossetti’s translated text in this edition – to translate those parts of Boccaccio that Chaucer used – therefore governs the shape of the target text and those parts of it that are included here. Rossetti, or his editor, is only interested in those parts of Boccaccio that have a direct and measurable linguistic correlation with Chaucer’s Troylus and Cryseyde. While it does not exclude entirely the other sections of the text, a summary of their gist is apparently enough for the target readership.

59 On the Chaucer Society, see Matthews, The Making of Middle English, 171–5. 60 Publications of the Chaucer Society, part 1, first series, vol. 44 (1875); part 2, first series, vol. 65 (1883).

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As in the previous translation by William Rossetti, the layout of the page and the parallel text placement underline the fact that Boccaccio is translated in service to Chaucer (figure 20). In physical terms, the very orientation of the volume is reimagined in order to further serve this function: instead of the normal vertical orientation of the book, the edition is presented horizontally and bound down the short left-hand-side rather than along its length. This “landscape” format allows two columns of text on each facing page, permitting the comparison of eight stanzas at a time of source text – in translation – and Chaucer’s version, a very practical solution to the extended comparison of two extensive texts. It should be noted as well, perhaps, that Chaucer’s text is given in its entirety, while Boccaccio’s is presented in a rather unbalanced form, where the editorial focus moves from close-up (in the passages that Chaucer reworks) to long-distance shot (the descriptions of the unused passages). This translation, despite its self-evident lacunae, is clearly a prestigious undertaking, although its prestige and value as a project and artefact is figured in a different way from, say, the privately printed de luxe illustrated editions of the Decameron of a decade and a half later. Here, the object speaks not only of the investment of the governing institution in publishing this work, but also of that of the translator. Rossetti evidences his researches spatially through the disposition of the two texts to each other and by careful footnoting of variants. Furthermore, he authorizes his credentials as a translator first through the rigour of his translation, and second through his authorial glosses (again in the footnotes) about his scholarly practice, source editions, and critical issues arising from his work.61 The whole presentation conspires to present a new model of the Boccaccio translator: one who is a scholar, rather than an artist (as performed so energetically by his

61 For example, Rossetti names his source editions of the Filostrato, and highlights his reason for using one over the other to settle a particular reading of the text: “This item is not given in the edition of the Filostrato to which I mostly confine myself – Opere Volgari di Giovanni Boccaccio, corrette sui testi a penna. Vol. 13, Firenze, per Ig. Moutier, 1831. It is from another edition, Il Filostrato, Poema di Gio. Boccaccio, ora per la prima volta dato in luce. Parigi, presso Franc. Ambr. Didot il Maggiore. 1789. This lastnamed edition was produced by Fra Luigi Baroni, and is portentously slipshod. I have to thank Mr Henry Bradshaw, of King’s College, Cambridge (among other courtesies) for warning me against it. Many of its variations have (it seems) no authority whatever: but, in the present instance, it would appear that Baroni followed some MS. corresponding with that which Chaucer consulted, while the very superior edition of Moutier has followed some other MS. to a different effect” (8n1).

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brother Dante Gabriel) or the professional (hack) translator of the mid-century Decameron, such as W.K. Kelly. Only John Payne, out of the  nineteenth-century Decameron translators, attempts a similar selffashioning through his paratexts, although he could also be seen as akin to Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his deliberate archaicism and medievalist fantasies as the founder of the Villon Society. Despite his attention to philological detail, William Rossetti presents himself as an interested amateur, who is bringing his knowledge of Italian to bear on a tricky critical task, and who, in the closing passage of his extensively scholarly “Prefatory Remarks,” humbly offers this work to help properly qualified Chaucerians: My personal business, however, would have been confined to such points as bear directly upon the relation of the Troylus to the Filostrato. Leaving, therefore, all else to the accomplished Chaucerian scholars who have undertaken the work, I may here appropriately conclude my ancillary part in it – only adding the account which Lydgate, in his Troy Book, gives of the Troylus and Cryseyde. (ix)

Rossetti’s pose of modest leave-taking is quite outweighed by the amount of scholarly detail contained in these prefatory remarks. In his role as translator-editor he amasses much detail about the two texts and their relation to each other, as well as information about versions of the tale antecedent to Boccaccio. Like his brother, he is also refreshingly forthcoming about his own translation practice and selection criteria, as well as those of the translator-subject of this book, Chaucer himself: For the first time, readers of Chaucer are now enabled to judge of the precise relation borne by the Troylus and Cryseyde of that supreme poet to the Filostrato of Boccaccio – which has long been known to be, to a large extent, its original. I have furnished an exact translation of all the lines of the Filostrato adapted, with more or less verbal closeness, by Chaucer; also a summary of those portions which were not so adapted. The passages of the Troylus which are wholly the work of the Englishman, being unaccompanied by any rendering from the Italian, speak for themselves. It will be perceived that Chaucer is, in many instances, a very accurate translator; in others, he has paraphrased without strictly translating. The details of diversity are full of interest to the minute student. (iii)

Rossetti thus understands his task as exactly analogous to that of Chaucer’s: to translate into English only those parts of the Filostrato

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that Chaucer thought to reuse. However, Rossetti proceeds from a “zero-sum” position, in that lines of Chaucer can only be derivative (“adapted [...] by Chaucer” from Boccaccio) or original (“the passages [...] which are wholly the work of the Englishman”). In the cultural atmosphere of late nineteenth-century medieval studies, dominated by the pursuit of Quellenforschung, the idea of synthesis and remaking was yet to be brought to the fore; in this climate every borrowing from Boccaccio is a loss from Chaucer, and hence can be quantifiable in numerical terms: The Filostrato contains 5704 lines: the Troylus is much longer, 8246 lines.[1] The difference, 2542 lines, must be counted entirely to the credit of Chaucer. Out of the 5704 lines of Boccaccio, about 2730 have been utilized by Chaucer, leaving 2974 not so utilized. The English poet, less diffuse, has compressed the 2730 lines of the Italian into 2583: hence we obtain the following result: Total of lines in the Troylus 8246 Adapted from the Filostrato, 2730 lines, condensed into 2583 Balance due to Chaucer alone 5663 This balance is considerably more than double the number of lines as condensed from Boccaccio. It may, therefore, in general terms, be said that something less than a third of the Troylus is taken directly from the Filostrato, while more than two-thirds are Chaucer’s own. Of course, however, even in these two-thirds Chaucer’s poem often follows the same general current as Boccaccio’s; and some moderate deduction should be made for lines for which the Englishman is indebted to other authors – Boëthius, Dante, and Petrarca, in especial. (iii)62

Despite his number-crunching tendencies, Rossetti makes some penetrating observations in passing about Boccaccio and Chaucer’s respective versification and the effect of moving from one to the other:

62 This sum is also the occasion for Rossetti to get a dig in at a fellow London scholar, Professor Morley of University College, whose calculation of the total number of lines differs by five from his own (iiin1). Morley will himself get into the Boccaccio business in the 1880s, publishing selections from the Decameron as number 15 in his Universal Library series (The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio: Including Forty of Its Hundred Novels [London: Routledge, 1884]).

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The Filostrato is written in the octave metre termed by the Italian “ottava rima” (the measure of Byron’s Don Juan). Boccaccio is understood to have invented this excellent narrative metre [...]. The Troylus and Cryseyde (I need not say) is written in stanzas of seven lines each – an exquisitely melodious and satisfying metrical form, too seldom employed: the natural result is that, when Chaucer takes successive lines from Boccaccio, he mostly gets the matter into a rather smaller space. (iii)

In the rest of his prefatory remarks, Rossetti will cover, in the same eye-watering detail, a discussion of the divergence between source and target text in terms of the plot; the pre-Boccaccio origins of the tale, with bibliography; evidence that Chaucer thought Petrarch and not Boccaccio the source; Lydgate’s description of this work of Boccaccio’s as “Trophe” and his not seeming to know it was Boccaccio’s; and a closing peroration on Troylus and Cryseyde as “perhaps the most beautiful narrative poem, of considerable length, in the English language.”63 Rossetti’s automatic focus on “originality” means that he is forced to issue a virtual apology for Chaucer’s magpie tendencies, but he nonetheless stresses Chaucer’s greatness in creating one of the greatest English poems, even if he got the idea from someone else: That Chaucer is not the sole person entitled to the credit of its invention and narration has long been known, is in these pages demonstrated with full detail, and must be allowed for in anything that we say or that others feel on the subject. But even after this has been admitted, our obligation to Chaucer remains where it was: we still have to thank him for presenting English readers with one of the most delightful of English or of possible poems – an “entire and perfect chrysolite.”64

As an additional authorizing strategy, Rossetti now uses another translator of Boccaccio, contemporary with Chaucer, to bridge the movement from his preface to the translation itself. The choice of John Lydgate is particularly fitting, because as we (and Rossetti) know, Lydgate not only translated Boccaccio’s De casibus but also wrote about Chaucer’s Troylus in his Troy Book, an extract from which is given in Rossetti’s book at pages x–xi. Immediately afterwards, the text proper begins, with the two texts presented in parallel, the translated text of 63 P. viii. 64 P. ix.

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Boccaccio’s source text in the left-hand column and Chaucer in the right-hand one. The page layout is elegant and logical, and an attempt is made to present corresponding sections in the same way across both columns. On the first page, both texts are given a title in large bolded black-letter type at the top of their respective columns, with some explanatory situating material presented immediately below. On the verso side (the Filostrato), Rossetti presents his editorial and organizational principles (figure 20): The summary of those parts of the poem that have not been adapted by Chaucer is enclosed in square brackets. In this summary, the marks of quotation “ ” are given when I translate a passage literally; the marks ““ ”’ when I so translate a passage that forms a speech; the marks ‘ ” when I summarize (without exactly translating) a speech – W. M. R. (1)

Thus, although Rossetti does not translate the entirety of Boccaccio’s work, it is possible at least to view its constituent parts and the points at which Chaucer’s text converges and diverges. As in his previous, shorter, translation of the Teseida, each stanza in each text is numbered, and the lines are also numbered at the outside margins. This prototype scholarly edition thus represents an entirely new type of English engagement with Boccaccio, albeit one defined by a deliberate attempt to illuminate the English canon, but one that will nonetheless become more prevalent as the discipline of academic Italian Studies develops over the next century or so. Perhaps it is now time for a re-evaluation of the work of the brother of Dante Gabriel Rossetti as another great mediator of Italian medieval culture, whose contribution in visual terms to Boccaccio’s nineteenth-century reception is already well known (he was the model for the figure of Boccaccio’s character Lorenzo in Millais’s Isabella), but whose foundational work in bringing scholarly versions of the minor works to the British English literature establishment is, as yet, less recognized. Boccaccio and the Academy: The Case of the Trattatello The enduring nineteenth-century interest in Boccaccio-dantista finds its most remarkable expression in the cluster of different translations and editions of Boccaccio’s Trattatello in laude di Dante at the turn of the century. Boccaccio’s treatise has had a long and complicated textual history. The first redaction of this text is thought to have been composed

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sometime between 1350 and 1355, and Boccaccio initially gave it a Latin title: DE ORIGINE, VITA, STUDIIS ET MORIBUS VIRI CLARISSIMI DANTIS ALIGERII FLORENTINI, POETE ILLUSTRIS, ET DE OPERIBUS COMPOSITIS AB EODEM, INCIPIT FELICITER (Concerning the origin, life, studies, and habits of the most illustrious man Dante Alighieri of Florence, renowned poet, and those works composed by him; here begins happily the book).65 The first redaction of Boccaccio’s text has been preserved in an autograph manuscript (Toledo, Biblioteca Capitular, MS Zelada, 104. 6), where it introduces an anthology of Dante’s vernacular writings, and thus it can be shown that Boccaccio probably conceived of his treatise as an introduction to Dante’s work rather than as a free-standing, independent work.66 Boccaccio then revised the text twice more during the 1360s, and these subsequent redactions are known as the Compendia.67 Probably as a result of the influence of Petrarch, Boccaccio removed the Latin title and those statements which framed Dante’s intellectual contribution as a “proto”-humanist for the second (and shortest) version of the biography;68 rather than stressing Dante’s classical learning, the new text presented instead a popular life of a poet of the people, with all the inferred inferiority of status that this might suggest.69 The third redaction restored some elements from the first redaction with some rewriting, and is thought to be the final, definitive, version. Given the involved textual history of this text (and the undeniable unwieldiness of its first 65 References to the original text are taken from the critical edition established by Pier Giorgio Ricci, Trattatello in laude di Dante, in Branca, Tutte le opere (Milan: Mondadori, 1974), 3:423–538 (437). The textual history of the Trattatello is discussed in the notes to Ricci’s edition: Tutte le opere, 3:848–56; there is a summary in English of recent literature on its textual history in Vincenzo Zin Bollettino’s English translation, The Life of Dante (Trattatello in laude di Dante), Garland Library of Medieval Literature, series B, 40 (New York & London: Garland, 1990), xxi–xxvii. 66 See Zin Bollettino, Life of Dante, xxiv. 67 The autograph manuscript of the so-called third redaction is also extant (Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Chigiano L. V. 176), although Ricci and others have argued that the third redaction may well be the second: Ricci, Trattatello, 430. On the physical features of the autograph manuscripts of the Trattatello, see Rhiannon Daniels, “Reading and Meaning: The Reception of Boccaccio’s Teseida, Decameron, and De mulieribus claris to 1520,” doctoral diss., University of Leeds, 2003, 131–46. 68 Todd Boli makes a strong argument that the Trattatello was in fact conceived as a defence of Dante in Petrarchan terms in his article “Boccaccio’s Trattatello in laude di Dante, or Dante Resartus,” Renaissance Quarterly, 41 (1988), 389–412. 69 Ricci terms it an “elogio popolare di un poeta popolare” (a popular eulogy of a popular poet): Trattatello, 428.

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title), it is now generally referred to as either the Vita di Dante, or the Trattatello in laude di Dante, after Boccaccio’s own description of it in the Esposizioni (“scrissi in sua laude un trattatello”; “I have […] written a brief treatise in praise of him”).70 In English, the Trattatello has always been characterized as a “Life,” and thus its connotations as a “treatise in praise of Dante” have generally escaped the anglophone reading public, as has its original function as a prefatory work intended to accompany an anthology of Dante’s writings. The later nineteenth-century interest in Dante, in combination with the institutionalization of Dante – and Italian – studies in the same period, however, led to this unprecedented outbreak of translations of the same text on both sides of the Atlantic. No fewer than four translations of the Trattatello were made and published in Great Britain and America within six years of each other, with further editions appearing up until the 1920s. The first (partial) English translation of the text, by Philip H. Wicksteed, appeared in 1898; this was followed in 1900 by a translation by George Rice Carpenter in a de luxe edition for the Grolier Club of New York, and in 1901 by another new translation by James Robinson Smith. Wicksteed then revised his provisional translation of the text, and a new version was published in two different formats in 1904, with further reprints in the King’s Classics series and a private American press in 1922. It has recently been reissued by Oneworld Classics in the UK.71 No further translations of Boccaccio’s text would then appear until eighty-five years later, with Vincenzo Zin Bollettino’s 1990 translation, and a new translation by J.H. Nichols for Hesperus was published in 2002. 70 Giovanni Boccaccio, Esposizioni sopra la Comedia, ed. Giorgio Padoan, in Branca, Tutte le opere, Accessus, 6:36; translation taken from Boccaccio’s Expositions on Dante’s Comedy, trans. Michael Papio (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 44. 71 The editions are as follows: A Provisional Translation of the Early Lives of Dante and of his Poetical Correspondence with Giovanni del Virgilio, trans. Philip H. Wicksteed (Hull: privately printed for the translator by Elsom & Co., 1898); A Translation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Life of Dante, with an introduction and a note on the portraits of Dante, trans. G.R. Carpenter (New York: The Grolier Club of the City of New York, 1900); The Earliest Lives of Dante: Translated from the Italian of Giovanni Boccaccio and Lionardo Bruni Aretino, trans. James Robinson Smith (New York: Holt, 1901); The Early Lives of Dante, trans. Philip H. Wicksteed (London: Moring, 1904); The Life of Dante, translated by Philip Henry Wicksteed (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1904); The Life of Dante: Giovanni Boccaccio’s encomium on Dante or “Trattatello in laude di Dante” (San Francisco: John Henry Nash, 1922); Life of Dante, trans. Philip Henry Wicksteed, rev. William Chamberlain (Richmond: Oneworld Classics, 2009).

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Nothing could throw into sharper relief Boccaccio’s minor status in this period than this dedicated translation activity in the service of another master, an impression that is accentuated by the rather marginal status of the translators themselves. Moreover, each edition is particularly revealing about the translators’ attempts to incorporate Dante into their various institutional frameworks, with the effect that this cluster of books can be seen to express a dialogue (and possibly some tension) between the emerging discipline of Italian Studies in Britain and in the Ivy League colleges. The pedagogical function of these translations is paramount.72 As seems typical of Boccaccio’s fate in his nineteenth-century translations, these four translations are the work of men of considerable intellectual gifts, whose focus is nonetheless not on Boccaccio but on Dante. Indeed, as a further injustice, their minor status is thrown into even starker relief when seen in the light of their more illustrious contemporaries. The English translator, Wicksteed, lectures on Dante, but in the University Extension Scheme and therefore outside the established degree programs; the two American translators have studied as undergraduates at Harvard and Yale but are not admitted to the faculty. They are associated with the great scholars in the great universities, but they themselves do not go on to become famous professors and illustrious Dantists (with the arguable exception of the polymath, Wicksteed). But then, the status of the translators is highly revealing of the cultural field in which they were operating; why would the illustrious Dantists of Oxford and Harvard translate anything as marginal as Boccaccio’s treatise on Dante, when they could be off translating the great man himself?73 72 For a discussion of translation and teaching, see Venuti, “Translation and the Pedagogy of Literature,” College English, 58.3 (1996), 327–44. 73 For example, the “Cantabrigian triad, Longfellow, Lowell, and Norton,” the legendary professors who lectured on Dante at Harvard College, each translated major parts of Dante’s oeuvre in this period: Longfellow and Lowell the Commedia and Norton the Vita Nuova: Angelina La Piana, Dante’s American Pilgrimage: A Historical Survey of Dante Studies in the United States 1800–1944 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), vii. Paget Toynbee, the equally legendary Oxford Dantist, is responsible for the (still well-respected) editing and translation of the Epistolae. La Piana’s study provides a useful introduction to the subject, with chapters on the translations of Lowell, Longfellow, and Norton, as well as valuable pointers on the development of the discipline of Italian studies in the United States. A contemporary evocation of the world of the 1890s Dantist can be found in Theodore W. Koch, Dante in America: A Historical and Biographical Study (Boston: Ginn and Co. for the Dante Society, 1896), reprinted in Dante Studies, 118 (2000), 7–56.

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The first of these translations was made by Philip Henry Wicksteed (1844–1927), an English Unitarian minister and economist whose career portfolio also included stints as a lecturer in the university extension programs and as a translator who translated from Greek, Dutch, Italian, and Latin.74 Wicksteed was born in Leeds and educated in Wales and London, studying first at University College and then Manchester New College of London University. Although his main occupation was as a minister, he lectured and wrote extensively on Dante, Aquinas, and Aristotle throughout his life.75 Wicksteed is nowadays still remembered as an English Dantist, but at the time was positioned outside the scholarly establishment. His academic formation is directly derived from an alternative pedagogical tradition of Nonconformist Protestant dissent in England, and indeed directed to a different audience than that found in the ancient universities, a fact highlighted by his biographer, C.H. Herford: Philip Henry Wicksteed was a man who deeply and lastingly impressed a large number of minds, from the simplest to the most eminent, yet won no corresponding recognition in the general mind of contemporary England. He occupied none of the points of vantage which catch the eye and secure the monstrarier digito more easily than many kinds of solid service. He made no attempt to enter the avenues which often lead less remarkable men to wide reputations. Through the greater part of his working years he trod the unpretending paths of the Extension Lecturer and the Unitarian minister. [...] Qualified hearers recognized that he had important things to say; but a wider reputation was discounted by the fact that these were addressed to wholly different audiences, and concerned seemingly unrelated provinces of reality.76

74 For a brief biography of Wicksteed, see his entry by Ian Steedman in the ODNB and his biography by C.F. Herford, Philip Henry Wicksteed: His Life and Work (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1931). 75 His contribution to scholarship was recognized by the awarding of honorary degrees from the universities of Leeds and Manchester in 1915 and 1919. 76 Herford, Philip Henry Wicksteed, xxix. In fact, Nonconformists were excluded from the ancient universities in England until 1871, and so Wicksteed could never have obtained access to the establishment as embodied in the Oxford Dantists. Instead, he too emerged from the London University stable, as did the Rossetti brothers and, later, Israel Gollancz.

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Wicksteed almost seems born to be a translator of Boccaccio, since his own biography reflects in some way Boccaccio’s own unshowy career as priest and lecturer. Comparisons with Boccaccio’s own Esposizioni project are not too belaboured: Wicksteed’s first course was on Dante, and the extension scheme was itself designed to bring expert knowledge to the masses, “literally to ‘extend’ the teaching of the universities, to serve up some of the crumbs from the university tables, in a portable and nutritious form, for some of the multitude who had no chance of sitting there.”77 Indeed, Wicksteed seems to have taken the stage both as a lecturer and as a preacher, not unlike Boccaccio himself: “For him it was a ‘pulpit-,’ as well as a ‘university-’ extension; he wore academic as little as clerical garb, but he held spellbound audiences which became in reality congregations, by a fusion of documented scholarship unusual in any pulpit with a prophetic fire rare in any university.”78 (This parallel is certainly lost on Wicksteed’s biographer, as he fails to mention his subject’s two translations of Boccaccio’s Trattatello anywhere in his book: proof, if any further proof were needed, of the continued invisibility of Boccaccio to men of letters of a Dantean persuasion.)79 Wicksteed’s career as a Dante lecturer certainly informs the material features of this first translation of the Trattatello, which appears as one of the lives included in his A Provisional Translation of the Early Lives of Dante and of his poetical correspondence with Giovanni del Virgilio (Hull: Printed for the Translator by Elsom & Co., Market-place, Hull, 1898). A note on the verso of the title page confirms that the translation was made precisely for this purpose: “This provisional translation of the Early Lives of Dante, and of his correspondence with Giovanni del Virgilio, is not published, but may be had from the Secretaries of the University Extension Centres; or from Miss Wicksteed, Bix Bottom Farm, Henley-on-Thames, for 2/2, prepaid in stamps or P.O.” A further

77 Herford, Philip Henry Wicksteed, 90. Wicksteed lectured in the extension programs of several universities, Oxford, Cambridge, London, Liverpool, and Manchester; classes were held not in the institutions themselves but in halls around the country. From the list of his classes provided in his biography, he does not ever seem to have lectured on Boccaccio. 78 Herford, Philip Henry Wicksteed, 90. In fact, Wicksteed’s first lectures on Dante, a series of six successive sermons on the subject, were given from the pulpit of his own church in 1879 (263–4). 79 The Boccaccio translations appear under their collective titles of “The Early Lives of Dante” in the bibliography.

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leaf, preserved and bound at the end of the volume, provides details of further works that may be of use to Wicksteed’s students: The Editor of this Volume has prepared, for the use of his pupils, provisional translations of the De Monarchia, the Political Letters, and the essential portions of Boccaccio’s Life of Dante, together with Leonardo Bruni’s Life and other matter. These translations have not been published, but as it might be convenient to some readers of this work to possess them, the Editor will be happy to forward them to any address on receiving Stamps or P.O. for the amounts given below. ADDRESS – Philip H. Wicksteed, Sydenham Farm, Tetsworth, Oxon.

(The De Monarchia is priced at 1s., 8d, the Letters at 7d, and the Early Biographies at 2s., 2d.)80 The modest origins of this book are borne out by its pink paper wrapper and self-publication, but as will be shown, this translation will soon be elevated via the process of republication in more prestigious imprints and series. The book contains four discrete sections, of which the Boccaccio “Life” is the longest and most extensive. Part 1 is “From Villani’s ‘Florentine Chronicle.’ Book ix §136. [Concerning the poet Dante Alighieri, of Florence]”; Part 2 is Boccaccio’s “Life of Dante”; Part 3 is “Lionardo Bruni Aretino Life of Dante”; and the fourth and final part is the “Correspondence with Giovanni del Virgilio,” comprising the four eclogues they exchanged.81 Although Wicksteed accords a much greater importance to Boccaccio as Dantist than any previous anglophone scholar by the generous amount of space he allows to this work, his focus is still clearly Dante. The emphasis is always on the biography of Dante, rather than Boccaccio’s own disquisitions on related subjects. The unity and integrity of Boccaccio’s text are ultimately dispensable, and Wicksteed therefore states that he has made some cuts to better serve his own purpose in a prefatory note on the verso of the title page:

80 The copy consulted is held in the John Rylands University Library of the University of Manchester, classmark Deansgate R17182. 81 Wicksteed, Provisional Lives, 5–8 (5); 9–72; 73–96 (73); 97–112. Egloge, ed. Enzo Cecchini, in Opere minori, ed. Domenico De Robertis and Gianfranco Contini (Milan: Ricciardi, 1984), 2:647–89.

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Certain disquisitions, inserted by Boccaccio in his Life of Dante, which contain no biographical material and have no bearing upon any disputed points in Dante’s character, have been omitted. Notice of these omissions is always given.82

Typically, even Wicksteed’s cuts are well documented with short summaries of the excised material; the sections omitted are (in his formulations) chapters VII, “In reproach of the Florentines”; IX, “Digression concerning Poesy”; X, “Of the difference there is between Poesy and Theology”; XI, “Of the laurel granted to poets”; and XVII, “Explanation of the dream of Dante’s mother, and conclusion.”83 Wicksteed follows the first redaction in his translation, and divides the text into seventeen chapters, a structural decision that will endure for all subsequent English translations of the text until the present day, despite the fact that the long-standing critical edition of the text – Pier Giorgio Ricci’s 1974 edition in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio – presents it as continuous prose.84 In addition, one of the most characteristic features of Wicksteed’s translation – and one again perpetuated through all subsequent English translations – is the presence of chapter titles for each sections. These chapter titles derive in fact from the source text for Wicksteed’s translation, the 1888 edition prepared by Macrì-Leone, which is unacknowledged in the first 1898 edition of his translation but mentioned in his 1904 revised version.85 Interestingly (and perhaps not surprisingly, given the blithe authority that Boccaccio translators have

82 Wicksteed, Provisional Lives, 10. 83 The summaries are as follows: chap. VII (46): “In reproach of the Florentines. Contains the suggestion that Florence should petition Ravenna to allow Dante’s remains to be brought back; with the expression of belief that the request would not be granted” (§§92–109 in critical edition); chaps. IX–XI: “Digression concerning Poesy. Contains theories as to the origin of Idolatry and the indebtedness of the Pagan poets to Scriptural tradition” (53); chap. X: “Of the difference there is between Poesy and Theology. Contains hints on the allegorical interpretation of the Pagan poets and the Scriptures” (53); chap. XI: “Of the laurel granted to poets” (53) (§§128–62); and chap. XVII (71): “Explanation of the dream of Dante’s mother, and conclusion. Contains an elaborate allegorical exposition of the dream given in §II.3; and then concludes as below” (§§205–28). 84 For more detail on the source texts and structures of the various translations, see my review article in Heliotropia, 2.2 (2004). Zin Bollettino, Life of Dante, adjusts the divisions into fifteen chapters but maintains their Wicksteed-derived titles. 85 The Early Lives of Dante (London: Moring, 1904), 15; Giovanni Boccaccio, Vita di Dante Alighieri, poeta fiorentino, ed. Francesco Macrì-Leone (Florence: Sansoni, 1888).

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historically brought to their task), none of the translators makes any mention of these explicit editorial interventions on their part. The decision to divide the text into chapters and title them is understandable, in that it allows the editor or translator to organize the text by imposing an order and interpretational frame onto Boccaccio’s writing. However, although the “text” is the same, the divisions and titles do not exist in any of the autograph manuscripts of the three redactions of the text, and it is certain that Boccaccio would have included such paratextual directives as rubrics or titles here, as in his other works, if he had intended to structure the text in this way. This nineteenth-century editorial intervention should be seen instead as an overt attempt to force Boccaccio’s treatise into the rather different generic constraints of the biographical novel, a choice governed in essence by the dominant scholarly interest in Dante and not Boccaccio. The second translation of the Trattatello was a very different kind of book indeed. Published by the fine press of the Grolier Club of New York, it was a large-format, limited edition of Boccaccio’s biography, and a deliberate attempt to ennoble Dante through this particular luxury object, as seen even in its titular construction: A Translation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Life of Dante, with an introduction and a note on the portraits of Dante. The translator, George Rice Carpenter (1863–1909), had been a pupil of Charles Norton’s at Harvard University, and in his youth was very involved in Cambridge Dante circles: a previous winner of the prize for the best undergraduate essay on Dante by a Harvard student in 1888, he had also edited the “Documents Concerning Dante’s Public Life” and Latham’s translation of Dante’s Latin letters for the Report of the Cambridge Dante Society.86 Carpenter’s translation was the first “complete” version of the text, as he himself points out in his introduction: The definitive edition, the text of which is followed in this translation, was published in 1888 by a brilliant young Italian scholar, the late Dr MacrìLeone. In spite of its interest and value, however, the Life of Dante has not, so far as I know, been translated, as a whole into any language. The French version of Reynard is based on the shorter and less important form of the

86 On Carpenter as dantista, see Jefferson Butler Fletcher’s obituary in the Twentyeighth Annual Report of the Dante Society (1909), 7–9; see also Theodore W. Koch, Dante in America: A Historical and Biographical Study (Boston: Ginn for the Dante Society, 1896), 118, 126–7; and La Piana, Dante’s American Pilgrimage, 215n2.

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Life, and the accurate and graceful version by Mr. P.H. Wicksteed, in his Provisional Translation of the Early Lives of Dante (1898), omits a number of the less essential chapters. The accompanying translation, therefore, is believed to be the first that is complete – not only in English but in any language.87

The Translation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Life of Dante was printed on Italian hand-made paper in a limited run of three hundred copies, with a further three copies printed on vellum, and as such was worlds apart from Wicksteed’s small edition, which he had privately printed to sell to his students. Alone among these early translations of the Trattatello, this edition contains only Boccaccio’s text, and the deliberately Dantean positioning can be seen also in elements such as the frontispiece portrait of Dante, which is “a reproduction of a drawing by George Varian from a photograph of the miniature in the Codex Riccardianus, 1040,” and the other plate, a reproduction of a woodcut of the medieval city of Florence.88 The emphasis on the reappropriation of authentic medieval artefacts to contextualize the translation, alongside the scholarly introduction written by the translator himself, serve to situate this book as a prestige Dante object, a “Life” for the Dante expert and connoisseur of the book, rather than one for the masses. The next translation, however, directs itself to an audience midway between those of the previous two editions. James Robinson Smith’s translation was the first mainstream publication of the text in the USA, emerging as volume 10 in the Yale Studies in English Series. Much like Wicksteed’s first edition, the text of the Trattatello is translated alongside the two other early lives of Dante (as shown in the title, The Earliest Lives of Dante: Boccaccio, Bruni, Villani), although Smith in his preface strenuously protests the originality of his rendering and its implied superiority to the British translation. Indeed, this preface seems to suggest that the whole enterprise was undertaken in resistance to the previous two versions, with possibly even an assertion of Yale’s independence from the American Dantean Harvard hegemony: Professor Albert S. Cook of Yale University suggested the undertaking of the present translation. The work has been carried on under his helpful

87 A Translation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Life of Dante, trans. G.R. Carpenter (New York: The Grolier Club of the City of New York, 1900), 14–15. 88 Carpenter, A Translation, 11.

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guidance, and every page is nearer what it should be because of his thoughtful and painstaking criticism. Professor Henry R. Lang, also of Yale, has kindly decided for me doubtful points in the Italian. For the rendering of certain words and phrases I am indebted to the translation of the Boccaccio life by Professor G. R. Carpenter, published in a limited edition by the Grolier Club, New York 1900; and to the translation of the Bruni life and of portions of the Boccaccio life by Mr. P.H. Wicksteed, Hull 1898. (6)

This preface, while observing the academic niceties, nonetheless attempts to diminish in particular the contribution of Wicksteed, to whom the translator is indebted for “portions” of the Boccaccio life. The use of academic titles also conspires to diminish Wicksteed’s contribution, since he is the only “Mr” in a list of eminent professors. However, even the briefest examination of the two books suggests that Smith was dependent on Wicksteed for much more than a few words and phrases; for example, the divisions into chapters and the chapter titles are almost identical, with only some minor changes such as the Americanization of spellings and the use of less archaic lexical items. In terms of sheer readability, Smith’s translation is certainly easier to approach than Wicksteed’s first version, and its potential usefulness as a source for Dante students was promptly picked up by Charles Dinsmore in his 1903 anthology Aids to the Study of Dante, where portions of Smith’s translations of the Lives were reproduced.89 The translation also had a profitable afterlife in the 1960s and 1970s, when six more editions were reprinted by a number of different publishers.90 However, its self-proclaimed linguistic superiority did not long go unchallenged, as Wicksteed responded with a revised version of his own translation in 1904. The ascension of this translation over its predecessors can be seen in the variety of formats in which it was published, appearing in Britain in 1904 as a small-format edition in the King’s Classics series, and in America in the same year as a de luxe fine press edition by the Riverside Press of Cambridge, Massachussetts, in a limited print run of 265 copies. While in Britain the Boccaccio translation – Boccaccio’s Encomium on Dante or “Trattatello in laude di Dante” – appears

89 Charles Allen Dinsmore, Aids to the Study of Dante (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903), noted in La Piana, Dante’s American Pilgrimage, 192. 90 The editions are as follows: New York: Ungar, 1963; New York: Russell and Russell, 1968; Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Press, 1969; New York: Haskell House, 1974; Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Library Editions, 1975; Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions, 1976.

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as part of the collection entitled The Early Lives of Dante, the American edition is another edition of Boccaccio’s life of Dante alone, appearing some four years after the Grolier Club edition. Like the Grolier edition, this is a de luxe Dante object, a large-format book designed by Bruce Rogers for the Riverside Press; the book is dignified with a medallion portrait of Dante on the title page in case we were in any doubt of its portentous subject. Unlike the Grolier edition, this edition is rather light on paratextual material, containing only the translator’s preface.91 However, this short text is extremely interesting, serving as Wicksteed’s defence of his work and summa of the whole sorry transatlantic Trattatello translation war: The greater part of Boccaccio’s Life of Dante, together with the whole of Bruni’s, was translated by me in 1898, and was issued to my pupils, though not formally published. The work was hastily executed and contained many errors. In 1901, Mr. James Robinson Smith issued an admirable translation of both the lives, in the series of “Yale Studies in English.” He was good enough to acknowledge indebtedness to my work, “for the rendering of certain words and phrases.” In completing and revising my translation for the present edition I have thoroughly consulted his work and by its aid have detected some mistakes in my own. Many more he would have enabled me to discover had I not already been fortunate enough to find them out for myself. I must also, in my turn, reciprocate the acknowledgement of indebtedness for “the rendering of certain words and phrases,” especially in the new matter of this edition; but in the great majority of cases coincidences of expression, on whichever side priority lies, must be regarded as having risen independently. (i–ii)

This exquisitely wrought response is a masterpiece of scholarly rhetoric, which, with its effusive compliment to Smith for his “admirable translation,” succeeds in making Smith look rather small-minded in his grudging acknowledgment of his debt to the previous translators; likewise, his politeness in addressing him as Mr Smith cannot be disputed, especially as it serves to highlight the fact that he holds no higher title than Wicksteed himself, despite the invocation of heavyweight professors in his own preface.

91 The same translator’s preface text also appears in the London 1904 edition, i–ii.

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In the next part of the preface, however, Wicksteed moves to the crux of his argument where he can assert his own superiority. In an apparently disingenuous comparison of their two translation styles, Wicksteed allows that Smith’s simpler syntax might find appreciative readers, but he must nonetheless ally himself with the original author on these grounds of textual (and intellectual) complexity: Our principles of translation differ considerably. Mr. Smith’s happy selection of words and his practice of breaking up the sentences of the original, have given a lucidity and precision to his work, which much excite the admiration of his rivals and the gratitude of his readers. But for myself, whatever lesser measure of success I might have been able to attain on the same lines, I had already sacrificed to an attempt (however successful I can hardly judge) to retain something of the very special flavour of Boccaccio’s style, with its quaint harmonious meanderings, flowing, in long and intricate windings through dependent clauses and participial and parenthetic constructions, to the uniting periods which we reach at last (if they come at all) with a half-surprised amusement at the long delayed gathering of the waters into a single channel. The task of the reader is certainly not lightened by this method, nor is sharpness of impression furthered by it. But, I would fain hope that some compensating pleasure, some sense of far away harmonies, together with some closer feeling of companionship with the writer, may in some cases be gained.

In fact, the prose style recalls nothing more than Boccaccio himself, with its deliberately modest tone, artful self-parody, and imitation of Boccaccio’s own multiclaused sentences. The implication of this magnificent opening statement is clear: while Smith has simplified Boccaccio in his translation, in a way which will give pleasure to his (less intellectual) readers, Wicksteed has instead achieved a more impressive degree of equivalence, one that is not merely semantic but that also succeeds in transmitting the complexities of Boccaccio’s ornate cursus, wit, artfulness, and rhetorical ability, which can of course only be appreciated by those in possession of a higher degree of intellect. The subsequent publication history of the two different translations has proved them both right, in a sense: while Smith cornered the market in study aids targeted towards students (the initial publication with Yale University Press; his inclusion in the Aids to the Study of Dante; and his reprinting in the 1960s and 1970s), Wicksteed has remained a more rarified taste. The inclusion of his translation in the King’s Classics series,

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with editions in 1904, 1907, and 1911, guaranteed a semi-scholarly presence in the UK, but one that perhaps appealed more to the general literary reader than the university classes. This particular audience appeal continues even a century later, with the reissue of his “Life” by Oneworld Classics in 2009. Wicksteed also became the translation of choice for American de luxe publications, such as the 1922 Nashdesigned limited edition of 250 copies, or the 1992 hand-printed run of 109 copies made at the Allen Press in California.92 It could perhaps be argued that it is precisely the archaicism and difficulty of his prose that made his translation the “best” one for these artist books, whose primary function is not, after all, to be read, but to be looked at. Conclusion In marked contrast with the preceding two centuries, the nineteenth century sees a renewed appreciation of Boccaccio’s writings beyond the Decameron. Due in no small part to the efforts of a small group of Italophile (and italophone) intellectuals, such as Leigh Hunt and the Rossetti family, selected texts from Boccaccio’s “Danteana” are first imported into English literary culture; a second wave of interest later in the century means that the two Chaucerian source texts (the Teseida and Filostrato) become a point of interest for the scholarly Chaucer studies community. Finally, the Trattatello in laude di Dante – perhaps the defining document of Boccaccio’s dantismo, not to mention agreeably short – is translated, retranslated, and republished seven times in ten years: a remarkably intense period of translation activity that demonstrates a desire to institutionalize this text, in particular, within the pedagogical activity of a number of different scholarly institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. The nineteenth-century translations of the minor works are unusual, however, in the overall translation history of Boccaccio in English. First of all, and in comparison with previous centuries, there is no contact with French culture or individuals: there are no intermediary French source editions, no French or francophone agents involved in the books’ production, and no detectable transmission route through France (and

92 Giovanni Boccaccio’s encomium on Dante or “Trattatello in laude di Dante,” trans. Philip H. Wicksteed (San Francisco: Printed by J.H. Nash for his friends, 1922); The Life of Dante, trans. Philip H. Wicksteed (Greenbrae, CA: Produced by hand at the Allen Press, 1992).

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this is in striking contrast to the publishing fate of the Decameron, which even as late as 1893 was being published with illustrations by the French artist Louis Chalon and with French passages in the text). Here, the encounter with the “Dantean” and “Chaucerian” minor works is direct and unmediated by third parties; the translations are undertaken by individuals with close ties to Italian culture who, by virtue of their linguistic skills or family background, can access contemporary Italian scholarly work on Italian medieval studies and mine it for an English audience. Even those works which are turned most overtly to the end of English canon formation (that is, the translations published for the Chaucer Society) are made available by an Anglo-Italian, William Rossetti. In fact, William Rossetti can be seen as the central figure in this narrative of the nineteenth-century reception, a man who serves as a bridge between the aesthetic, Romantic, and Pre-Raphaelite interest in Dante (as exemplified by his brother) and the academic medievalists who become interested in Boccaccio as an intertextual source for Chaucer. By contrast, the Dantists operating at the turn of the century view the Trattatello as merely a historical source for the life of Dante, a retrograde step that reveals their fundamental lack of interest in Boccaccio as an author and authority in his own right. The next chapter will follow these trends into the first three decades of the twentieth century. With the development of positivist philological research in the late nineteenth century, we will see how other minor works of Boccaccio are co-opted into the new discipline of medieval studies, with the publication for the first time since the medieval period of parts of the Latin works, as well as new editions of the medieval and Renaissance English translations. Meanwhile, the popular, “romance” Boccaccio will also return with renewed vigour, and will enjoy a range of textual and romantic adventures in a variety of respectable and less respectable formats.

6 The Early Twentieth-Century Recovery of the Minor Works

This final chapter will consider those translations of Boccaccio published in the first three decades of the twentieth century. This period of Boccaccio’s reception is characterized by a certain concretization of the trends that emerged in the late nineteenth century regarding his English reception: the development of a professional “academic” cadre of translators and editors (with an associated academic readership); a continuing fascination with the popular “romance” Boccaccio, which first grows out of the widespread anglophone cult of Dante and is then amplified by the clandestine printers of erotica in New York in the 1920s; and the desire to re-historicize Boccaccio, which can be seen materially in the recuperation and republication of historic English translations of his writings for the first time since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and also in the fact that much of this work is carried out under the auspices of learned societies of medieval studies. The enormous amount of translation activity can be seen both in the wide range and large number of translations made in this period across both the Latin and vernacular works. At least twenty different editions of Boccaccio’s translations are published to 1931, not counting editions of the Decameron and Trattatello, which were discussed in earlier chapters. This chapter will take a roughly chronological approach to these developments, beginning with the first new translation of the Fiammetta, then moving in turn through those rediscovered works that are translated for the first time (the Olympia and Genealogia), new renderings of the Filostrato, and the rediscovery and republication of the historic translations initially discussed in the first half of this book.

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The Author as Lover: The 1907 Fiammetta Chronologically, the first of these new translations of Boccaccio is James C. Brogan’s 1907 rendering of the Elegia di madonna Fiammetta, its first published translation since Bartholemew Young’s version of 1587. The context in which this translation appears, however, once again demonstrates the continuing “secondary” status of Boccaccio in this period relative to his superstar predecessor, and may even be seen as a continuation of the nineteenth-century cult of Dante. The translation appears in the sixteen-volume series The Literature of Italy, published by The National Alumni in New York, and Boccaccio is the third of four authors in this particular volume.1 The first work is Rossetti’s translation of the Vita Nuova, which is introduced by the renowned American Dantist Charles Eliot Norton. The works that follow it are ordered chronologically, but appear to have been selected primarily for their presumed “romantic Italian” qualities after the Dantean model, and also, no doubt, for the wider fame of their authors. After Dante, Petrarch’s sonnets are succeeded by Boccaccio’s Fiammetta, and the volume closes with Michelangelo Buonarroti’s Poems. Physically, the book seeks to be imposing, claiming on the spine to be an “Edition de luxe.” The copy consulted is bound in deep blue cloth, with an ornate gilt-impressed design; the top edge of the page block is also in gilt, and the pages have been hand-cut. A note inside reveals that the cover reproduces a historic binding: The binding on this volume is a facsimile of the original on exhibition among the Treasures of the Vatican, and is here reproduced, by special permission, for the first time. It is an Italian binding of the middle of the eighteenth century. The cover is ornamented with a handsome geometrical design, combined with arabesques and blind stamped with heated tools to render portions of the leather darker. On compartments formed by the pattern are introduced the instruments of the Passion. The arms stamped in the center of the cover are those of Pope Clement XIII.

1 The New Life (La Vita Nuova) by Dante Alighieri, translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti with an Introduction by Charles Eliot Norton. One Hundred Sonnets by Francesco Petrarch. La Fiammetta by Giovanni Boccaccio. Poems by Michelangelo Buonarroti, in The Literature of Italy 1265–1907, ed. Rossiter Johnson and Dora Knowlton Ranous, vol. 2 (New York: The National Alumni, 1907). The volume number is not stated on the book itself.

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Such a detailed note clearly seeks to impress the reader with the taste and erudition of the series editors, yet the lack of specific information on the original binding and insistence instead on nebulous “special permission” (which would surely not be necessary to reproduce a binding) and the trappings of institutional Catholicism, suggest instead a rather inexpert engagement with the book as object. Nonetheless, the abundance of prefatory paratextual material leaves the reader in no doubt that this is a substantial undertaking, enriched by the contributions of some of the most eminent writers that have ever lived. The recto of the first leaf of the book gives details of the series: “THE LITERATURE OF ITALY consists of sixteen volumes, of which this one forms a part. For full particulars of the edition see the Official Certificate bound in the volume entitled ‘A HISTORY OF ITALIAN LITERATURE’”; the next leaf contains the binding information discussed above, and then, after a full blank opening, there follows a two-page opening with tipped-in frontispiece plate and ornamental series title page. Both the plate and the title information are presented in an art nouveau–style frame. The plate is a black-and-white image of a woman in a diaphanous garment seated on a vaguely medieval-esque monument, holding a flower in her left hand. The initial word “The” of the facing page is formed into a decorative glyph and enclosed in a frame, coloured in orange ink to give the effect of a decorated initial capital. The title page text of the series is elegantly set within the decorative frame, and gives detailed information about the many luminaries involved in this enterprise: The Literature of Italy 1265–1907. Edited by Rossiter Johnson and Dora Knowlton Ranous. With a General Introduction by William Michael Rossetti and Special Introductions by James, Cardinal Gibbons, Charles Eliot Norton, S. G. W. Benjamin, William S. Walsh, Maurice Francis Egan, and others. New translations, and former renderings compared and revised. Translators: James C. Brogan, Lord Charlemont, Geoffrey Chaucer, Hartley Coleridge, Florence Kendrick Cooper, Lady Dacre, Theodore Dwight, Edward Fairfax, Ugo Foscolo, G. A. Greene, Sir Thomas Hoby, William Dean Howells, Luigi Monti, Evangeline M. O’Connor, Thomas Okey, Dora Knowlton Ranous, Thomas Roscoe, William Stewart Rose, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Addington Symonds, William S. Walsh, William Wordsworth, Sir Thomas Wyatt.

Unlike earlier editions, the presence of notable translators is trumpeted here on the title page – a sign, perhaps, of the editors’ confidence

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in their product and knowledge of their intended audience. The readers of the Literature of Italy series are wealthy, cultured, and aspirational, but probably monoglot in their language competence; the presence of a translation by a known literary quantity such as Geoffrey Chaucer, William Wordsworth, or Dante Gabriel Rossetti would be immensely reassuring and a badge of quality. Furthermore, the listing of the translators included in the sixteen volumes gives an impression of an extremely distinguished editorial board who endorse the series, although of course many of these eminent translators have the distinct advantage of being dead, and hence long out of copyright. The others appear to be for the most part jobbing translators and/or associates of the series editor Rossiter Johnson himself, including his sister-in-law Florence Kendrick Cooper and friend Dora Knowlton Ranous.2 Johnson was a born generalist, an “editor, author, poet, lexicographer, lecturer, and historian,” who published copiously and was the editor of a number of literary series, such as the Little Classics, and Condensed Classics, as well as a multitude of reference works.3 Johnson was also an active antifeminist and anti-suffragist, as was his wife.4 Although, given the Johnsons’ views, it is tempting to see the presence of Fiammetta here as a condemnation of the faithless wife, it is rather more likely that the text is included for its canonically romantic properties, perhaps even deriving from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s inclusion of Boccaccio’s six sonnets in his Early Italian Poets, and his deliberate positioning of Fiammetta as analogous to Beatrice via his English titles. As will be shown, each of the authors featured in this volume is deliberately positioned as a lover, both by the choice of text to be translated and by the accompanying paratextual features that frame each. In addition to the frontispiece, the volume contains four other illustrations, all of which are listed after the volume’s title page on page vii. The first of these appears as the frontispiece to the volume’s title page

2 Johnson published posthumous appreciations of both Ranous and his own wife: Dora Knowlton Ranous: Author, Editor, Translator; A Simple Record of a Noble Life (New York: Publishers Printing Company, 1916); Helen Kendrick Johnson (Mrs Rossiter Johnson): The Story of Her Varied Activities (New York: Publishers Printing Company, 1917). 3 On Johnson, see Evelyn Yost, “Rossiter Johnson,” University of Rochester Library Bulletin, 16.2 (1961), 21–36, http://www.lib.rochester.edu/index.cfm?PAGE=2488 (accessed 10 July 2012). 4 The Johnsons’ anti-suffragist activities and publications are described on the summary of their papers held at the New York Public Library, http://www.nypl .org/archives/1492 (accessed 10 July 2012).

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(iii), with a tissue guard on which is printed in red “Portrait of Laura From a Painting by Jules Lefebvre.” Laura is depicted casting her eyes devoutly upwards while holding a small illuminated book in her hands. The second plate, entitled “Petrarch reading his Canzoniere to his Friends From a Painting by Alexandre Cabanel,” appears towards the end of the Sonnets (facing page 114), and shows an intense Petrarch declaiming to a group of three young men and one lady, who appear transfixed by him. Boccaccio is represented in a coloured photolithograph entitled “Boccaccio before the Queen of Naples From a Painting by Jacques Wagrez” (facing page 130).5 A very youthful Boccaccio kneels before the queen as she crowns him with a laurel wreath while eight ladies-in-waiting look on. The final plate, “Michelangelo Buonarroti reading a sonnet to Vittoria Colonna From a Painting by Herman Schneider” (facing page 328), shows the artist leaning on his sculpture of Moses, flourishing a piece of paper, while Colonna is seated at the base of the statue. The illustrations, taken together, therefore present a consistent narrative of the poet-artist and his audience, which may be either a group of attentive listeners or the love object herself. (A male love object is clearly not countenanced in this visual construction of Italian love literature, despite the fact that Michelangelo’s translator here, John Addington Symonds, had been instrumental in revealing that Michelangelo’s sonnets had been altered in the archives in order to suppress their homosexual intentions.)6 This romantic positioning of the volume as a whole is borne out in Dora Knowlton Ranous’s introduction to the Fiammetta (123–8), which begins “Youth, beauty, and love, wit, gayety [sic] and laughter, are the component parts of the delightful picture conjured up by the mere name of Giovanni Boccaccio, the prince of story-tellers for all generations of men” (123). The biography of the author is itself an overtly romance narrative, repeating the conventional (and erroneous) assertion of Boccaccio’s French birth (while tactfully glossing over his illegitimate status, which was usually invoked alongside this fact); and, as usual, Dante is also used to qualify Boccaccio’s life: “This creator of a

5 Wagrez’s illustrations for the Decameron were first published in the Paris Launette edition of 1890, republished in several Danish editions from 1904, and then in two American editions (Philadelphia: G. Barrie and Sons, 1910–11; and Philadelphia: J.P. Horn, 1928). 6 See Rictor Norton’s entry “John Addington Symonds (1840–1893)” in the ODNB.

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real literary epoch was born in Paris, in 1313, (in the eleventh year of Dante’s exile), of an Italian father and a French-woman of good family.” (Interestingly, the modesty extended to the matter of Boccaccio’s parentage is reflected also in the translated text, as will be shown.) Boccaccio’s fantastic biography continues in the usual way, with much made of his love for “the Lady Maria, a natural daughter of King Robert of Naples, who had caused her to be adopted as a member of the family of the Count d’Aquino, and to be married when very young to a Neapolitan nobleman” (124). In her summary of his literary works Ranous concentrates exclusively on Boccaccio’s vernacular writings, relating them deliberately to the events of his personal life and the great English authors: [He produced] between the years 1343 and 1355, the Teseide (familiar to English readers as “The Knight’s Tale” in Chaucer, modernized by Dryden as “Palamon and Arcite”), Ameto, Amorosa Visione, La Fiammetta, Ninfale Fiesolana [sic], and his most famous work, the Decameron, a collection of stories written, it is said, to amuse Queen Joanna of Naples and her court [...]; from the confused mass of legends of the Middle Ages, he evolved a world of human interest and dazzling beauty, fixed the kaleidoscopic picture of Italian society, and set it in the richest frame of romance. (124)7

The supposed circumstances of the writing of the Fiammetta are then described in some detail: While he had the Decameron still in hand, he paused in that great work, with heart full of passionate longing for the lady of his love, far away in Naples, to pour out his very soul in La Fiammetta, the name by which he always called the Lady Maria. Of the real character of this lady, so famous in literature, and her true relations with Boccaccio, little that is certain is known. [...] there is no proof, notwithstanding the ardor of Fiammetta as portrayed by her lover – who no doubt wished her to become the reality of his glowing picture – that he ever received from the charmer whose name

7 While Ranous devotes some space to an account of Boccaccio’s classical learning, the only Latin work she mentions by name is his version of the Iliad, co-translated with Leonzio Pilato “which Boccaccio transcribed with his own hand” (126). Presumably this is because it is the only work the series’ intended audience would have been likely to know.

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was always on his lips anything more than the friendship that was apparent to all the world. But she certainly inspired him in the writing of his best works. (124–5)

While Ranous is clearly trying her very best to construct a correspondence between Boccaccio’s “real-life” love object and the protagonist of the Fiammetta, such a link is rather untenable. (Would a devoted lover really seek to portray his beloved as abandoned, raving, and suicidal in the hope of advancing his prospects?) Ranous does allow a more complex reading – that Boccaccio instead assumes the voice of the abandoned woman – but only through citation of another authority, and then quickly returns to her preferred theme of the loveliness of the book: The best critics agree in pronouncing La Fiammetta a marvelous performance. John Addington Symonds says: “It is the first attempt in any literature to portray subjective emotion exterior to the writer [...]. The author of this extraordinary work proved himself a profound anatomist of feeling by the subtlety with which he dissected a woman’s heart.” The story is full of exquisite passages, and it exercised a widespread and lasting influence over all the literature that followed it. It is so rich in material that it furnished the motives of many tales, and the novelists of the sixteenth century availed themselves freely of its suggestions. (127)

Although Boccaccio’s life and works, as told by Ranous, verge on the simplistically romantic, she does not automatically accord him as lowly a status as her predecessors have done: Boccaccio is the “younger genius” (127), who develops Dante and Petrarch’s depiction of the beloved female into its most realistic form. The penultimate paragraph of her introduction reveals the internal logic for the form of this anthology: From Dante’s Beatrice, through Petrarch’s Laura, to Boccaccio’s La Fiammetta – from woman as an allegory of the noblest thoughts and purest stirrings of the soul, through woman as the symbol of all beauty worshiped at a distance, to woman as man’s lover, kindling and reciprocating the most ardent passion; from mystic, stately periods to Protean prose; from verse built up into cathedral-like dignity, through lyrics light as arabesques and pointed with the steely touch of polished style, to that free form of speech which takes all moods and lends itself alike to low or lofty things – such was the rapid movement of Italian genius within the brief space of fifty years. (128)

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The introduction closes with a brief note about this translation, which, although advertising its scholarliness, gives no useful information about the source text or translator: No translation into English of La Fiammetta has been made since Shakespeare’s time – when a small edition was published, which is now so rare as to be practically unattainable – until the appearance of the present scholarly and poetic rendering, which places within reach of all one of the world’s greatest masterpieces of literature. (128)

The translator is only identified finally as James C. Brogan on the title page to the Fiammetta itself (121), although his name also appeared in the alphabetical list of translators on the series title page at the start of the volume. With no biographical or interpretative material available, we can only judge his intentions for the work from the target text itself, and it is impossible to know how many of his translation choices were his own or instead were the result of editorial direction.8 In terms of the parts of the book, the translation is complete, comprising the authorial incipit, prologue, nine chapters, and summary rubrics to each chapter. Similarly, the paucity of paratextual information means that it is hard to deduce the source edition for Brogan’s translation, although the fact that Brogan’s text is abridged suggests that it was not the 1587 English translation, which is more complete.9 Brogan’s translation is lucid and readable, although a careful comparison with the modern critical edition reveals that it has been subtly

8 The only discussion I have been able to find of Brogan’s rendering is in the introduction to Causa-Steindler and Mauch’s translation of the Fiammetta: “Giovanni Boccaccio’s Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta has been previously translated into English twice. Bartholomew Young (or Yong) did a rather free rendering of the work in 1587, entitled Amorous Fiammetta. A translation by James C. Brogan, published in 1907, turns the Italian into a quaintly archaic English and frequently omits passages in the original” (The Elegy of Lady Fiammetta, ed. and trans. Mariangela Causa-Steindler and Thomas Mauch [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990], vii). 9 In support of the idea that the translator did not consult the earlier translation, the introduction mentions it only as “now so rare as to be practically unattainable” (128). Several Italian editions of the Fiammetta were published in the nineteenth century, and it is not known which was Brogan’s source edition; I have therefore used Delcorno’s edition for comparison here: Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, ed. Carlo Delcorno, in Tutte le opera di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca (Milan: Mondadori, 1994), 5:2.1–412.

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abridged. The choice of passages to cut is revealing, however, and supports the broader program of textual restyling for the specific intended readers of the Literature of Italy series. A brief analysis of several sections will demonstrate how Boccaccio’s Fiammetta is remade for American readers of a romantic bent at the start of the twentieth century. “Italian” signifiers such as the names of characters and the locations are maintained throughout; additional “Italian” features, such as the exclamation “Oimè,” are allowed to remain within, or even inserted into, dialogue passages for “foreign” effect. This italicized interjection is more of a conscious stylistic feature of Brogan’s version than a deliberate attempt at equivalence: for example, in chapter 1, when Fiammetta relates how Panfilo courted her, Boccaccio’s “Oimè” (I, 23, 7) is rendered “Woe is me! (161); the next paragraph begins ‘Oimè! most compassionate ladies, what is there that Love will not teach to his subject? and what is there that he is not able to render them skilful in learning?” (161), when in fact the source Italian reads: “O pietosissime donne, che non insegna Amore a’ suoi suggetti, e a che non gli fa egli abili ad imparare” (Most compassionate ladies, is there anything that Love does not teach his subjects and which he does not make them capable of learning?; I, 23, 9).10 Brogan’s aim (if it was indeed a conscious aim) is to dramatize the Fiammetta as an exotic, “medieval” text, and to this end he will sometimes alter lexical items, as when Fiammetta describes Fortune as “[striving] with all her might to scourge me with biting scorpions,” the prickly nettles of the original presumably not as dramatic as this oxymoronic construction (compare “con più pugnente ortica s’ingegnò d’afliggere l’anima mia”; “she strove to afflict my soul with more stinging nettles”; II, 1, 2).11 Most of his archaicizing activity can be seen in the dialogue passages, where Boccaccio’s natural contemporary direct speech is rendered by an artificial faux-medieval, cod-Shakespearean idiom, which would have been highly dated even a century ago: “O soul of my soul! what has made thee afraid?” To which I responded: “I fell asleep, and methought that I had lost thee.”

10 English translations of the Fiammetta are taken from the Causa-Steindler and Mauch translation, The Elegy of Lady Fiammetta, 24. 11 Causa-Steindler and Mauch, The Elegy of Lady Fiammetta, 28.

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Woe is me! and what an augury and what true foretellers of the future were these my words so suddenly thrust on my mind by some spirit from I know not where, and this I can now seen plainly. But he made answer: “O best and dearest of all women! death and death alone can make thee lose me.” (166–7) – O anima mia bella che temesti? – Al quale io, sanza intervallo risposi: – Parevami ch’io ti perdessi. – Oimè! che le mie parole, non so da che spirito pinte fuori, furono del futuro e agurio e verissime annunziatrici, come ora veggo. Ma egli rispose: – O carissima mia giovane, morte, non altri, potrà che tu mi perda operare. – ] (II, 2, 9–10) “Beautiful soul of mine, what were you afraid of?” To which I answered without hesitation: “I seemed to be losing you.” Alas, I know not what spirit forced these words out of me, which were an omen and truthful herald of the future. But he replied: “My young beloved, nothing but death could make you lose me.”12

For the dialogue between the lovers, Brogan favours the affected “thee,” along with other tortuous constructions suggesting archaic English, such as “methought,” and overwrought syntax such as “were these my words so suddenly thrust on my mind by some spirit from I know not where.” Other characteristic stylistic features can also be seen in the passage above, such as a trimming of perceived superfluities (e.g., no attempt is made to render “sanza intervallo”) and the addition of extra narrative information, as seen by the insertion of “I fell asleep.” Brogan’s editorializing can perhaps be most clearly seen in his treatment of the salient details of the love affair, which he manages with a stern hand. This is exemplified in his version of the passages describing the last days before Panfilo’s departure: These words having been said, we tried to comfort each other and dried each other’s tears and then parted.

12 Causa-Steindler and Mauch, The Elegy of Lady Fiammetta, 29.

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He came often to see me before his departure, which was to take place in a few days, finding me much altered in mind and appearance from what I had been when he saw me first. But when that fatal day arrived which was to be the end of all my happiness, we spent it in various discourse, not unmingled with abundant tears. At last I embraced him, and thus addressed him: “Alas! my sweet lord, who is it that is thus taking thee away from me?” [...] Then, somewhat soothed by his caresses, though still weeping bitterly, I kissed him. When he was about to give me the last tearful embrace, I arrested him, saying: “Dearest my lord, lo, now thou goest away, but thou dost promise that in a short time thou wilt return.” (179)

While Brogan maintains the sorrowful romantic feeling of this waterlogged leave-taking, the original Italian is much more forthcoming: Queste parole dette, l’uno confortato da l’altro rasciugammo le lagrime, e a quelle ponemmo sosta per quella notte; e servato l’usato modo, anzi la sua partita, che pochi giorni fu poi, me più volte venne a rivedere, bene che assai d’abito e di volere trasmutata dal primo mi rivedesse. Ma venuta quella notte, la quale dovea essere ultima de’ miei beni, con ragionamenti varii, non sanza molte lagrime, trapassammo; la quale, ancora che per la stagione del tempo fosse delle più lunghe, brevissima mi parve che trapassasse. E già il giorno, agli amanti nemico, cominciato avea a tòrre la luce alle stelle; del quale vegnente poi che il segno venne alle mie orecchie, strettissimamente lui abracciai, e così dissi: – O dolce signor mio, chi mi ti toglie? [...] E così amaramente piagnendo, e riconfortata da lui, più volte il baciai. Ma dopo molte stretti abracciari, ciascuno pigro a levarsi, la luce del nuovo giorno strignendoci, pur ci levammo. E apparecchiandosi egli già di darmi li baci estremi, prima, lagrimando, cotali parole li cominciai: – Signor mio, ecco tu te ne vai, e in brieve la tornata prometti. (II, 11, 1– II, 13, 1) After saying this, we comforted each other, dried our tears, and put an end to them that night. Before his departure, which took place a few days later, he kept to his usual habits and came back to see me several times, even though he found me much changed from before in appearance and disposition. But when that night arrived, which was to be the last of my

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pleasurable ones, we spent it in various talk and not without tears, and although it was one of the longest nights of the year because of the season, I had the impression it passed very quickly. And the daylight, that enemy of lovers, had already begun stealing away the starlight, and when the sign of its coming reached my ears, I embraced him tightly and said: “My sweet lord, who is taking you away from me?” [...] And so, comforted by him, I wept bitterly and kissed him several times. But after many tight embraces, each of us was reluctant to rise, but we did so, forced by the light of the new day. He was about to give me his final kisses when I began saying through my tears: “You see, my lord, you are leaving, and you promise to return soon.”13

It is immediately clear that Brogan’s English translation is much shorter than the Italian, a result of the cuts he has made to the text. Most obvious is the management of all references to the night, which are either excised in their entirety or in one case substituted by the word “day” (“that fatal day”). Whereas Boccaccio’s Fiammetta and Panfilo spend two nights together in this section, Brogan’s lovers first part from each other (instead of staying together), then meet again in the daytime, spend their time talking to each other, and exchange tearful embraces. Brogan avoids entirely the description of their last night together, which is an important part of Boccaccio’s romance narrative, and is emphasized by the description of the brevity of the summer night and the arrival of the dawn, “agli amanti nemico” (enemy of lovers). Likewise, the sheer quantity and intensity of Fiammetta’s embraces is glossed over (e.g., “strettissimamente lui abracciai,” I embraced him tightly; “più volte il baciai,” kissed him several times; “dopo molte stretti abracciari,” after many tight embraces), giving instead the impression of a modest, if devastated, Victorian maiden. In addition to his bowdlerizing tendencies, Brogan also silently abridges some of the classical references and the rhetorical flourishes of the authorial voice. For example, Fiammetta’s musings on the examples of Laudomia and Protesilao, and Ovid’s poetry, are simply excised after the opening sentence of book III (III, 3, 1–III, 4, 3), and substituted by a gloriously banal bridging sentence: “Sometimes, when solitary and sad in my chamber, all my thoughts dwelling on him, I strode to and fro, and, fetching many a sigh, murmured: ‘Would that my Panfilo

13 Causa-Steindler and Mauch, The Elegy of Lady Fiammetta, 37–8.

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were here!’” (185). (Compare the Italian: “Alcuna altra volta con più gravezza mi venne pensato lui avere il piè percosso nel limitare dell’uscio della nostra camera, sì come la fedele serva m’avea ridetto, e ricordandomi che a niuno altro segnale Laudomia prese tanta fermezza, quanto a così fatto, del non reddituro Protesilao”; “At other times it occurred to me to give more serious thought to his having stubbed his toe on the threshold of our bed chamber, as my faithful servant had reported, and remembering that Laodameia had not taken any other sign as seriously as this one, which indicated that Protesilaus would not return” [III, 3, 1]).14 Notwithstanding the above omissions found in Brogan’s target text, the book as a whole is perfectly functional and adequate to its intended purpose and readership. In a series without pretensions to scholarliness, the absence of arcane classical references would go unnoticed by anyone who was not reading with a parallel Italian text; the censorship of more sexually suggestive details and the reframing of Fiammetta as a more conventional tragic romantic heroine sorrowing in her unrequited love fits well with the general positioning of the volume, based as it is around the fundamental Dante/Beatrice model; while the addition of elements that stress the plot over Boccaccio’s digressions would certainly help the reader along in what is still a rather difficult and erudite read. If not exactly a complete or scholarly rendering of Boccaccio’s Fiammetta, Brogan’s version nonetheless brought this work to a new anglophone audience, and led to the publication of the new editions of this text in the 1920s and 1930s, even if this was an inadvertent result of its inaccuracies and abridgements. The Latin Boccaccio Rediscovered: Olympia and the Genealogia A new development in the first decades of the twentieth century was further scholarly interest in Boccaccio’s Latin works, including some texts that had never before been translated into English. The first of these to be published was book XIV of the Buccolicum carmen, known as the Olympia after Boccaccio’s own titular rubric: “incipit egloga XIIII, cui titulus est Olympia.”15 The text was translated by the eminent British

14 Causa-Steindler and Mauch, The Elegy of Lady Fiammetta, 43. 15 Buccolicum carmen, in Branca, Tutte le opere, 2:689–1090 (858).

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medievalist Israel Gollancz, professor of English at King’s College of the University of London, and the details of its publication show once again how Boccaccio’s reception was managed and subsumed within the “English” literature project, rather than recognized on its own merits. Gollancz (1863–1930) was a crucial figure in the establishment of English literary studies as an academic discipline in its own right in Great Britain, holding positions at the universities of Cambridge and London.16 He was also active in various learned societies, being one of the founders of the British Academy, president of the Philological Society, and honorary director of the Early English Texts Society. His contribution to Boccaccio’s presence in English translation should therefore be seen as emerging from the same English academic stable as William Rossetti’s translations for Furnivall’s Chaucer Society a generation earlier. However, unlike Rossetti, Gollancz was a trained linguist, philologist, and literary expert, and his translation of the Olympia shows for the first time a scholarly engagement with Boccaccio that had until this date been quite absent from the English renderings. Gollancz’s Olympia appeared first in a fine-format limited edition of five hundred and fifty copies, produced for the six-hundredth anniversary of Boccaccio’s birth in 1913.17 The volume is a beautiful piece of work, with careful attention to detail in both its physical and scholarly attributes: the copy consulted has a limp vellum binding, tied with ribbons, and is printed on deckle-edged hand-made paper with the Aldwych watermark. The elegant physical appearance of the volume is amplified by the type, printed in both red and black ink, and the careful selection and disposition of texts and paratexts within the book. In a nod to the forms of the manuscript book, red ink is used throughout for decorative effect: the first title page (fol. b) is printed entirely in red capitals, while on the second title page the word “Olympia” is printed in red capitals with the rest in black. Likewise, the headings of the various sections are all rubricated in capitals, with the main text printed in black ink. Although the ink palette and layout alludes to the early print

16 On Gollancz’s life, see his entry in the ODNB by A.M. Hyamson, revised by William Baker. 17 The first title page reads: “Boccaccio’s Olympia with English rendering by Professor I. Gollancz, Litt. D., F. B. A., printed at the Florence Press, London to commemorate the six hundredth anniversary of Boccaccio’s birth, MCMXIII” [fol. b]. The copy consulted is held at the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, Private Press Collection R97729, and is number 3 of the issue.

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book, this is no pseudo-archaic product such as the 1909 Tudor Translations editions of the 1620 Decameron; instead, it is a spare, contemporary edition, with a spacious layout and modern type. This prestigious commemorative volume mixes the highest production values with thorough scholarship and a sense of the historical context from which the text emerged. This positioning is evident not only from its evocation of the manuscript book, but also in the presence of a facsimile reproduction of the first page of Boccaccio’s autograph manuscript of the text, labelled as such to underline its authenticity.18 One editorial feature that appears rather whimsical at a century’s distance – but that would be in keeping with late medieval English tradition – is the inclusion of an invocatory sonnet of modern composition, written by Gollancz himself (fol. b3).19 The poem is entitled in red: “MCCCXIII– MCMXIII,” commemorating the six hundred years between Boccaccio’s birth and this volume, while the sonnet itself is set in black type, with a large red initial capital O: OLYMPIAN! From thy laurel that ne’er fades A tender leaf athwart our pathway falls, And, fragrant with sweet violet, recalls, The dearest blossom in thy love-lit glades. Far from thy Roses, with desire imbrued, Far from thy garden, where with wanton lays Plague-haunted dames & gallants sped their days, A floweret all too frail thy tears bedewe’d. Not Fiammetta, but thy Angel-child Led thee foot-sore the Hill-top to ascend, The high Olympus of the undefiled. There Beatrice on Violante smiled, And told of fair Eletta, thy child-friend, And played with Pleasant Pearl, so wise and mild.

This poem, addressed to Boccaccio, the “Olympian,” provides the key not only to the contents of this commemorative volume, but also to

18 The inscription below the plate reads “from Boccaccio’s Autograph M.S. Bibl. Riccardiana, Florence” (between fols. b and b2). 19 Although unattributed here, the poem is signed “I. G.” in the 1921 limited edition of the poem published by Humphrey Milford for Oxford University Press (251).

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Gollancz’s own interest and motivation in making the translation. Using conventional (medieval) horticultural metaphors for literary endeavour and the love-object, the first stanza describes the work that follows, a small part of the corpus for which Boccaccio is rightly famed, and that is dedicated to the memory of his beloved. The second verse moves out to describe those works for which Boccaccio is best known, focusing solely on his romance output (the “wanton lays”) and not including his Latin scholarly works, and stresses the distance between his literary activity and the short-lived object of his real-life devotion. The volta between octave and sestet reveals the identity of this woman: not his famed senhal, Fiammetta, but instead his dead daughter (Violante), who appears to him in this poem and describes her life in Heaven. The final tercet opens out to embrace the emblematic women of the literary traditions that inform the making of this poem and its translation by Gollancz: Beatrice, Dante’s beloved, who inhabits Dante’s Paradise (the mention of whom may allude to the evident intertextual links between the Olympia and Paradiso); Eletta, Petrarch’s granddaughter, and Pearl, the subject of the Middle English poem that Gollancz had famously translated in 1891.20 Despite its archaic poetic stylings, the poem is a marvellously compact distillation of the genesis of this translation, relating Boccaccio’s literary output and the loss of his beloved daughter to the context of the production of this volume and Gollancz’s own work as translator and editor. This type of prefatory address is very much in the spirit of the paratextual poems of the medieval English reception of Boccaccio, such as those found in the fifteenth-century translation of the De mulieribus claris, a fact that would not of course have escaped Gollancz, the professor of medieval English. The remaining paratexts of the book all serve to situate the poem within this context of remembrance of the loss of a child. Immediately following the poem is a careful selection of extracts from two of Boccaccio’s letters, in which Violante is memorialized. The first of these (fols. cr–c2r) is from Boccaccio’s fifteenth letter, to Petrarch, where he describes how much Petrarch’s granddaughter Eletta reminded him of his much-mourned daughter, while the second (fols. c2v–c3r) is taken from

20 On the Dantean resonances of the Olympia, see my article “Heavenly Bodies: The Presence of the Divine Female in Boccaccio,” Italian Studies, 60.2 (2005), 134–46. The first edition of Gollancz’s edition and translation of the Pearl-poem appeared in 1891 (London: D. Nutt), and this translation of Boccaccio’s Olympia was published as an appendix to this work in five further editions from 1918 onward.

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the Letter to Martino da Signa (Epistle XXIII). The letters are reproduced in Latin on the verso side of each opening, with Gollancz’s translation on the facing recto side; however, the difference between the two versions of the title for the letter to Petrarch suggests that Gollancz seems to have (correctly) assumed his readership would be accessing the text primarily through the English. The Latin title for the letter to Petrarch reads: “johannis boccacci de certaldo | ad franciscum petrarcham lau-| reatum familiaris epistola” (the familiar letter from Giovanni Boccaccio of Certaldo to Francesco Petrarca, the laureate), while the English title is much more discursive: “from boccaccio”s letter to pe-| trarch, describing his visit to francesca, petrarch’s daughter, | at venice, in the year mccclxvii, and telling of eletta, francesca’s little daughter.” Gollancz’s concentration on the affective content of these letters can be seen in the choice of selections, which in both cases reveals Boccaccio’s enduring grief for the loss of his daughter. For example: Lo, there before me was your dear little Eletta, my little friend! How gracefully she came along! One could not have expected such grace in so young a child. Before she could know who I was, she smiled at me so sweetly. What joy was mine when I saw her! What a hunger seized my heart as I held her in my arms! At first I thought it was my own girlie – the little maid once mine. [...] Your little Eletta is the very image of my lost one. She has the same laugh, the same joyous eyes, the same bearing and gait; she holds her dear little body just the same way. My girlie was perhaps slightly taller, but then she was older; she was five and a half when I saw her last. Had their dialect been the same, they would have spoken the same words – the same simple artless words. I can see no difference, except that Eletta’s hair is golden, while my girlie’s was chestnut brown. Ah me! How often, while I fondled your little one, and listened to her sweet prattle, did the memory of the little daughter reft from me bring tears to my eyes! How often, when no one was looking, did I sigh away my tears!

The second letter, to Fra Martino, presents the Olympia itself: This fourteenth Eclogue is called Olympia, from the Greek Olympus, signifying in Latin splendidus or lucidus, & so Heaven. Hence the name Olympia is given to this Eclogue, since much is told herein concerning the heavenly realm. The speakers are four in number: Silvius, Camalus, Therapon, and Olympia. By Silvius I mean myself, and so I name myself here,

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because the first thought of this Eclogue came to me in a wood. [...] By Olympia I mean my little daughter, who died at that age at which, as we believe, those who die become the citizens of heaven. And so for Violante, as she was named when living, I call her now Olympia - the angelic.

Following these contextualizing letters, there follows the text and translation of the poem itself. The titular rubrics (here even printed in red) precede the text proper, with the Latin title on the verso side, “incipit egloga quarta decima, | cui titulus est olympia, collocu-| tores autem sunt silvius, cama-| lus, therapon, et olympia” (fol. c3v), and the English on the recto, “here begins boccaccio”s four|teenth eclogue entitled olym- | pia, wherein the speakers are silvius, camalus, therapon, and | olympia” (fol. c4). The parallel text proper begins on the next opening, following the same convention of Latin at left and English at right, and both pages begin with a centred rubricated title in capitals comprising the names of all the speakers: “silvius, camalus, therapon, | olympia” (16–17). The translation of the eclogue itself renders Boccaccio’s Latin metre as English blank verse, following the verse divisions of the source Latin text, with Latin text on the verso page of the opening and English on the right-hand side. The text and translation of the eclogue take up thirty pages in total (16–45), or slightly more than half the book, while the book closes with a substantial postscript by Gollancz himself, in which he discusses his motivation as translator, the history of the text, the intertextual references, and his view of the links to the subject matter of the Pearl poem. Interestingly, just as transatlantic tensions between British and American academia were expressed in the competing translations of Boccaccio’s Trattatello, once again the impetus for this translation is a scholarly disagreement: My interest in Boccaccio’s OLYMPIA dates from 1904, in which year my friend Professor W. H. Schofield, of Harvard, reprinted from the Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, xix, i, an article on “The Nature and Fabric of the Pearl,” in which he attempted, altogether unconvincingly in my judgment, to disprove the obvious autobiographical interpretation of the poem, and to maintain that its elegiac setting was a mere literary device for dealing with certain theological problems. (49)

According to Gollancz, Professor Schofield then went on to contend that the source for the Pearl was in fact Boccaccio’s Eclogue XIV;

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although the British academic cannot agree with this judgment, it did at least give him the occasion to produce a translation of the text: I am none the less grateful to Dr. Schofield, although after long study of the two poems I have come to the conclusion that there is no definite evidence of any indebtedness on the part of the author of “Pearl” to Boccaccio’s poem, & that such parallels as may be discovered in the two poems are due to the poets’ common knowledge, ideas and belief. [...] With the dangers of parallelism before me, I attempted to consider the question independently; for which purpose I found it necessary, in the first place, to prepare an adequate text of the Eclogue, and further, to understand it aright, to render it into English. (50)

The peculiar linking of the child Pearl to Beatrice, Violante, and Eletta in the last stanza of the invocatory sonnet is thus finally explained, and provides an unusual and highly specific motivation for this particular translation of Boccaccio. Like the majority of his English translators, Gollancz sees the Italian author through the prism of English literature, but, as an academic expert in the field – and thus unlike most of his predecessors – his aim is to prove or disprove a trend in medieval textual transmission rather than merely aggrandize the anglophone literary patrimony. However, despite his superb scholarly range, Gollancz, like most of the English professors implicated in the Boccaccio translation project, essentially views Italian literary history through the prism of Dante, and the final paragraph of his conclusion reiterates – albeit in a different way – the final verse of his invocatory poem: A like sorrow befell two poets, and each found solace in song. The one – a pioneer of the Renaissance – characteristically, under the influence of his great Italian master [i.e., Dante], harmonized Virgilian form with Christian belief. The other – a didactic English poet, far from the new literary currents – bethought him of the Pearl of the Gospel, and found his inspiration in the visionary scenes of the New Jerusalem, coloured by medieval allegory. [...] In accordance with theological fancy, in each poem the transfigured child, grown in wisdom, appears as matured also in age, “joined in Eternal Spousal.” No longer the children they were, they teach with bold authority lessons of resignation & the mystic properties of Heaven – “Pearl,” more particularly, who in her argumentative skill recalls the figure of Reason in the “Romaunt.” Yet, at the same time, to the dreamer she is still “my little queen,” and, for all “her royal array,” his treasure “so

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small and sweetly slight.” So, too, Olympia’s voice and image are those of Violante – “virguncula mea.” The child angelic, matured in Heaven – “for spousal fit” – is still the child for dreamer and poet. In the Kingdom all are as children. And so even to Dante, in the hour of his imperilled loyalty to her memory, Beatrice first appears “con quelle vestimenta sanguigne, colle quali apparve prima agli occhi miei, e pareami giovane, in simile etade a quella in che prima la vidi.”

Just as the Pearl-poet and Boccaccio write of meeting again their beloved dead daughters in an oneiric encounter, so does Dante dream again of the child Beatrice in chapter XXXIX, 9 of the Vita Nuova.21 (And indeed, to be reductive, the entire Commedia is based around this conceit of the author-character meeting the lost beloved, a subtext deftly deployed via intertextual allusion by Boccaccio in his Olympia.) The final reference to Dante also has the fortuitous effect of framing and authorizing this book with a concluding reference to the master (much as Boccaccio did himself in his authorial explicits). The defining characteristic of this translation, then, is the way in which Gollancz’s scholarship links two distinct literary traditions – those of medieval Italian and Middle English – and enriches them both, on the one hand disproving an assertion about the textual genetics of the Pearl, and on the other bringing Boccaccio’s poem on a similar subject matter to a new audience, and providing a new comparative reading of three different texts. The quality of this 1913 commemorative edition, in both its physical aspects and intellectual content, is construed as a fine memorial piece for the author, and is probably the most “expert” translation of all the works discussed in this book. While Gollancz’s translation of the Olympia was made primarily with a view to illuminating his reading of the Pearl, and published to commemorate the six-hundredth anniversary of Boccaccio’s birth, there is another, practical, motivation to be taken into account. In his postscript, he notes that his translation uses as its source the text included in Oskar Hecker’s 1902 study of Boccaccio’s manuscript culture, Boccaccio-Funde.22 Hecker’s book contained not only an authoritative text of the fourteenth eclogue, based on the autograph manuscript, but also extracts from

21 28.1 in the Gorni ordering of the text. 22 Oskar Hecker, Boccaccio-Funde: Stücke aus der bislang verschollenen Bibliothek des Dichters darunter von seiner Hand geschriebenes Fremdes und Eigenes (Braunschweig: G. Westermann, 1902), 84–92.

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Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium, comprising the proemium, the proemia to books II–XIII, the full text of books XIV–XV, and the conclusion.23 Hecker’s book was the first reliable text of this work to be prepared according to modern philological practice, and was, in fact, the only modern edition until Vincenzo Romano’s 1951 edition for Laterza. As we have seen so many times in this book, a particular publishing moment in one country is often followed some time later by its translation into another language, and its insertion into the cultural fabric of the receiving culture; so it is with Hecker’s Boccaccio-Funde, which provides the impetus for the only two English translations from Boccaccio’s Latin works until Guarino’s translation of the De mulieribus in the 1960s. Gollancz’s Olympia was the first of these, and the second is Charles G. Osgood’s 1930 partial translation of the Genealogia, Boccaccio on Poetry.24 Like Gollancz, Osgood (1871–1964) was a distinguished academic, who spent the majority of his career at Princeton University, where he held the Holmes Professorship of Belles Lettres.25 Again, like Gollancz, he worked chiefly in English Studies, and his literary interests ranged from the classics to the eighteenth century; indeed, at Princeton, his signature undergraduate course was “English Literature and the Classics.” It is therefore probably safe to surmise that his interest in translating Boccaccio emerged from his own scholarly and pedagogical interests in the links between classical and modern English literary studies, rather than in a specific interest in the Italian author. According to his biography, Osgood’s focus throughout his career was on poetry rather than prose, and his title for his translation promotes his own understanding of where the interest lies for the modern reader in Boccaccio’s Genealogia: it has become “Boccaccio on Poetry,” although, in fact, this title does not begin to encompass the contents of this vast source text. The text’s most recent English translator, Jon Solomon, describes it as “an ambitious synthesis of ancient mythological information, Greek and Latin poetry, medieval and humanistic scholarly research, and poetic manifesto”; of its fifteen books, the first thirteen 23 Oskar Hecker, Boccaccio-Funde, 159–302. 24 Boccaccio on Poetry: Being the Preface and Fourteenth and Fifteenth Books of Boccaccio’s Genealogia Deorum Gentilium in an English Version with Introductory Essay and Commentary, ed. and trans. Charles G. Osgood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1930). 25 A detailed biography of Osgood can be found online at the Pennsylvania Center for the Book: http://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/palitmap/bios/Osgood__Charles _Grosvenor.html (accessed 10 July 2012).

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present the complex mythographic genealogies of the title, while only the last two contain the discussion of poetics.26 In his own (extensive) introduction to the work, Osgood stresses the holistic nature of Boccaccio’s classical learning, suggesting that “classical antiquity, mythology, and poetry are to him essentially one. Therefore to explore and defend antiquity or mythology is to explore and defend the art of poetry” (xxix). The unavoidable implication is that this is the reason why these two books in particular have been selected for translation into English, although there is another, unmentioned but more pragmatic reason, which can be reconstructed through the textual evidence. Osgood – like Gollancz – had also prepared an edition of the Pearl, published in 1906, and it seems very likely that his impetus to take on the translation of the Genealogia must have resulted in part from his scrutiny of one of the later editions of Gollancz’s Pearl, which would have included the Boccaccio text and details of its source edition, Hecker’s Boccaccio-Funde, or perhaps even the 1913 edition of the Olympia.27 Osgood’s official statement of his intentions is found in his preface to the volume: I have undertaken in these pages to make more accessible and, I hope, more intelligible the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Books of Boccaccio’s Genealogia Deorum Gentilium. They have been so often described in histories of literature and related works, that one need not again assert their importance in the history of humanism. But no one has yet fully measured their strong determinant influence upon the poetry, criticism, and scholarship of later times. Partly for the historic worth of these books, partly because the ideas which they contain may not be wholly unsalutary in this latter day, and partly because they lead to intimacy with that very engaging person, the author, this version has seemed worth the making. It had its origin more than twenty years ago in a suggestion of the late Professor Cook. (v)

26 Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogy of the Pagan Gods: Volume I, Books I–V, ed. and trans. Jon Solomon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Solomon’s translation – the first in a projected three-volume set – when complete will be the first ever English translation of the whole text. On Boccaccio as mythographer, see Tobias Gittes, Boccaccio’s Naked Muse: Eros, Culture, and the Mythopoeic Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). 27 The Pearl: A Middle English Poem, ed. Charles G. Osgood (Boston: Heath, 1906).

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Osgood’s translation of the Latin Boccaccio therefore differs in some crucial respects from Gollancz’s, primarily in that his book was created with a deliberate pedagogical aim. While Gollancz’s Olympia is avowedly learned, its scholarly function is essentially (and materially, in the later editions) to be a footnote to the Pearl-poem. Osgood’s Boccaccio has a much broader intention, not to mention a wider reach. Every part of this book speaks of its academic origins and pedagogical positioning. The imprint alone is suggestive: the book was published by Princeton University Press, who had published a translation of the Filostrato in 1924 (to be discussed in the next part of this chapter). Osgood’s Boccaccio contains an abundance of scholarly aids for the inexpert reader, which construct a framework of intellectual and institutional authority around the translated text itself. Although produced in a relatively inexpensive octavo format, the book’s title page imitates more prestigious ancestors in layout and faux-archaic language: the title is arranged in an inverted triangle shape above the Princeton university crest, and reads: “BOCCACCIO ON POETRY | Being the Preface and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth | Books of Boccaccio’s Genealogia Deorum Gentilium | in an English Version with Introductory Essay | and Commentary” (iii). This is then followed by the preface (v–vi), a “List of abbreviated titles more often cited in Introduction and Notes” (vii–viii), a table of contents (ix–x), and a long and learned “Introduction” to Boccaccio and this text (xi–xlix). There is a half-title page between the introduction and translation, which reads “The Genealogy of the Gentile Gods” in capitals: an interesting choice of formulation that masks the fact that the translation is only of a small part of the whole text. The target text itself takes up 139 pages of the book (3–142), and is itself followed by copious explanatory back matter: the notes (143–200) and a comprehensive index (201–14). In terms of its editorial paratexts, this edition is in fact a model for the scholarly Boccaccio translations by American academics that would come to characterize the field from the 1970s onward.28 Osgood’s book is characterized by a copious informational apparatus, explicitly designed for an academic audience. And, indeed, his text has not yet been fully superseded, as no English translation of the

28 On the post-war scholarly translations of Boccaccio, see my article “Translations as Cultural ‘Facts’: The History of Boccaccio in English.” In Translation: Transfer, Text and Topic, ed. P. Barrotta and A.L. Lepschy (Perugia: Guerra, 2010), 53–68.

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whole text, nor new translation of books XIV–XV, has yet been published (although the first five books are now available in Jon Solomon’s translation for the I Tatti Renaissance Library).29 The conclusions about the respective fates of Boccaccio’s vernacular and Latin texts in English translation are easy to draw: while the Decameron has been remade in English by virtually every generation since the seventeenth century, a single translation is all that has been available for the Genealogia until very recently, and this translation itself is partial, somewhat altered (with its titular additions), and quite unrepresentative of the source text in its entirety. Osgood’s approach to the Genealogia is highly focused on the poetic: that is to say, he reads Boccaccio as a poet and scholar, and this book as a product of both his poetic sensibility and learning: “Boccaccio designed his book as a speculum of ancient myth. [...] It was the work of a generous and patriotic poet” (xi). He makes connections between Boccaccio’s factual works in the service of his poetic theme: In the Preface to his geographical dictionary, De Montibus, etc., he says that he has prepared this book especially for students of poetry and history, particularly of the works of pagan writers, to help in explaining geographical allusions. He must have been well aware that very similar would be one of the uses of the Genealogy of the Gods. (xiv)

For Osgood, Boccaccio’s text is of interest precisely because he is a practitioner: he is an expert witness for the defence of poetry: Boccaccio’s defence has the superior value which must attach to a discussion of poetry by a poet, not by a mere professional critic. It is thus of a kind with the essays of Horace, Tasso, Ronsard, DuBellay, Sidney, Spenser, Jonson, Boileau, Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley. Like most of these it is polemic, or at least was provoked by stupid and prejudiced mishandling of the subject. (xxx)

29 The Osgood text has been reprinted by a number of different publishers over the years (e.g., New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1956; Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956, 1978). Solomon lists some editions and translations in his bibliography, The Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, 1:827–9; for all the English translations, including further excerpts from Osgood, see also my bibliography of the minor works in Studi sul Boccaccio, 38 (2010), 167–204.

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This quotation is telling, in that it contains the crux of Osgood’s intentions for his translation. Boccaccio should be seen primarily as a “world” poet, rather than a narrowly Italian one (the literary world being made up of Latin, Italian, French, and English authors, which one presumes were Osgood’s languages of competence); his aim is universal – the defence of poetry – and his reach is international. Unlike previous translators, who concentrated on Boccaccio’s importance for English studies, Osgood situates him in a European tradition, but the net effect is roughly the same with respect to the sending culture. Although Osgood may see this work as being “about” Boccaccio, and a way of making the text more “accessible” and “intelligible,” the translation project is (of course) essentially concerned with the receiving culture. Despite the translator’s ambitions to open up the world of Boccaccio to a new audience, and the scholarly paratextual accretions designed to further this aim, the published artefact is very much a product of pre-war Ivy League academic publishing, rather than a vignette of medieval Latin culture. Some material features of the book, such as the layout of the target text, underline this: Boccaccio’s Latin prose is rendered in a fluent English, but not presented in parallel with the source text as was the text of the Olympia, for example. The scholarly intention is absolutely not philological or linguistic: there is no discussion of Boccaccio’s Latin prose style or elements such as textual variants, beyond a rather general note in the preface about the source edition: The translation is based upon Hecker’s text as published in his BoccaccioFunde, Brunswick, 1902, from an autograph which embodies Boccaccio’s latest known revisions of his text [note: Hecker, pp. 107, 134.] The so-called Vulgate text, which is the text of all other manuscripts and editions, is earlier. The significant differences, however, are not many nor great. (v)

Similarly, Osgood does not problematize his activity as a translator in the short paragraph describing his practice: I have not attempted a closely literal rendering. It has often been necessary to disregard the limits of Boccaccio’s sentences, or to resort to something like paraphrase, in order to convey more of the meaning as well as the quality of the orignial [sic]. (v)

The notes that follow the text are admirably detailed, but their focus is consistently on the “content” of the text rather than its form or

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linguistic peculiarities. Osgood’s Genealogy, while well contextualized, is therefore none the less somewhat deracinated linguistically and culturally, which is perhaps an inevitable result of the circumstances of its production and publishing context. The translation itself tends to follow the source text closely, but has sometimes been criticized on grounds of accuracy.30 Osgood translates all of the extracts from the Genealogia included in the Hecker edition, with the exception of the proems to books II–XIII.31 All the titles (incipits, explicits, and chapter headings) are translated, although Osgood inserts a chapter number before each of these in his text, whereas Hecker notes this in the margin. Typographically, Osgood’s titles are all set in small capitals, with the effect that they break up the text much more than Hecker’s, which are printed in bold type. Another editorial clarification on Osgood’s part is the insertion of the “voices” in the “Preface” to underline its dialogic aspect: while Hecker’s text reproduces the dialogue between author and dedicatee in the proem as continuous prose, Osgood marks out the words of “Boccaccio” and “Donino” via their names, again in small capitals.32 Finally, in comparison with Hecker, Osgood’s translation is determinedly non-philological. None of the detailed apparatus or finding aids to the manuscripts that characterize the source edition are maintained in this translation, and the overall effect is very much to remove the medieval alterity of Boccaccio’s text and substitute it with an invisible modern English prose style and unforbidding critical apparatus. This is perhaps not surprising when we consider both the background of the translator and his presumed target audience: undergraduates in English literature and comparative literature programs with little or no command of Latin or other languages apart from English. As was the case for Gollancz’s Olympia, Boccaccio’s Latin works tend not to be translated for an Italianist audience, but instead for a broader

30 E.g., see Rudolph Altrocchi’s review in Speculum, 6 (1931), 624–5, where he lists numerous errors in the volume, singling out for particular criticism “Office buildings […] for fori […] as too modern and too American” (624); Paul Shorey’s review in Classical Philology, 26 (1931), 226, likewise praises the rendering in general terms but also notes that “he occasionally seems to have missed the meaning of a word or phrase.” 31 Hecker, Boccaccio-Funde, 171–88. 32 The most recent translator, Solomon, marks out the dialogue using quotation marks, single in the Latin text and double in the facing-page English.

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literary constituency, in a way that allows these modern translations to have a transdisciplinary appeal analogous to that of the transnational readerships they enjoyed in their transcontinental reading communities in the medieval period. However, the publication of these two very different editions of the Latin Boccaccio also reveals a more pragmatic stimulus: the publication of some of Boccaccio’s Latin works in a recently published edition offers a way for non-Italian speakers to nonetheless undertake a prestigious project, allowing them to associate themselves with the learned (and hence not the popular or romance) Boccaccio. Two American Filostratos of the 1920s The Filostrato, too, benefited from the trend for publishing translations of classic authors in the large American university presses. As seen in the previous chapter, this work was first partially translated into English by William Rossetti in the late nineteenth century for the Chaucer Society. In the 1920s, two new translations were published within five years of each other: the first, a verse rendering by Hubertis Cummings in 1924, and the second, a parallel-text edition by Nathaniel Edward Griffin and Arthur Beckwith Myrick, published in 1929. Both translations again emerge from the American academic community, and in both cases American academic presses take the lead, with simultaneous publication in London. However, despite these superficial similarities, the two works are very different in intention and execution, and their differences exemplify different trends in scholarly translation in the first half of the twentieth century. The first translation, by Hubertis Cummings, is very firmly in the English studies camp, having more in common with Rossetti’s nineteenth-century translation than with the other translations of Boccaccio appearing elsewhere in the 1920s. The title page alone privileges the English reception tradition, giving Boccaccio second billing to the tale made famous by Chaucer: Il Filostrato: The story of the love of Troilo as it was sung in Italian by Giovanni Boccaccio and is now translated into English verse by Hubertis Cummings (iii). Cummings, like the other twentiethcentury translators of Boccaccio in this chapter, was an Anglicist, rather than Italianist, and signs himself “Assistant Professor of English Literature in the University of Cincinnati” at the end of his preface (xi). Cummings had form in this field before this translation, with a 1914 doctoral dissertation entitled “The Indebtedness of Chaucer’s Works to

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the Italian Works of Boccaccio,” and so his partisanship in favour of the English poet is easily explicable in terms of his own research focus.33 In physical features, the book is a small octavo hardback, very similar in size to the previously discussed Boccaccio on Poetry, published by Princeton six years later. However, it differs markedly from the later volume in its lack of scholarly paratexts, and also in the presence of some decorative details, which are presumably intended to convey the “romance,” or perhaps “poetic,” genres. On the title page, for example, there is a short Italian tag set in small italic type that reads “E voi amanti prego che ascoltiate” (And you, lovers, I beg you to listen), which, although unreferenced, is taken from the Filostrato itself (I, 6, 1). In addition, the header title for each subsection of the book is set in capital letters between two decorative borders, recalling the visual conventions of earlier print books of the hand-press period. In terms of space, the book itself is chiefly concerned with the target text, which takes up the majority of the pagination, and thus contains relatively little supporting material. The title page (iii) is followed by the preface (v–xi) and a table of contents (xiii), while the translation takes up the majority of the rest of the book (1–187). The back matter comprises some “Notes on the Translation” (189–94) and a very brief bibliography (195). Cummings’s justification of his task as translator is artfully set out in his preface. The novelty of this translation, as he points out himself, is that it is a verse rendering of a verse source text, already well known in English through Chaucer. But his work is not redundant, as he is bringing a little-known aspect of Boccaccio’s literary production to an English audience: This translation of Boccaccio’s Filostrato has not been prepared with a purpose primarily of adding to the rich storehouse of English poetry. To add further ornament to English Literature would at any time be most difficult; but to seek to add at a point where Chaucer has already made the supreme contribution in his Troilus and Criseyde would be the height of temerity. In that poem, more than five hundred years ago, appeared the best gift that the Filostrato, its chief source, could hope to make to lovers of story in English verse.

33 The dissertation was published as The Indebtedness of Chaucer’s Works to the Italian Works of Boccaccio: A Review and Summary (Menasha, WI: George Banta, 1916) and was republished in 1965 and 1967.

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Yet my work upon the translation of the old Italian narrative poem on which Chaucer’s tale of the unhappy love of Troilus is founded, and upon a translation of it into English verse, has not been without purpose. Two of  “the all Etruscan Three” of whom Byron [...] sings in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Dante, and Petrarch, and scarce less than they, The Bard of Prose, creative spirit! he Of the hundred Tales of love. are familiar figures in English Literature. He who lists may read Dante and Petrarch from their own lips speaking in English poetry. But it is not so with the “Bard of Prose.” He seldom speaks to us in the language of English verse. We have been introduced to him in poetry, to be sure, by Chaucer in The Clerk’s Tale, by Longfellow in his story of The Falcon of Ser Federigo; [...] but [...] however charming the English verses that have introduced Boccaccio, we have met him only as the “Bard of Prose,” the author of the Decamerone. [...] As a “Bard of Verse” – translated English verse for Italian verse – we have then met Boccaccio the poet only in a few modest and little known sonnet translations by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. (v–vii)

One of the most interesting features of Cummings’s self-presentation is the way in which he conflates adaptation and translation itself, a way that is entirely congruent with the historic misconceptions of the status and function of Boccaccio in English literature (as exemplified, not least, by Herbert Wright’s book Boccaccio in England from Chaucer to Tennyson). From this perspective, Boccaccio’s works are thus reduced to their “content”: tales to be retold for the English audience, in such a way as to give an equivalent rendering of their style and genre in the original Italian. In terms of target text, for Cummings, and others of this mindset, prose is best translated as prose, and verse as verse; like William Rossetti’s brother, Dante Gabriel, he privileges an aesthetic re-presentation of the source text rather than a literal translation of the meaning. Cummings thus wants to redeem Boccaccio in the eyes of an English readership as a poet, not just as the author of the Decameron, an aim that also informed Osgood’s translation of the poetic books of the Genealogia, as we have seen. But rather than presenting the Italian author’s own treatise on poetry, as Osgood does, Cummings will invent Boccacciothe-poet through his own artistry: It has been largely the hope of this present translation that that it might introduce him [i.e., Boccaccio] anew to English readers as a poet. For the

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fact that Boccaccio is best known, and should be best known in English as the airy and graceful narrator of the famous novelle should not debar him from the privilege of being known more largely to us in our own language in that capacity. The author of the Decamerone, the first great student and critic of Dante, the friend and intimate of Petrarch, the writer of an ardent defense of poetry in one of the books of his De genealogiis Deorum – and so an ancestor of criticism of Sir Philip Sidney and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Boccaccio has, it seems to me, for his very achievements’ sake deserved a ranking among the poets. May it be the good fortune of this text of the Filostrato to bring him a little nearer to that place in the English language! (vi)

Despite this enthusiastic affirmation of Boccaccio’s greatness as a poet, Cummings fails to mention any named works from his Latin and Italian poetic production. Instead, his work must be constantly referred forward in time and space to later English writers. His second aim for the translation is less elevated, if no less anglocentric: But my work has had, too, a more practical and less ambitious purpose. I have wished to make it possible for students of Chaucer more readily to compare Troilus and Criseyde with the story of Troilo, as Boccaccio told it, that they more properly may appraise the merits of both narratives, the English and the Italian. There has been a tendency towards belief that Chaucer’s is a preeminently superior work, more realistic in action and character portrayal, richer in humour, and more mature in wisdom. That such is not invincibly the case I hope may be revealed here. Boccaccio’s work is not sheer romance. The Filostrato may deserve the name of metrical romance which is frequently given to it, but it is, for all those facts, a poem that is written with the clearest psychological truth to human character, and one that exhibits many a sly touch of satire and worldly wisdom. At times, too, it has a piquancy that even Chaucer’s geniality does not entirely transcend. It is different in manner from Troilus and Criseyde rather than distinctly inferior in quality. (vi–vii)

The translation itself is a hugely impressive piece of work, which maintains a complicated versification throughout the nine cantos, for a total of 713 stanzas in all. In the last part of the preface, the translator gives some indication of his method: he has translated stanza for stanza throughout, maintaining the ottava rima and only changing the metre of the last line of each verse, as he explains here:

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The last line of the stanza (which is usually made, like all the other seven, one of iambic pentameter) has here been regularly converted into an alexandrine, like the last verse of a Spenserian sonnet. The assuming of this liberty has made somewhat easier the task of translating stanza for stanza, rhyme scheme for rhyme scheme; and it has not unpleasantly altered the iambic rhythm. (x)

In a further note, he explains how the constraints of the metre have affected his rendering of the names of the characters, although “the reader will readily be guided by the iambic structure of the verse.”34 Stylistically, he admits resorting sometimes to archaism in lexis, “in such terms as ruth, hent, pent, joyaunce, pleasaunce, and gentilesse” (x), and indeed, a contemporary reviewer commends those “eminently appropriate archaisms of French derivation used by Chaucer.”35 The superimposed Chaucerian medievalism is also acknowledged in Cummings’s decision to refer to male characters with the culturally differentiated choice “knight” or “prince,” a decision he justifies in generic terms: “in the translation of a poem that belongs to the genre of romance it has not seemed presumptuous to refer to the several male characters of Il Filostrato with the terms knight or prince” (x). In addition to this stylistic choice to render a medieval Italian text in ways that recall medieval English culture, rather than Italian, he also attempts a decorative amplification of Boccaccio’s text in the dialogue passages: “the Italian verb disse and similar indefinite verbs employed by Boccaccio to introduce direct discourse have been [...] translated by more expressive verbs in the English” (x). The effect of these notes is to highlight Cummings’s seriousness of purpose and technical expertise in producing this verse translation; at the same time, however, they do reveal the unassailably English orientation of his interest in Boccaccio, and the lack of a scholarly paper trail with regard to the Italian source text and its wider literary culture. The bibliography is highly limited, providing only two references under “Works” to the Moutier seventeen-volume edition of the Opere Volgari, Florence, 1827–34, and a recent inexpensive edition of the Filostrato, vols. 146–8 in the Bibliotheca Romanica series, published in Strasbourg. Cummings does not specify which is his source edition, although it is probably safe to presume he used both if

34 “Notes on the Translation,” 189. 35 Nathaniel E. Griffin, in Modern Language Notes, 40 (1925), 292–7 (293).

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they are both presented here. The remainder of his bibliography is strictly anglophone: he cites Symonds’s (1895) and Hutton’s (1909) biographies of Boccaccio, an article on Boccaccio’s “Defence of Poetry” in PMLA, and two “Works comparing Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde with Il Filostrato,” one of which is his own doctoral thesis. The essentially aesthetic and Anglicist aims of this volume are thus borne out in nuce even here in the bibliography. Cummings’ translation is a highly targeted performance that seeks to achieve aesthetic equivalence of the Boccaccian source text through the prism of the text’s own function as a source for Chaucer.36 It is a terrific, if mannered, tour-de-force of poetic ingenuity. However, a contemporary reviewer, one Nathaniel Griffin, took considerable issue with this production.37 While Griffin commends those “eminently appropriate archaisms of French derivation used by Chaucer” (293), he finds many other aspects of this rendering wanting in his 1925 review of the book. Griffin, we should note, would go on to publish his own, very different translation of the Filostrato four years later, and he may even have decided to produce his own version to compensate for what he felt were the shortcomings of Cummings’s rendering, as we will see. The first criticism that can be made is on grounds of completeness. This poetic translation is not complete, since it lacks any translation of the prose sections of the Filostrato, which comprise the titular rubric, proemio, the summary rubrics at the beginning of every chapter, and other rubrics that are occasionally interspersed between the stanzas at marked points in the narrative in the source editions. These elements are not merely what I have termed elsewhere “organizational paratexts” but instead form part of the authorial text, and their omission in this rendering shows his focus on the English “use” of the text, that is, as poetry, rather than the integrity of the Italian source.38 Moreover, the decision to privilege the verse form does lead to an inevitable alteration in the meaning, as can be seen in a simple comparison of the opening stanzas of the first canto:

36 For a discussion of issues around poetic translation, see Jean Boase-Beier, “Poetry,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 2nd ed., ed. Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha (London: Routledge, 2009), 194–6. 37 Griffin, review, in Modern Language Notes, 40 (1925), 292–7. 38 Guyda Armstrong, “Paratexts and Their Functions in Seventeenth-Century English Decamerons,” MLR, 102 (2007), 42. On the omission of the prose proemio, see Griffin’s review, 295–7.

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The English Boccaccio Some poets, Lady, still of Jove do crave Fair favour for poetic enterprise; Others invoke Apollo’s aid to save Their fragile verse. E’en I, with frequent sighs, Besought Parnassian Muses, all too grave, My theme to lift through music to the skies; But Love, who changed old use, doth now require I seek thine aid alone my true song to inspire. Thou, Lady, art that clear and lovely light Which in the darkness still my life illumes; And thou that only star serenely bright Whose ray, across the mountains, sweet assumes The guidance of my bark from storm and night Till anchored there, where joyous comfort blooms, – With, – who art my Phoebus, – art my Jove, – My Muse, – and all the good I feel and know of Love! Lady, thy absence now, to me a woe Greater than death itself, constrains my will To write the grievous life of Troilo Whenafter Criseis, who caused his ill, Was forced, yet all in love with him, to go Outside the Trojan walls, ere either fill Of amorous delights had known; so, wise, Thy puissant aid I seek for this my enterprise! (Cummings, Filostrato, I, 1–3) Alcun di Giove sogliono il favore ne’ loro principii pietosi invocare, altri d’Apollo chiamano il valore; io di Parnaso le Muse pregare solea ne’ miei bisogni, ma Amore novellamente m’ha fatto mutare il mio costume antico e usitato, po’ fui di te, madonna, innamorato. Tu, donna, se’ la luce chiara e bella per cui nel tenebroso mondo accorto vivo; tu se’ la tramontana stella la quale io seguo per venire a porto;

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àncora di salute tu se’ quella che se’ tutto ’l mio bene e ’l mio conforto; tu mi se’ Giove, tu mi se’ Apollo, tu se’ mia musa, io l’ho provato e sollo. Per che, volendo per la tua partita, più grieve a me che morte e più noiosa, scriver qual fosse la dolente vita di Troiolo, da poi che l’amorosa Criseida di Troia sen fu ita, e come prima gli fosse graziosa, a te convienmi per grazia venire, s’i’ vo’ poter la mia ’mpresa fornire.

(Filostrato, I, 1–3)39

A direct comparison of the Italian and English stanzas reveals that, although Cummings broadly follows the source text in his progression, the constraints of his chosen verse form combined with his own literary aims mean that he reorders elements, adds in additional vocabulary, and anticipates the plot in a way that does not occur in Boccaccio. In the first stanza, for example, he translates Boccacccio’s “Alcun” as “Some poets”; this certainly works better for the English iambic rhythm, but nonetheless has the effect of making manifest something that was only implied in Boccaccio. More significant, perhaps, is his direct address to his “Lady,” which occurs in the first line of each of the first four stanzas in the English version but only once in this place (in stanza 2) in the Italian. The authorial personaggio in Boccaccio does address his “madonna” in the first stanza, but in the last line of the octave, not the first, which gives an entirely different progression to the poem. In Boccaccio, the first stanza builds to the moment when the narrator falls in love with his beloved, while the concluding couplet in Cummings has a quite different meaning: that the poet appeals directly for her help in inspiring his work. Cummings here concretizes something that is again only implied in Boccaccio, and makes the opening invocatory appeal to the female beloved much more explicit. The moment of “innamoramento” is sidelined in favour of a personified Love who requires the author to reject conventional poetic intermediaries in favour of the love-object. Interestingly, Cummings acknowledges his textual distortions of this passage in the endnotes, but has evidently chosen to favour 39 All citations from the Filostrato are here taken from the critical edition edited by Vittore Branca in Tutte le opere, 2:1–228.

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a less literal, but more “poetic,” rendering in the text proper: “I, 5–8. The original, beginning with ma amore, is more accurately to be translated: ‘But love recently has made me change my ancient, long used custom, since I have been, lady, enamoured of thee’” (190). The points where his text diverges substantially from that of Boccaccio’s should therefore not necessarily be seen as incompetence (as Griffin implies in his review), but rather a compromise between English poetic form and source Italian content. The constant and repeated recourse to the “Lady” in Cummings’s version can be seen to serve a more important function in terms of the translation frame, however. Since this English rendering does not include the prose proemio (the site of the Italian text’s first dedication to the female beloved), its opening invocatory function is transferred to the first stanza of the poem; Cummings’s decision to move the object of address to the very first line therefore accentuates its dedicatory and invocatory function, which must occur in a different textually marked place in his version in the absence of the dedication passage. Cummings’s versification also demands the insertion of additional vocabulary to make the metre and rhyme-scheme work, which contributes to the sense of utter conventionality in the execution, as seen, for example, in the rhymes “enterprise” | “sighs” | “skies”; further amplification can also be found in constructions such as “save | their fragile verse,” and “all too grave,” which impute an additional level of meaning beyond that which Boccaccio intended. Similar strategies are visible in the second stanza: the marvellous compression of Boccaccio’s phrase “la tramontana stella | la quale io seguo per venire a porto” takes up the best part of half the stanza in English (although again Cummings presents the more literal rendering in the notes: “These two lines, beginning with tu sei say more accurately: ‘Thou art the transmontane star which I follow in order to come to port’” [190]). In the third stanza, we see an example of how Cummings anticipates the story to come in a way that does not occur in the source text: “Whenafter Criseis, who caused his ill, | Was forced, yet all in love with him, to go | Outside the Trojan walls, ere either fill | Of amorous delights had known” (while Boccaccio’s text does not reveal Criseida to be the cause of Troilo’s misery). These changes are presumably made with the primary aim of making the English words fit the constraints of the versification, but also perhaps because Cummings wishes to flag up to his English audience what will happen, in order, so as to create narrative suspense. Indeed, in the source text, this function is fulfilled by another part of the text left untranslated by Cummings, the rubric that

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introduces the chapter: “Qui comincia la prima parte del libro chiamato Filostrato, dell’amorose fatiche di Troilo, nella quale si pone come Troilo s’innamorasse di Criseida, e gli amorosi sospiri e le lacrime per lei avute prima che ad alcuno il suo occulto amore discoprisse.” The second version of the Filostrato to be made in this period is the parallel-text rendering by the aforementioned Nathaniel Edward Griffin and Arthur Beckwith Myrick, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1929.40 This volume is very different from its predecessor in physical size, form, the “shape” of the translated text, and authorial intentions; indeed, it probably should be seen as a reaction to Cummings’s translation, and an attempt to address its shortcomings as perceived and articulated by Griffin in his 1925 review. While acknowledging the aesthetic pleasures of the poetic translation (its “facile and graceful artistry”), Cummings strongly doubted its advertised scholarly usefulness; and the copious notes and diligent documentation of this second translation are designed to leave the reader in no doubt about the seriousness of the Griffin/Myrick enterprise. Griffin made a number of specific criticisms in the review – such as the difficulty of comparing the source text with Chaucer via a metrical English rendering, the often inaccurate translation of the “exact meaning” of the original, and most importantly, the omission of the proemio from the text translated, and each of these perceived shortcomings is addressed in his own version. Certainly, with this book Griffin and Myrick do succeed in wrestling the Filostrato back from a purely Chaucerian usefulness, and reinstate its Italianity to some degree, evidenced from the first in its title, The Filostrato of Giovanni Boccaccio. Like the other American translators of Boccaccio’s minor works, Nathaniel Griffin (1873–1940) and Arthur Beckwith Myrick (1875–?) attended elite higher educational institutions. Griffin, like Cummings and Osgood, emerged from English studies and comparative literature programs rather than from the field of Italian studies. He received his doctorate on the history of the Troy narrative from Johns Hopkins in 1899, and then was assistant professor in English Literature at Princeton for some years before working as an editor on Webster’s Dictionary. He eventually moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and continued

40 The Filostrato of Giovanni Boccaccio. A Translation with Parallel Text by Nathaniel Edward Griffin and Arthur Beckwith Myrick. With an Introduction by Nathaniel Edward Griffin (Philadelphia and London: University of Pennsylvania Press and Oxford University Press, 1929). This translation will be republished in 1967 (New York: Biblo and Tannen) and 1978 (New York: Octagon Books).

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working as an independent scholar until his death.41 Incidentally, during his time at Princeton, he seemed to have greatly antagonized the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald with his approach to literature. Fitzgerald was one of his students at Princeton, and a marginal note in one of his textbooks betrays his opinion: “Gee but this man Griffin is terrible. I sit here bored to death and hear him pick English poetry to pieces. Small man, small mind. Snotty, disagreeable. Damn him.”42 (In Griffin’s defence, Fitzgerald had just been forced to repeat the academic year due to “scholastic deficiencies” and ill health, so may not have been particularly well disposed to academic study at the time of writing.)43 As a medievalist and Troy specialist, Griffin could therefore remake the English Filostrato in his own image, and his edition is notable for the way in which it situates Boccaccio within a broad tradition of European narrative, rather than merely as a source for Chaucer. Little is known about his collaborator on the translation, Arthur Myrick, apart from the fact that he studied at Harvard University, gaining a Harvard AB in 1900, AM in 1901, and a PhD (“Some notes on Italian borrowings from England in the eighteenth century”) from the Department of Comparative Literature in 1904.44 Apart from the Filostrato, Myrick had also translated from the French, with a version of Théodore de Banville’s Gringoire published in 1916.45 Although Myrick is given co-billing as author of the volume, it is hard to escape the feeling that this project is very much Griffin’s baby, with Myrick roped in primarily for linguistic purposes. Physically, this new version of the Filostrato is a very different from its predecessor. Measuring some 25 cm in height and over five hundred pages long, it is a much more imposing volume than Cummings’s edition (which was surely one of the subliminal intentions of the translator and editors). Some hundred and ten pages (i.e., more than a fifth of the

41 Griffin’s thesis was published as Dares and Dictys: An Introduction to Medieval Versions of the Story of Troy (Baltimore: J.H. Furst Company, 1907). Other biographical information has been obtained from the newspaper article “Professor’s Party,” Time, 3 June 1935, and from his New York Times obituary, 26 August 1940. 42 Matthew Joseph Bruccoli and Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, rev. ed. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 65. 43 Bruccoli and Smith, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, 60. 44 This information has been derived from the Harvard Library records. 45 “Gringoire: Comedy by Théodore de Banville,” trans. Arthur Beckwith Myrick, Poet Lore, 27, no. 2 (1916), 129–63.

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book) are given over to supporting material, while the text is presented in both Italian and English, with Italian on the verso and English on the recto of the opening. The poem is generously laid out, with four stanzas per page and very wide margins at the outer and bottom edge, while the translated passages, although in prose, are spaced and numbered in the same way as the stanzas of verse. In design, the book is not dissimilar to Cummings’s translation, for example containing an ornamental printer’s device on the title page and decorative borders at the head of each section of the text. Both books draw slightly on the visual vocabulary of the hand-made book, in a way that subtly asserts the institutional authority accruing to a university press and the natural importance of its offerings. No editorial stone is left unturned in this volume, which, to judge by its spacious layout and generous use of paper, accords great importance to including as many paratextual parts of the book as possible: the title page (iii) is followed by a copyright statement and print information (iv), then by a Latin dedication from the authors, which reads “carleton ·brown · viro · amico · et · praeclaro | venerabvndi · don · ded | n · e · g | a · b · m” (To Carleton Brown, a distinguished man and friend, this book is respectfully dedicated and given, N· E· G; A· B· M; v). After this comes a short preface (vii–viii), a table of contents (ix), the mighty introduction by Griffin (1–107), and a bibliographical note (109–11); there is then another halftitle page (113), before the text itself begins at page 114. By contrast, the book ends with a whimper at the end of the last translated stanza of the final canto, with no back matter whatsoever. The overall impression of this gigantic offering is one of weightiness, thoroughness, and scholarly intent. The translators are keen to situate themselves as worthy academics from the highest universities in the land (rather than, perhaps, dilettante poets from the University of Cincinnati), both by the sheer heft of the volume and by their effusive thanks to many other esteemed academics in the preface, as well as the Latin dedication to the great American medieval English professor whom they are proud to call “amicus.” In this superabundance of paratextual material, however, there is one very interesting omission: nowhere in the book is there any discussion of the translators’ technique, practice, or intentions for this work. Even though this is a parallel-text edition, their translation practice is almost invisible. Venuti has of course shown how the illusion of transparency and fluent discourse has become by default the dominant style in translation into English, and what we see here is this approach in excelsis: the highly wrought

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versified rendering of Cummings is rejected entirely in favour of a modernized naturalistic and neutral English prose style.46 For Griffin and Myrick, no explanation of their practice is necessary, because it is automatically authorized by its very invisibility. Although there is no discussion of the actual translation process, the preface does contain a paragraph thanking all those who have assisted the authors, more than seven in total (vii). These include “the late Mr. Samuel Harper of Baltimore [who] contributed substantially to laying the foundations of the present translation of the proemio and of the first three cantos of the Filostrato,” and two eminent Italian medievalists, Charles Grandgent and Ernest Hatch Wilkins, among others. Myrick’s contribution is only acknowledged with regard to the translation (“the translators owe these gentlemen a debt of gratitude that cannot be put into words”), since for the second half of the preface it is the “author of the introduction” (Griffin) who goes on to acknowledge his personal debts of gratitude. In the same way, of course, Griffin flags his sole authorship of the Introduction on the title page. Since there are no first-person statements of the translators’ or editor’s motivation in translating this text of Boccaccio’s, we must extrapolate their (or more likely, his) intentions from other parts of the paratext. We have already seen how Griffin levelled certain criticisms at Cummings in his 1925 review, and in a sense, this whole enterprise may well have been undertaken to demonstrate what he felt to be an improved approach to the translation of this text. The lengthy introduction, however, offers Griffin the opportunity to set out his stall as to where the importance of this text lies, and he identifies four principal reasons for its continuing relevance: No other work of Boccaccio combines so varied a range of interest as the Filostrato. The poem possesses an important autobiographical significance because of the parallel drawn by the author between the love of his hero for his heroine and his own love for the lady in whose honor it was written. From the poet’s explanation in the Proemio of the application of the fable to his own case we obtain valuable information concerning this love relationship. The poem also possesses an important literary significance as an epoch-making contribution to the medieval story of Troy. For by enlarging and enriching the love episode of Troilus and Briseida and by 46 See Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008), chap. 1.

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separating it from the war narrative, by which in earlier versions of the Troy story it had been encompassed, Boccaccio virtually created a new story of his own. The poem also possesses an important cultural significance as exemplifying the well-recognized habit of late medieval writers of bringing, in so far as possible, older love stories of whatsoever provenience into conformity with the requirements of the contemporaneous code of Courtly Love. The extent to which the Italian poet has thus transformed his original fable makes of the Filostrato an interesting measure of the degree of authority exercised by Courtly Love in literary composition. Finally, the poem possesses for students of English literature an important significance as inaugurating one of the most enduring love traditions in English poetry. As we all know, the Filostrato served Chaucer as the source of his masterpiece, the Troilus and Criseyde, while Chaucer’s poem furnished Shakespeare with the love plot of his play of Troilus and Cressida, subsequently imitated by Dryden. (1–2)

This opening statement sets the tone for the following 106 pages of introduction, and shows immediately that Griffin is no Italianist, nor cutting-edge textual critic. His background as a comparativist is useful in moving the Filostrato away from a purely Chaucerian function, but his dogged and misguided focus on an autobiographical inspiration for the text is highly restrictive, while his interesting comments on textual transmission are overshadowed by the nebulous influence of “Courtly Love.” Each of the four reasons for the text’s interest is then explored at some considerable length in individual sections of the introduction, accompanied by copious footnotes. The sections are “I. Boccaccio and Maria d’Aquino,” which rehearses the conventional invented romantic biography derived largely from the authorial personaggio in Boccaccio’s early vernacular romance works; “II. The Composition of the Filostrato,” a very detailed discussion of the links between this text and its sources; “III. The Filostrato as a Courtly Love Document,” which attempts, not very successfully, to analyse the text within historical courtly practice, Boccaccio’s romantic autobiography, and literary texts; and “IV. The Bearing of the Filostrato upon English Literature,” which is selfexplanatory (although it is perhaps telling that Cummings is mentioned only as the author of a book on “The indebtedness of Chaucer”s works to the Italian works of Boccaccio” (101n1), with no mention made anywhere in this book of the preceding translation). Overall, the introduction is floridly overwritten and often factually inaccurate; some of the grosser errors are pointed out by Edmund Gardner in his review (which

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praises the book most of all for its attractive physical features, and damns the introduction as “adequate”).47 Apart from these errors, the main problem with Griffin’s critical perspective lies in its unquestioning reliance on this simplistic construction of Boccaccio-the-lover, which informs all Griffin’s discussion of the text and its author. For a supposedly scholarly edition, this is a curiously outdated view of Boccaccio and his works, and demonstrates once again the way in which the popular perception of Boccaccio bleeds into the so-called university editions – a result, of course, of the fact that these works are rarely prepared by Boccaccio (or even Italian) specialists. As Anglicists, or independent scholars, the American translators of Boccaccio of the 1920s do not necessarily know (or care) about recent Boccaccio scholarship; linguistically one suspects that they were not really up to reading Italian philological studies (certainly in the case of Griffin, if not others), relying instead on outdated English-language biographies of the author such as Hutton’s. Even Griffin’s supposedly academic overview of Boccaccio’s work betrays this worldview: To the average reader Boccaccio is known only as one of the world’s greatest story-tellers, as the author of the Decameron. Only the narrower circle of the professed students of humanism know him also as one of the pioneers of the Revival of Learning, as the author of the De Genealogia Deorum, of the De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, and of the De Montibus, Silvis, Fontibus, et Lacubus. Only the still smaller circle of those who have chanced to interest themselves in his biography, know him likewise, as they know Dante and Petrarch, as one of the world’s greatest lovers, as the author of a series of romances in which, like his two great Italian contemporaries, he turned his love experiences to literary account. (2)

Although Griffin is presumably proclaiming himself to be one of that rare band of elite readers, if nothing else, this outdated view of Dante reveals his exclusion from the circles of the Dante Society, meeting

47 “The Filostrato has assuredly never been presented before in so attractive an external garb as that in which it now comes to us from America, and students of Boccaccio will be glad to have the handsome volume upon their shelves”: Edmund G. Gardner, review of Studi di filologia italiana. Bullettino della R. Accademia della Crusca, vol. 2 (1929) and The Filostrato of Giovanni Boccaccio, trans. N.E. Griffin and A.B. Myrick, MLR, 25.3 (1930), 363–4.

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down the road from him in Cambridge, Massachusetts. More significantly, he seems unaware of or uninterested in the presence of Italian studies in the American universities: the American Association of Teachers of Italian was, after all, founded a few years earlier in 1923, and might be presumed to have a more nuanced view of Boccaccio’s vernacular and Latin works than that espoused by Griffin above.48 The problematic focus on the author as lover persists throughout, with much time spent on prurient speculation, along the lines of “As to the personality of Maria, we are left much in the dark. It seems likely, however, that she possessed beauty and a strong liking for tales of an amatory complexion. That she was voluptuous does not admit of a doubt” (13–14). Although this edition is not overtly positioned as a “romance,” in terms of appearance, layout, and textual apparatus, it nonetheless possesses many of the usual traits of the typical non-scholarly English Boccaccio translation. In terms of textual integrity, this translated text is, however, more extensive than Cummings’s, and is shown to be such via the parallel text presentation. The Italian text reproduces Ignazio Moutier’s text in his Opere volgari di Giovanni Boccaccio, with the textual differences found in the Bibliotheca romanica edition noted in the footnotes.49 All parts of the Italian text as found in Moutier are translated, from the explanatory title onward, which is presented in Moutier as the first paragraph of the proemio: Filostrato è il titolo di questo libro; e la cagione è, perchè ottimamente si confà cotal nome con l’effetto del libro. Filostrato tanto viene a dire, quanto uomo vinto ed abbattuto da amore, come vedere si può che fu Troilo, dell’amore del quale in questo libro si racconta; perciocchè egli fu da amore vinto sì fortemente amando Criseida, e cotanto s’afflisse nella sua partita, che poco mancò che morte non lo sorprendesse.50 Filostrato is the title of this book and the reason is that this name comporteth excellently with the purport of the book. Filostrato is as much as to say a man vanquished and stricken down by Love, as can be seen was

48 For the history of the AATI and Italian Studies in North America, see their website at http://www.utm.utoronto.ca/~aati/aati_history.html (accessed 17 June 2012). 49 Griffin/Myrick, vii. 50 Griffin/Myrick, 114–15; note that the critical text in Branca, Tutte le opere, vol. 2, ends at the word “partita.”

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Troilus, the story of whose love is related in this book; for he was vanquished by Love in so strongly loving Cressida and so much grieved by her departure that little was wanting that death should come upon him.

As can be seen even from this short extract above, the target text follows the source text very closely, with a substantial amount of interference from the source text in syntax, as seen, for example, in formulations such as “Filostrato is as much as to say a man vanquished,” or “that little was wanting that death should come upon him.” Griffin and Myrick favour archaic verb forms (“comporteth”) and the Shakespearean form of the names. Their dependence on the Moutier edition extends to the naming of the parts of the book: the individual books are “Parts,” after the Italian “Parte,” while the initial rubrics are entitled “Argument” after the Italian “Argomento.” The mise-en-page of this book is very different from that of the poetic version, with the Italian text on the verso page of the opening and the English on the recto. As far as possible, the layout is deliberately mirrored on both sides, with an ornamental design above the title for the first page, and a rule separating the title from the text itself. The introductory rubric is presented underneath the rule in italic type, with the title set in capitals. The main text of the poem is then printed below in roman, and each stanza is numbered; the Italian verse on the left is set in a noticeably smaller type size than the prose on the right. The pages have generous margins with ample room for marginalia, and the proportions of the page and its elegant design recall that of the hand-press book. The aim of this layout and page design is clearly to aid the reader to use both languages, since the English translation is locked to the Italian at every point. The choice of a prose rendering, likewise, is surely intended to present the Italian text to the English reader with the minimum of extraneous stylistic interference (and with therefore an implied criticism throughout of the ornate versification of Cummings). If we consider the rendering of the first three stanzas of part 1, then a direct comparison may be made with Cummings: 1. Some are wont in their pious openings to invoke the favor of Jove; others call upon the might of Apollo. I was wont in my need to implore the muses of Parnassus, but Love hath recently caused me to change my longaccustomed habit, since I became enamored of thee, my lady.

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2. Thou, lady, art the clear and beautiful light under whose guidance I live in this world of shadows; thou art the lodestar which I follow to come to port; anchor of safety, thou to me art Jove, thou to me art Apollo, thou art my muse; I have proved it and know it. 3. Therefore in undertaking because of thy departure – more grievous to me than death and more distressing – to write what was the sorrowful life of Troilus after the amorous Cressida had departed from Troy and how, previous to that, she had been gracious to him, it is fitting that I come to thee for grace, if I am to finish my enterprise.

The first and most obvious difference between this and Cummings’s version is the choice to render the text in English prose. In his review of Cummings, Griffin suggested that “a close literal rendering” would be necessary to allow readers to compare Boccaccio’s Italian with Chaucer’s English, and that Cummings’s metrical version was regrettably unsuitable for this task; and so he and Myrick have chosen to present the text in this way.51 Certainly, the English target text adheres closely to the syntax of the Italian, and is generally highly intelligible. However, the compensatory price for syntactical closeness is the corresponding lack of poetic effect such as metre, assonance, alliteration, and so on (for example, compare Griffin/Myrick’s prose with Cummings’s opening couplet of: “Some poets, Lady, still of Jove do crave | Fair favour for poetic enterprise”). In their concentration on the literal content of Boccaccio’s poem, the later translators necessarily sacrifice an adequacy of form and acoustic features. Like Cummings, they favour an archaicizing lexis, although this might again in part be due to the constraints of the enforced syntactical rigidity, as seen in the choice of “wont,” and “was wont” for “solere”; no practical reason presumably obtained for the choice of the affective and formal “thou art” (e.g., “thou art she who art all my weal,” §2), which could just as easily be rendered in modern English. Interestingly, though, all these examples are common in Middle English, and it seems likely that Griffin and Myrick intend to

51 “Undoubtedly such a close literal rendering as would provide opportunity for this minute phraseological comparison [between Boccaccio and Chaucer] is largely, if not wholly, precluded by the choice on the part of the translator of a metrical rendering”: Griffin, review, 294.

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give the flavour of a historically contiguous (if unrelated) linguistic context. Although this is thus a prose rendering, it is not a modernization, and could still present some problems for a modern less-expert reader. However, since the principal implied English audience in Griffin’s review is the “student of Chaucer,” the translators may have judged that problems of the intelligibility of Middle English forms were probably not too great. For the Italian studies undergraduate seeking a crib (nowadays, probably the primary audience of this text since the advent of newer, more Chaucer-focused versions), however, the unfamiliar medieval English vocabulary could well obstruct the meaning. Elsewhere, due to this scrupulous attention to the letter of the source text, there is no scope for dramatic invention or narrative prefiguring, as was seen in Cummings’s treatment of the same stanzas. The Griffin/Myrick edition of the Filostrato anticipates by some sixty years the explicitly “educational” bilingual editions of Boccaccio’s texts such as the 1986 Amorosa visione and Filostrato, 1987 Eclogues, and 1991 Caccia di Diana, being a parallel-text presentation of the work with copious supporting material.52 However, unlike these later editions, the 1929 Filostrato is still a non-specialist production, prepared by an expert of English rather than Italian, made from outdated philological sources and with an essentially non-Italian intention. Nonetheless, the Griffin/ Myrick translation and Osgood’s near-contemporary translation of books XIV and XV of the Genealogia point the way forward for the postwar scholarly editions of Boccaccio, and represent in their own way a high point of Boccaccio’s reception and emergent authorization in the anglophone world during the period covered by this study. The Republication of the Historic English Translations This chapter concludes with a discussion of the final group of Boccaccio translations made in the 1920s and early 1930s. These are the historic medieval and early modern translations, rediscovered and republished in a variety of formats and for a variety of intended readerships. The

52 Giovanni Boccaccio, Amorosa visione, trans. Robert Hollander, Timothy Hampton, and Margherita Frankel (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1986); Il Filostrato, trans. Robert P. ApRoberts and Anna Seldis Bruni (New York: Garland, 1986); Eclogues, ed. and trans. Janet Levarie Smarr (New York: Garland, 1987); Diana’s Hunt/Caccia di Diana: Boccaccio’s First Fiction, trans. Anthony K. Cassell and Victoria Kirkham (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1991).

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printed destinies of these translations are differentiated by editorial perceptions of the genre and functions of both the source and target texts, and their perceived usefulness to different reading constituencies, the whole conditioned by the wide range of publishing possibilities in this period. These translations have already been discussed in their historic production contexts in chapters 1 to 3 of this book, but the forms in which they now reappear in the third decade of the twentieth century express the dramatic changes in Boccaccio’s literary reception in the anglophone world, as well as the vertiginous developments in textual technologies and reading practices over the previous halfmillennium. In the concluding part of this study, then, we have thus come full circle, meeting the oldest books in new forms. In this way, the manuscripts of Lydgate’s verse paraphrase of the De casibus become the basis of the Early English Text Society’s critical edition of 1923–7, and, perhaps more surprisingly, the Thirteen Questions sequence from the Filocolo can be republished as tasteful erotica, with candid illustrations, in multiple editions by the Illustrated Editions Company of New York.53 The Fall of Princes The first of these reissued translations is coincidentally the first of Boccaccio’s works to be translated into English, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, edited by Henry Bergen and published in four volumes by the Early English Text Society between 1923 and 1927.54 Boccaccio’s translation history had already intersected tangentially with some of the individuals who were involved with the Society, such as Frederick Furnivall, William Rossetti, and Israel Gollancz, but this four-volume edition represents the moment when a translated work of Boccaccio is definitively authorized by publication under the auspices of this scholarly learned society. However, as in the case of the Chaucer Society translations of the Filostrato and Teseida, this authorization is vested in a different 53 The different manifestations of the Filocolo are noted by Victoria Kirkham in her review essay “Two New Translations: The Early Boccaccio in English Dress,” Italica, 70.1 (1993): “It [the Filocolo episode] was reissued with a dignified introduction by Edward Hutton (London: Peter Davies, 1927), and then bizarrely reincarnated on this side of the Atlantic as Boccaccesque eroticism by the Illustrated Editions Company, which distributed their product both in quarto and octavo (New York, 1931)” (80). 54 I am grateful to Professor A.S.G. Edwards for his help on Bergen and the history of the discipline of Middle English Studies.

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tradition from that of the source text. In fact, Boccaccio’s publishing fate through these English societies parallels the development of English medieval studies as a discipline: what began in the late nineteenth century as essentially a hobby for non-academic scholars had become by the 1920s a thoroughly professionalized affair.55 The EETS had been founded primarily as a textual resource for lexicographical and philological purposes, to provide material for the Oxford English Dictionary, and as such, was directed towards lexicographical novelty and English canon formation, but Bergen’s edition transcends this with its scrupulous thoroughness. This edition is the longest work ever published by the Society (closely followed by Lydgate’s Troy Book, also edited by Bergen), and accords much space to Lydgate’s source text – Boccaccio’s De casibus – and its transmission history from Italy, via French, to fifteenth-century England. Either because of the unwieldiness of Lydgate’s poem, or the relative unpopularity of its author, this edition remains the only modern edition of the Fall of Princes since the mid-sixteenth century. The paratextual materials are admirably comprehensive, and serve to situate the poem within a broader European context: for example, the frontispiece to volume 1 is a reproduction of a woodcut of the wheel of fortune, published in the 1545 Augsburg edition of the German translation of the De casibus (FP, I, ii).56 Most of the supporting material is provided in the first and last volumes. Volume 1 contains an “Introductory Note” (ix–xxvii), with details of Lydgate’s poem, Boccaccio’s text, and Laurent’s version, and a discussion of their various approaches to the subject matter. There is also a summary of the source manuscripts used for this edition (chiefly the MS Bodley 263 B), and a detailed survey of the contents of the whole poem (xxiv–xxvii), where “passages of special 55 For an overview of the activity of the EETS, see Antony Singleton, “The Early English Text Society in the Nineteenth Century: An Organizational History,” The Review of English Studies, n.s., 56 (2005), 90–118. On the history of medieval English studies, see David Matthews, The Making of Middle English, 1765–1910 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), esp. chap. 6, “‘Go-a-head-itiveness’: Frederick Furnivall and Early English,” and chap. 7, “‘Wise and Gentle Speech’: From the Chaucer Society to the Universities”; Ralph Hanna, “Middle English Books and Middle English Literary History,” Modern Philology, 102.2 (2004), 157–78. 56 Furnemmste Historien und exempel von widerwertigem Glück, mercklichem und erschroecklichem unfahl, großmaechtiger Kayser Künig Fürsten unnd anderer namhafftiger Herrn in neün Buechern durch de Historischreiber und Poeten Ioannem Boccatium von Certaldo in Latein beschriben (Augsburg: Heinrich von Steiner, in kosten Leonhard Portenbach, 1545).

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interest or charm are marked with asterisks.” This is followed by sections on “The Metre” (xxviii–xlvi), and selected extracts from Boccaccio and Laurent’s versions given in the original Latin and French, with no English translations. The Boccaccio texts comprise “Boccaccio’s Preface to his First Version,” reproduced from “Jean Petit’s post-1507 edition” (xlvii), “Boccaccio’s Preface to his Second Version” (xlviiii), and “Boccaccio’s Letter to Mainardo” (xlix), both from Ziegler’s 1544 edition.57 These are followed by “Laurence’s Translation of Boccaccio’s Preface” (li–lii), “Laurence’s Prologue” (lii–liv), both from the 1483 Du Pré edition, with corrections and additions from manuscripts, and “Laurence’s Dedication to the Duke of Berry” (liv–lxv), from the MS Royal 18. D. VII, again with amendments from other manuscripts.58 The historicity of these two source authors is typographically marked by the presentation of the titles of their source texts in bold gothic type, thus “De Casibus Virorum Illustrium” (xlvii), and then “Des Cas Des Nobles Hommes et Femmes” (li). The text of Lydgate’s poem finally begins after these substantial prefatory paratexts, with the remainder of volume 1 containing books I and II. Volume 2 contains books III–V, and volume 3 contains books VI–IX and also some supplementary material: Greneacre’s Envoy on Bochas (1023), taken from the Rylands manuscript discussed in chapter 1, and an appendix, “The Daunce of Machabree” (1025–44), here included because of its authorship by Lydgate and by virtue of its inclusion alongside the Fall of Princes in Tottel’s 1554 edition. The final volume of the set is given over to an extremely copious supporting apparatus, comprising the editor’s “Preface” (v–vi), contents page (vii–viii), and lengthy bibliographical introduction (1–136). This is then followed by “Notes on Laurence and Bochas” (137–397), an “Appendix, The Chapter on Messalina, Caligula and Tiberius” (399– 403), from Ziegler’s edition, “Notes on The English Text” (405–14), a “Glossary” (415–504), and finally, an “Index to Lydgate’s Text” (505–29). Taken together, Bergen’s edition is an extraordinary achievement of recuperation and structuring that creates Lydgate anew for his twentiethcentury scholarly readers. 57 Ioannis Boccacii Certaldi de casibus illustrium virorum libri (Paris: Jean de Gourmont and Jean Petit, 1514); De certaldo historiographi clarissimi, de casibus virorum illustrium libri novem. Nuc primum ab innumeris, quibus passim scatebat, mendis, studio & opera Hieronymi ziegleri rotenburgensis repurgatus, adiectisq’m paucis scholiis eiusdem, in lucem nunc denuo editus est. Hvc accessit index copiosus (Augsburg: Philipp Ulhart, 1544). 58 De cas et ruyne des nobles hommes et femmes (Paris: Jean Du Pré, 1483).

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This is not the place to go into the politics of the textual editing of the critical edition, but it should perhaps be noted here that – in keeping with the most rigorous philological principles of the time – Bergen’s is a composite edition, based on the idea of a single, lost, ur-version of the text that is reconstructed from later versions. For all its scientific protestations, it is as much of a fantasy document as any of the other incarnations of Boccaccio’s works discussed in this book, and speaks much more of the time of its production than the time of the text’s original composition.59 The copious apparatus is noteworthy, not only for its superabundance of bibliographical and comparative information about the three texts (which has never been surpassed, nor is likely to be), but also for its effect on the critical history of the text. Through his selection and ordering of primary texts, Bergen has here modelled – or perhaps even “invented” – the translation history of the De casibus from Boccaccio to Lydgate, from Italy to England, in a way that has been automatically assimilated by subsequent scholars (and not least, informs this book). In addition, by drawing on the pioneering philological work of scholars such as Emil Koeppel, Henri Hauvette, and Attilio Hortis, Bergen brings their findings to a new, anglophone audience, which may not have been able to access their research in their original languages. Bergen’s contribution to the translation history of this text therefore lies in the disposition of the contents of his edition. No fifteenth-century manuscript presents the three phases of translation in this way, with the prefatory paratexts of Boccaccio and his French translator preceding the natural teleological end point of Lydgate’s poem. Nonetheless, here the source texts have been seamlessly assimilated into the critical book-object, in what is a philologically justified, if historically anachronistic, move. The De mulieribus claris Gustav Schleich’s 1924 edition of the fifteenth-century English manuscript of the De mulieribus (British Library, MS Additional 10304, 59 The material turn in literary studies has moved scholarly interest away from the artificially constructed “definitive version” and instead onto the dynamic genetics of the text. On this, see, for example, Bernard Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); on the editing of Middle English texts, see also Fred Porcheddu, “Edited Text and Medieval Artefact: The Auchinleck Bookshop and ‘Charlemagne and Roland’ Theories, Fifty Years Later,” Philological Quarterly, 80.4 (2001), 465–500.

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discussed in chapter 2 of this book) is an example of a similar cultural appropriation, although this time in the service of German Anglistik studies, rather than “English” English. Schleich was a prolific scholar, who prepared a number of editions of Middle English texts, published in Germany. This edition is therefore primarily directed towards a learned German-language audience, as the edition contains no English text apart from that of the poem itself. It can thus be placed within another strand of English studies than that exemplified by the EETS: one that sought to inscribe English within a different linguistic narrative, of Germanic derivation, rather than one that preferred to locate it within the Latin and Romance-language tradition.60 In the post–First World War landscape, it is therefore salutary to compare the relative products of the anglophone and Germanic academic traditions, and to consider the ways in which Boccaccio (indeed, medieval studies in nuce) is being turned to serve very different cultural ends. While the German scholars seek to underline the links between the literary and linguistic cultures of the northern European countries, and even the dependence of English culture on German antecedents, the anglophone scholar rejects this in favour of a shared linguistic heritage of Latin derivation, which incidentally mirrors the anti-German national alliances of the recent conflict. The auspices under which Schleich’s edition was published perfectly summarize this pro-Germanic argument: the edition appears as volume 144 of the journal Palaestra, subtitled “Untersuchungen und Texte aus der Deutschen und Englischen Philologie” (Studies and Texts of German and English Philology). Although the target text is very much shorter than Lydgate’s, Schleich’s edition contains a similarly detailed apparatus that models this reading of the text. It begins with a “Vorwort” (Foreword), which presents the justification for publishing this translation (iii–iv), and the table of contents (vi). The text itself is preceded by a discussion of the “Überlieferung” (Tradition) of the text, which describes its physical attributes and presents the two Latin poems that frame the proemial section in their entirety. (It is interesting to

60 Matthews describes the proponents of these diverse tendencies as “adherents of the Germanic character of English language and literature and those who wanted to see in English a post-Conquest rejection of the Germanic elements” (The Making of Middle English, 186). For some interesting considerations on nationalistic rivalries and the disciplines of medieval studies, see also Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

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note that Schleich clearly considers them extraneous to the actual verse paraphrase of Boccaccio’s text and so separates them from the rest of the text, even though they are fully integrated into the book-object, as was shown in chapter 2.) Most of the journal issue is taken up with the text itself (3–91), laid out in English and Latin, with the English in the upper part of the page in numbered stanzas and the relevant portions of the Latin text of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus presented in the lower part of the page below a ruled line. Variant readings are noted between the two sections, and both versions are numbered in five-line intervals in the left margin. Immediately following the text is a section on “Quelle” (Sources), which gives details of the two source editions (themselves printed by German printers, of course) used for the Latin text, the 1475 Strassburg edition by Georg Husner, and the 1539 Berne edition by Mathias Apiarius. This section also includes the Latin text of Boccaccio’s dedication to Andrea Acciaiuoli, information on the ordering of the lives in the two print editions and their textual variants, as well as a discussion of other intertextual sources for the English poet, chiefly Ovid, Virgil, and Sallust. The section concludes with some thoughts on the anonymous poet’s motivation in making this version of the De mulieribus: Schwieriger ist die Frage nach dem Ursprung seiner Bekanntschaft mit Boccaccio. War er selbst in Italien gewesen? Hatte ihm jemand Boccaccios Buch [...], mitgebracht? [...] Jedenfalls ist Boccaccio für den Englander der Anlaß gewesen, seinen Landleuten einen Einblick in die Sagenwelt des Altertums zu bieten, and nach der Richtung hin erweitet die englische Bearbeitung die Kenntnis, die wir vom englischen Geistesleben im Anfang des 15. Jahrhunderts besitzen. (105) More difficult is the question of how he became acquainted with Boccaccio. Had he himself been in Italy? Had somebody else brought him back a copy of Boccaccio’s book? [...] At any rate, it was Boccaccio which prompted the Englishman to offer his fellow countrymen an insight into the mythology of the classical world, and in that direction the English version extends the knowledge that we possess of English intellectual life at the beginning of the fifteenth century.

As befits the work of an eminent Anglicist, the edition also contains highly detailed treatments of “Sprache” (Language) (106–16), and “Versbau” (Versification) (117–22), which are then followed by a section

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of notes (“Anmerkungen,” 123–37), addenda and corrigenda (“Ergänzungen,” 137), an index of proper names (138–9), and finally, the “Inhaltsverzeichnis zu den Anmerkungen” (the table of contents for the notes, 140), which gives references within the text for particular lexical items, stylistic or grammatical points not treated elsewhere. The level of detail in the accompanying material is vertiginous, and once again underlines that the focus of this edition is absolutely not Boccaccio, but instead the poem’s function as an example of Middle English philological and literary practice. The Fiammetta Following the recovery of the fifteenth-century verse adaptations of Boccaccio, two of the English sixteenth-century translations were republished between 1926 and 1931. Both the Fiammetta and the Thirteen Questions sequence of the Filocolo were printed in Great Britain and America in multiple editions, and their print fate in this short five-year period interestingly demonstrates a similar “banalization” or “popularization” process that was seen for these romance works in their historical context. Both translations are published first in London, each with an introduction by the leading popular Italophile of the day, Edward Hutton, and both are then republished in cheaper American editions with illustrations. The Fiammetta also witnesses an “upgrading” in status in the same period, in the 1929 fine press edition published by Mandrake Press. The first of these works to be published, chronologically, is the Navarre Society’s Amorous Fiammetta (London, 1926). Navarre had previously published an edition of the Rigg translation of the Decameron in 1921 with illustrations by Louis Chalon, and this edition of the Fiammetta recalls this edition in its size, binding, and visual elements such as the title page. Unlike later Boccaccio editions published by Navarre (such as the undated Decamerons, which were reprinted several times), this is a rather handsome affair, with a number of high-quality features, such as the gilt ornaments on spine and front boards, high-quality paper, and the use of two colours for printing on the title page (the title appearing here in red, just as it did on the title page of the 1921 Navarre Decameron). An editorial note in the prefatory pages stresses the high quality of the workmanship and production values: “This Limited Edition of ‘Amorous Fiammetta’ is modernized from the only English  translation, made by Bartholemew Young and printed by John

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Charlwood in 1587, of which only four copies are known to exist. Printed by the Riverside Press in Edinburgh, upon paper of fine quality, specially made for the Navarre Society” (ii). Like other fine-press editions of Boccaccio of this period, such as Davies’s 1927 Pleasant Disport and the 1929 Mandrake Fiammetta, this one contains a number of physical allusions to both the original sixteenth-century artefact and the visual codes of the early printed book, seen in the copious paratextual framework that accompanies the translated text. This edition, for example, contains (in order) a half-title page (i), printed in red; a note on the edition (ii); a reproduction of a page of a manuscript of the Fiammetta from the British Museum, with hand-tinting and gilding of the initial capitals; the title page, printed in red and black (iii), with the country of printing noted on the verso (iv); a dedication, presumably from Hutton: “To my friend Sir Israel Gollancz in affectionate admiration” (v); and a lengthy introduction to Boccaccio and this text by Edward Hutton (vii–xl). This modern front matter is then followed by the editorial paratexts of the original 1587 edition, comprising here the title page, printed in a modern gothic typeface and again with the title printed in red (xli), Thomas Newman’s dedication to Sir William Hatton (xliii–xlv), Gabriel Giolito’s dedication to the women of Castale (xlvii– xlviii), and “The Author his Prologue” (xlix–li). The succession of elements from the early modern text is then interrupted by the table of contents (liii–lix), which has been moved from its position in the original edition at the very end of the book in order to make it conform to the modern convention of the contents appearing at the beginning of the text. The table of contents is reproduced unaltered apart from the changed page references, and includes both the French translation of the line from Petrarch and the original date of printing, and is then itself – finally – followed by the complete text of the 1587 translation. The book concludes with the Spanish translation of the Petrarch quote, which served as epigraph to the original edition. Both the volume designer and Hutton as editor have gone to considerable length to stress the authenticity of the text and to give a flavour of the physical and visual characteristics of its sixteenth-century incarnation. The “archaic” parts of the text are characterized by the attempt to preserve some of the typographical features of the older book, such as the presence of large floriated initial capitals at the beginning of every chapter, and the preservation of the marginal glosses, which are here set into the main text in small italic type that contrasts with the larger roman type of the main text. In his introduction, Hutton does not

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only limit himself to a general biography of Boccaccio, as might be expected, but also goes into considerable detail about the print history of the text and its historic English translator. His careful work as editor is underlined by the fact that he goes to the trouble of correcting an imperfection in the British Museum copy by reference to the Bodleian copy so as to present the complete translated text to his readers (xxxv). However, this attention to textual integrity and surface form is not borne out in the text presented here as Young’s own. Hutton hymns the translation as “a work of art; the music and lovely rhythm of his prose are worthy of that great time [the Elizabethan age], and in their very different way as fine as the original” (xxxix); however, the text presented here has been silently cleaned up for a modern (inexpert) readership, with spellings and punctuation modernized. The scholarly credentials of Hutton, evidenced in the lengthy introduction, reproduction of an original contemporary artefact, and careful editing, combined with the presentation of the paratexts and visual features of the 1587 edition, have in the final reckoning been subsumed to the hard-headed realities of the Navarre Society’s intended readership. This is an interesting reproduction of a historic translation that quite fails to reproduce the historic translated text as it was, a distinction that would presumably go unnoticed by the vast majority of its readers. A quite different product is the 1929 edition of the 1587 translation published by Mandrake Press in London, Amorous Fiammetta By Giovanni Boccaccio. Reprinted from the original English edition, translation of Bartholomew Young (1587). Now Edited with an Introduction by K.H. Josling and decorated in colour by M. Leone (London: The Mandrake Press, 1929).61 This is a superb volume, which particularly privileges the visual aspect. The book is a large-format quarto, bound in green vellum with embossed gilt lettering on the spine and a gilt illustration of the Three Graces on the upper board. The overall impression of this volume is one of bright colour, as, in addition to the unusual green binding, it contains twenty full-page colour chromolithographed plates and another ten small coloured illustrations on the title pages to each of the parts of the translation. Mandrake Press was a short-lived fine press,

61 The prospectus for this book and the book itself are items 19 and 20 in the exhibition catalogue by Reg Carr, The Mandrake Press 1929–30: Catalogue of an Exhibition, Cambridge University Library, September–November 1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Library, 1985), 17–18. The catalogue includes all the items published by Mandrake.

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founded in 1929 by Edward Goldston and Percy Stephensen.62 The price was five guineas, which “would represent a very good week’s wages in 1929 values. As Stephensen wryly commented later in doggerel verse [...] ‘The Amorous Fiammetta | was prettier and better | but not so quick to sell.’”63 Stephensen was a fixture of the London bohemian literary scene, a communist who was close to D.H. Lawrence, and the press was founded with the intention of publishing Lawrence’s own obscene paintings (including one entitled “Boccaccio Story,” a depiction of a crucial moment in the tale of Masetto, Decameron, III, 1).64 Most of the works published by the press in its short life were by associates of Lawrence and this intellectual circle; the press soon ran into financial difficulties and was taken over in 1930 by a consortium led by the renowned occultist Aleister Crowley, but folded shortly afterwards. The inclusion of this historic Boccaccio translation in an otherwise coherent list is almost inexplicable, but can perhaps be linked to the public perception of Boccaccio as sexual libertine and the notoriety of Lawrence’s paintings (his 1929 exhibition having been closed down by the police and his pictures seized), as well as the pragmatic opportunity to follow in the slipstream of the 1926 Hutton edition of the Amorous Fiammetta.65 Mandrake would go on to publish a second Boccaccio volume under the new consortium in 1930: Ten Tales from the Decameron, with sexually explicit woodcut illustrations by Edmondo Lucchesi (Edinburgh: Riverside Press for the Mandrake Press, 1930). While the 1930 Boccaccio edition selectively focuses on the sexual content of the tales through the choice of novellas with accompanying erotic illustrations, the 1929 edition is chaste in comparison. Rather than aiming exclusively for an erotic positioning, this edition combines tasteful female nudity with a literary-historical slant. The introduction by K.H. Josling situates Fiammetta as a character in the history of literary depictions of female sexuality (itself another Lawrentian

62 A history of the press and pen-portraits of its main movers is given in the Mandrake exhibition catalogue. On Stephensen’s life and works, see Craig Munro, “Stephensen, Percy Reginald,” in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press / London: Cambridge University Press, 1966–), 12:70–1. 63 Carr, The Mandrake Press, 18. 64 On the Mandrake edition of Lawrence’s paintings, see David Ellis’s Cambridge Biography of D.H. Lawrence, vol. 3, Dying Game, 1922–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 458. 65 The paintings are reproduced in K.M. Sagar, D.H. Lawrence’s Paintings (London: Chaucer, 2003).

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hobby horse) in his rather rambling introductory essay, “The Heroine and her History” (vii–xxxvii). Meanwhile, the title page and typography allude to the 1587 edition, and the historic text is reproduced unchanged in spelling or punctuation (unlike the Hutton edition). The distinction between the “modern” and “historic” parts of the book are maintained via visual and typographical elements, such as ligatures that occur within the “historic” text, although not in the “modern” sections. Some attempt is made to combine the different time periods in elements such as the first title page (i), which presents the modern publisher’s details within a green decorative frame typical of the sixteenth century (if not in colour). The title page is followed by a full-page plate of a woman swooning into a man’s arms, both in pseudo-medieval dress, setting the tone for the narrative to follow. A short table of contents includes further historic ornaments in the shape of the printer’s flowers at the head of the page (in a nice touch, these echo those used for the table of contents of the 1587 edition, fol. Kk1) and an inverted triangle of flowers below the table. After Josling’s essay, the “historic” part of the book begins with a second title page (xxxix), this time reproducing word for word the title page of the 1587 edition, with some attempt to follow its typography. This is in turn succeeded by “The Epistle Dedicatorie” to William Hatton (xli), preserving here the original running title that was lost in Hutton’s edition, then Giolito’s address to the women (xlii), and “The Authour His Prologue” (xliii–xliv). This is followed by the table of contents to the text, here in the place established in Hutton’s edition rather than in its concluding position in the original, and here lacking page numbers. The rest of the book is taken up with the seven Bookes of the Fiammetta, each prefaced by a title page with brightly coloured chromolithograph image, and the concluding section, “Fiammetta speaketh to her Booke” (159–61), this prefaced by an arresting image of a naked woman encircled by the coils of a giant snake (figure 21). The book also contains a colophon, with coloured illustration (figure 22), which reads: Here ends The Amorous Fiammetta of Giovanni Boccaccio faithfully reprinted from the original English translation of Bartholemew Young (1587) now edited by K.H. Josling. This book is printed at The Westminster Press London. The colour plates printed by the Botolph Printing Works. Typography and production arranged for the Mandrake Press London 1929 by P.R. Stephensen and Edward Goldston. This edition is limited to 550 copies. (163)

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It is clear from the attention to the mise-en-page and, more importantly, by the presence of the unmediated sixteenth-century prose, that Josling clearly had recourse to a copy of the original book, either the British Museum copy or the one held in Oxford at the Bodleian. However, there is no mention made of this edition’s recent predecessor, the 1926 edition, despite the fact that the contents show a dependence on Hutton’s reordering of the parts of the book, and Josling draws on Hutton’s introduction in his own essay. The relationship between the two editions is presented instead as a personal acknowledgment in the editor’s “Note,” which reads: “Acknowledgment is due to Mr. Edward Hutton for much useful information about Boccaccio, and for restoring a line that is missing in the British Museum copy but included in the Bodleian copy” (xxxviii). The Mandrake Fiammetta is an unusual oddity, an unprecedented example of the aesthetic “upgrading” of a Boccaccian romance from its first incarnation into a fine illustrated edition. The more usual print fate of these works – towards a rather less refined product – is however exemplified in the final edition of the 1587 translation printed in this period, which represents something of a definitive degradation of the brand. The final destination for Young’s translation of the Fiammetta in this period was its publication under the imprint of an American publisher of erotica, Rarity Press of New York. Rarity, like similar imprints such as The Illustrated Editions Company and the Three Sirens Press, was a private publishing house specializing in cheap editions of the classics, especially those that could be presented as erotic in tone.66 The target audience and use of these books could not be more different from those of the expensive fine editions of Mandrake Press: mass produced for a wide readership, they would be sold for a dollar apiece in outlets such as department stores.67 Physically, the 1931 Rarity edition of the Fiammetta is a superficially classy affair. Bound in red cloth, with the publisher’s device (a haloed female nude dropping her diaphanous garment) stamped on the front cover in silver, the edition also included six mildly titillating plates that seem to have very little to do with the narrative, a handsome title page, an attractive typeface, generously set  with wide margins, and historiating features such as illuminated

66 On Rarity Press and similar publishers, see Jay Gertzman, Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica, 1920–1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), esp. 30, 58, 93. 67 Gertzman, Bookleggers and Smuthounds, 56.

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capital letters at the beginning of every chapter. However, closer inspection immediately reveals that the typography of this edition is an exact copy of that in the 1926 Navarre edition, and so we can deduce that this version was prepared by making a photolithographic copy of that edition. Gertzman has shown how technological developments in offset lithography printing drove the explosion of pirated pornographic books in New York after 1928, and this Boccaccio edition can thus be seen as a product of this borderline-legal publishing trade.68 For the first time, the means were in place to allow very cheap reproduction of previously published editions, which is a considerable factor in accounting for the very high number of Boccaccio translations produced around 1930, which are all marketed to and for the clandestine erotica market that drove the technology. Interestingly, though, the American editors do not bother to reprint all parts of Hutton’s edition, and this leads to considerable illogicality within the volume. The 1931 edition therefore reproduces the title page of the 1926 Navarre edition, changing only the publisher’s information at the foot of the page to read instead “Privately printed for Rarity Press, New York, 1931.” (“Privately printed” had by now become a code to signal the inclusion of sexually frank material, and can be seen in several other Boccaccio translations of this period; the edition is of course also “privately printed” because of its unauthorized means of typesetting.)69 The title page therefore claims that the volume includes an introduction by Hutton, but this is in fact nowhere to be found; likewise the table of contents in the 1931 reprint includes page references to this introduction, the dedication, and “The Author his Prologue,” which are also omitted here.70 The Rarity edition therefore contains none of the editorial paratexts of the 1587 translation, and only the title

68 “By 1928, offset lithography radically simplified the printing process; with just two copies of a banned book, a pirated impression could be run off speedily, and much more cheaply, since no type needed to be set”: Gertzman, Bookleggers and Smuthounds, 86. 69 “Complete editions often were issued as ‘privately printed.’ A publisher who placed the firm’s name on the title page as well as this rubric was simply increasing curiosity [...]. Frankly obscene erotica was issued privately because anonymity was essential to avoid arrest”: Gertzman, Bookleggers and Smuthounds, 65–6. 70 There is considerable typographical variation between copies of the Rarity Press Fiammetta; I have also seen a copy where the page references to the missing parts of the book have been blanked out on the contents page, and one where the place of publication is given as London.

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page and table of contents from the 1926 Navarre edition; the proemio is missing, although the conclusion (“Fiammetta speaketh to her book”) is maintained. With the scholarly and historic material apparently surplus to requirements, Hutton’s chaste edition is finally given a racy spin by the inclusion of some mildly erotic plates in their stead to attract a rather different audience. The Rarity Press Fiammetta is therefore a remarkable example of editorial repurposing for commercial advantage. Its textual incompleteness and lack of contextual material are absolutely irrelevant in the drive to cash in on Boccaccio’s notorious reputation in American publishing, with the end result being this particularly illogical edition. The Thirteen Questions Hutton’s handsome 1926 edition of the Fiammetta may have also been the impetus for the production of the final historic translation to be published in this period, the 1927 edition of the Thirteen Questions sequence, published by Peter Llewelyn Davies (1897–1960). Davies had founded his imprint in 1926, and would become recognized as a renowned publisher; however (and much to his misery), his most enduring claim to fame is through his family’s association with the author J.M. Barrie. He was one of the five Llewelyn Davies boys who, with their mother, were supported by Barrie after the death of their father (as immortalized in the 2004 film Finding Neverland), and he was reputed to be the namesake for Barrie’s most famous creation, Peter Pan.71 With the encouragement of Barrie, Davies studied the printing business with Walter Blackie in Edinburgh (who had also published Boccaccio in educational editions) before setting up on his own, and this translation was one of the first books to be published under the Davies imprint.72 The 1927 Thirteen Questions of Love is a beautiful little book, produced to the highest production standards in a limited edition of 520. The material features, typography, and subject matter indicate that this is not intended for a mass market: instead it is a treat for the connoisseur of 71 The association with Barrie would become a great burden to him, and he committed suicide by jumping in front of a Tube train in 1960. See Davies’s obituary in The Times, 7 April 1960 (16, col. F), and the additional comments by Herbert Van Thal, The Times, 12 April 1960 (15, col. C). 72 For example, Tales from the Decameron (London and Glasgow: Blackie, 1904?). The Boccaccio volume is classified as “General Literature,” in the “Middle and Senior Divisions” of the Blackie’s English Texts list.

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the early printed book. Davies’s book attempts to reproduce as far as possible the text and “feel” of the sixteenth-century edition. The new edition reproduces the third (1587) edition of the text “from photographs of the copy in the British Museum,” and, despite its nonscholarly imprint, is therefore a historically documented text, which cannot necessarily be said for the editions to follow.73 Given the increased number of textual errors in the 1587 edition, though, it might have made better sense to have based it on the first edition of 1567.74 The title page (figure 23) gives most of the 1587 title, although the typography and publisher’s information are altered, and with the additional insertion of the original date of translation and details of Hutton’s introduction. It reads: “THIRTEENE MOST PLEASAUNT AND DELECTABLE QUESTIONS, Entituled, A DISPORT OF DIVERSE NOBLE PERSONAGES, written in Italian by M. IOHN BOCACE Florentine and poet Laureat, in his booke named PHILOCOPO: Englished anno 1566 by H.G. To which is prefixed an Introduction by Edward Hutton London Peter Davies. 1927.” Original spellings are maintained throughout, as are other typographical features of the early printed book, such as ligatures, the pilcrow sign, and a final colophon and register; the page numbers are recorded at the lower right-hand corner of the text (where the catchword would usually be printed), and the roman numbers follow the archaic convention of using “j” for the final “i.” Blue ink is used for the initial capital letters at the start of every chapter and for the printer’s device on the title page, while the paper is of a heavyweight grade and shows visible chainlines. The presence of these historic typographical features is explained in the colophon (102): Five hundred and twenty copies only of this book have been printed at Haarlem at the house of Joh. Enschedé en Zonen. The fount in which it is printed was reconstructed early in the present century from the remaining characters of a fount designed and made by Peter Schoeffer of Gernsheim (1420–1500), some sixty matrices of which were acquired by Joh. Enschedé

73 “Introduction,” Thirteen Questions of Love, xvii. 74 H.G. Wright observes that “it was somewhat unfortunate that for the reprint issued in 1927 the text adopted was that of the 1587 edition. All the errors, however palpable, are faithfully reproduced, and others, not previously found make their appearance. The 1927 edition therefore achieves the maximum of distortion”: “The Elizabethan Translation of the ‘Questioni d’Amore’ in the ‘Filocolo,’” MLR, 36.3 (1941), 296n1.

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in the year 1768, from Jacobus Scheffers, Printer at Bois-le-Duc, a descendant of the original maker.

The intention to reproduce the parts of the early printed book can be seen in the extensive (and generously spaced) paratexts of this 1927 edition. Before the text itself, there is a half-title page (v), title page (vii), publication note (“Printed in Holland,” viii), and “Introduction” (ix– xix). These are then followed by two of the editorial paratexts of the source edition, the dedication to William Rice (xxi–xxii) and poem “The Booke to the Reader” (xxiii), then the text itself. All titles and rubrics found in the source edition are here reproduced, and an attempt is made to demarcate the historic and contemporary parts of the book in the mise-en-page, as seen for example at the end of each section in the older parts, where the text tapers to an inverted triangle, while the modern layout is maintained in the introduction. Whereas for the Bergen and Schliech editions the interest in the historic translation is philological, here the overriding concern is aesthetic and literary. Both the layout and the physical attributes of this book fetishize the material and historical object over the text itself, although the attempt to re-present the sixteenth-century edition, using a “historic” font (Enschede English Bodied Roman No. 6) and heavyweight paper, does stabilize the historic translation in a way that was not so evident in previous recovered translations, such as the Tudor Translations’ Decameron or the Hutton Fiammetta. The aims of both the Bergen and Schleich editions are quite different: to publish the text in such a way as to enable scholars of medieval English to access two previously unpublished examples of Middle English vernacular verse, with an emphasis on the words rather than the book. A comparison between these three editions of the 1920s also demonstrates the huge technological and linguistic leaps made in the crucial hundred-odd years between the Fall of Princes and the 1566 translation of the Thirteen Questions sequence. Bergen and Schleich do not seek to reproduce the medieval manuscripts in the print format, which would be impossible outside of a facsimile edition; however, print technology and the English language have developed sufficiently by the late sixteenth century for the book to be read with relative ease (once substituting the black-letter type by a humanistic font) by readers four hundred and fifty years later. While the Davies edition of the Thirteen Questions is a subtly attractive product for the bibliophile, the appeal of the 1931 illustrated edition is more blatant. The book was published in various formats under

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a number of different imprints in the United States, but the key components are common to all editions: an updated text of the Thirteen Questions sequence (based on the 1587 edition established in the 1927 London edition), an introduction by Thomas Bell, and – perhaps most importantly for the target demographic – Alexander King’s lewd illustrations.75 The title of the book was edited and updated, becoming Pleasant Questions of Love for the Falstaff Press edition and The Most Pleasant and Delectable Questions of Love for all the other editions, stressing the amorous subject matter over a historically accurate title.76 The publication of this text under the Falstaff imprint is particularly noteworthy. Falstaff were a mail-order-only publisher of erotica, whose speciality was pseudo-scientific publications on sexology. A 1934 advert invites “Mature readers and collectors of Amatory Curiosa of all races, oriental and occidental” to write in for an “interesting free catalogue of privately printed books in De Luxe Limited Editions on Scientific Sexualia, Anthropological Esoterica Unexpurgated Love Classics Exotically Illustrated.”77 The only other “literary” writer on their list was the Marquis de Sade; the Boccaccio edition was only their third publication after Serge Voronoff’s How to Restore Youth and Live Longer (1928) (the answer, by undergoing a graft of monkey testicles), and Richard Burton’s orientalist study of pederasty, Anthropological Notes from the Sotadic Zone (1930?). Later Falstaff titles would include Augustin Cabanes’s Erotikon. Being, an Illustrated Treasury of Scientific Marvels of Human Sexuality (1933), the Japanese Arts of Love (1934), and Woman as Sexual Criminal (1935). One can only imagine how profoundly disappointed the Falstaff subscribers would be on receipt of this Boccaccio translation.

75 Giovanni Boccaccio, The Pleasant Questions of Love (New York: Falstaff Press, 1931); The Most Pleasant and Delectable Questions of Love (New York: Illustrated Editions Co., 1931). Other imprints include: New York: Hartsdale House, 1931; New York: Three Sirens Press, 1931; and New York and Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1942. In her recent bibliography of Filocolo editions (252–3) in “Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375)” (in Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies, vol. 1, ed. Gaetana Marrone [New York: Routledge, 2007]), Victoria Kirkham suggests the Falstaff edition was published in 1930, but I have not been able to find documentary evidence for this date. On Falstaff Press, see also Gertzman, Bookleggers and Smuthounds, 39–41. 76 For a partial list of Falstaff publications, see http://www.wolfshollow.com/Falstaff .html (accessed 17 June 2012). 77 Gertzman, Bookleggers and Smuthounds, 41.

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The publication of this particular confection across a multiplicity of different cheap, privately printed editions suggests that the illustrations and Boccaccio’s reputation were the main selling point, rather than any public interest in the opportunity to buy an updated version of this historic translation. The commissioning of the star illustrator Alexander King was surely a shrewd marketing move. King specialized in jaded and risqué illustrations of the classics, and commanded very high fees, so the reproduction of his illustrations in multiple editions was presumably intended to recoup as much as possible from  this investment in the named artist.78 The decision to print the text and illustrations under the Falstaff “de luxe” imprint lent the text a veneer of connoisseurship, and also meant that it could circulate via the subscription book clubs, thus circumnavigating the censorship of the mainstream trade market. The subsequent editions published by the  Illustrated Editions Company in 1931 were probably photolithographed pirated editions, produced in the wave of clandestine erotic printing with the intention of undercutting Falstaff.79 Apart from the bold illustrations (seen in figures 24 and 25), the Illustrated Editions Co. edition of the Pleasant and Delectable Questions of Love also contains other visual elements to suggest the text’s historicity. These include decorative frames (e.g., on the title page), borders, rules, gothic type in headers, and large initial capitals. However, unlike the Davies edition, which showed a detailed understanding of the technology of the early print book (and indeed used type based on a fifteenthcentury font), these mass-produced editions seem only to signal an indeterminate archaicism without specific reference to a particular period or location. The bindings of this series sought also to invoke a lost 78 “Among the most sensational illustrators was the young Alexander King, whose ‘cold disdain for human beings,’ expressed in macabre and bleakly expressive drawings, Donald Friede took particular pleasure in championing. ‘King seemed to hate everything and everybody,’ Friede explained of the artist’s success, ‘and all decent feelings were his very special target’”: Megan L. Benton, Beauty and the Book: Fine Editions and Cultural Distinctions in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 157. On King, see Benton, 185, 200–1. In fact, Friede’s characterization of King as an embittered misanthrope must have been another marketing invention, as King recalls Freide’s personal generosity to him in his picaresque memoir Mine Enemy Grows Older (London: Heinemann, 1959, first published New York 1958). Chap. 8 gives King’s own account of the 1920s New York publishing scene. 79 Joseph Meyers, of the Illustrated Editions Co., was described as a “notorious pirate” by Bennett Cerf of Random House: Gertzman, Bookleggers and Smuthounds, 313n21.

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era of leather bindings and fine finish, somewhat undermined by the embossed depictions of scantily clad lovelies on the spine. Textually, the book is closely based on the 1927 Davies edition, although this relationship is nowhere acknowledged: the introduction by Thomas Bell (3–9) is a bastardized version of that of Hutton, rewritten in a more conversational and popular style to emphasize the romantic content. The authorial paratexts of the 1566–7 edition are also included: the invocatory poem follows the introduction (10), followed by a new table of contents with rubric-summaries for each of the thirteen questions (reproducing word-for-word Hutton’s summaries in his introduction to the 1927 volume), and then the dedication to William Rice (15–16). A further sop to the market can be seen in the language of the translated text itself, which has been modernized so as to be more accessible to a general reader.80 The 1931 publication of the illustrated Questions of Love by the private New York presses can be seen as a culminating moment to this strand of Boccaccio’s translation history. This book, and those other illustrated editions of the Fiammetta and the Decameron that emerge from the world of erotic publishing in New York, form a discrete corpus of editions, which embody a lesser-known and certainly less respectable moment in his anglophone reception. Simply in terms of numbers, this period is the high point of Boccaccio’s print fortune in English, with at least seven separate editions of the minor works printed between 1929 and 1931, and an astonishing twenty different editions of the Decameron printed in the same three-year period. Yet by 1933 this concentration of Boccaccian printing activity was all but over. The economic crisis meant that the book trade was in free fall; the profusion of cheap editions had undercut the costly “limited editions,” and the market was simply saturated: “Because the works of Boccaccio, Martial, Margaret of Navarre, and other writers once decried as prurient were now made widely available, and also had been cleared by the courts, or ignored by Customs officials and vice-society investigators, it became fruitless to try and tempt people with them.”81 Even the most assiduous consumer of “gallant love” would probably not envisage needing more than one

80 “The present editor has modernised nothing but the spelling and the punctuation. An obsolete word or two has been discarded for a more readily understandable one; in a few places a conjunction or a preposition has been added to make the sense clearer while too-solid pages have been divided into paragraphs” (9). 81 Gertzman, Bookleggers and Smuthounds, 58.

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illustrated copy of each of Boccaccio’s romance works, and so this remarkable moment in Boccaccio’s dissemination as an author, when he was so widespread and well known that copies of the Fiammetta could be bought for a dollar apiece in New York department stores, eventually fizzled out, not with a bang but with a whimper. Conclusion Alone among the tre corone, Boccaccio’s status in the anglophone world in the 1930s thus encompassed an extraordinarily wide range of readerships, who were either unaware, or perhaps affected unawareness, of each other. The pirated smutty illustrated editions were only the most striking manifestations of this remarkably wide appeal – sold directly to a popular readership in non-academic outlets such as drugstores and department stores or via mail order. The fine-press limited editions of the Decameron, Fiammetta, or Thirteen Questions reached other audiences, which in themselves were very varied: there is a world of difference between the readers of the subscription-only Limited Editions Club Decameron, the libertine- and occult-tinged Mandrake Press Fiammetta, or the austere bibliophile’s historicized edition of the Thirteen Questions of Peter Davies. Even overtly scholarly editions express competing agendas and discipline-specific concerns, as can be seen if we compare, say, the German edition of the Middle English De mulieribus with Cummings’s poetic rendering of the Filostrato; both published in 1924, and both concerned with the use that medieval English makes of Boccaccio, yet profoundly different in their conceptions of the functions of translation and the forms of the book. One factor that unifies every edition discussed in this final chapter, and arguably every translation mentioned in this entire book, is the way in which the editors, translators, and publishers are supremely unconcerned with the academic study of Boccaccio in an Italianist context. Yet Boccaccio was already being taught (and at a very high level) in American universities by the 1930s, as a report in the 1935 issue of Italica shows us.82 The “Boccaccio” section of the “Syllabi of Literary

82 By 1930, Italian was also well established in Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland. Remarkably, the first Chair of Italian was founded at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1776; while Italian was established as a subject at Cambridge University in 1909. The Serena Chairs of Italian were founded at the Universities of Manchester, Birmingham, Oxford, and Cambridge in 1919. See Corinna Salvadori, “Dove ’l sì sona:

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Courses by Centuries,” by Timothy Cloran, provides a survey of core material for Boccaccio studies, comprising the best philologically informed Italian editions of the texts, the most important critical studies in Italian, German, French, and English, and notices of English translations of key works.83 From this brief two-page report, we can make some interesting deductions: first, that the undergraduate Boccaccio syllabus of the 1930s aimed to situate itself within the source, untranslated text, and second, that it was keen to demonstrate that it was founded on classic philological studies. Only six of the many translations discussed in this book are mentioned: for the Decameron “J.M. Rigg has given us the best translation,” and the other “new translations” of Aldington and Winwar are also noted; the Filostrato “has been admirably translated [...] by N.F. Griffin and A.B. Myrick,” while Hutton’s revised translation of the 1587 Fiammetta appears, as well as Osgood’s Boccaccio on Poetry. The omissions are telling, and may show how far these translations are “owned” by their originating literary disciplines. No mention is made of the Trattatello translations, which presumably belong instead to Dante studies (although they are not in fact mentioned in the corresponding review of Dantean material),84 and neither the Teseida translation nor Cummings’s verse Filostrato are mentioned (since these are Chaucer studies). The many editions of the Thirteen Questions are also ignored. The author may have been unaware that the Fall of Princes and the Middle English De mulieribus were of Boccaccian origin, but in any case, they fall under English, too, as does the Olympia, associated as it is with the Pearl-poet. There is no mention of the Rossetti sonnets, or the Esposizioni treatment of Paolo and Francesca, so fundamental to the Victorian cult of Dante and so widely reproduced in the nineteenth century. And most significantly, this highly scholarly summary refuses to admit anything of the popular, erotic Boccaccio: the Falstaff/Illustrated Editions Pleasant Questions of

Two Hundred and Thirty Years of Italian in Trinity College Dublin,” in Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, Corinna Salvadori, and John Scattergood, Italian Culture: Interactions, Transpositions, Translations (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006), 13–28; Uberto Limentani, “Leone and Arthur Serena and the Cambridge Chair of Italian, 1919– 1934,” MLR, 92 (1997), 877–92 (880, 886); and now David Robey, “Italian Studies: The First Half,” Italian Studies, 67.2 (2012), 287–99. 83 Timothy Cloran, “Syllabi of Literary Courses by Centuries: The Trecento (Continued),” Italica, 12.1 (1935), 7–10. 84 Timothy Cloran, “Syllabi of Literary Courses by Centuries: The Trecento,” Italica, 11.4 (1934), 122–6.

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Love is too crude even to mention, while the attribution of Fiammetta to Hutton glosses over the fact that this translation was also available in pirated form from the Rarity private press. For an author – and a corpus – so consistently and avidly orientated outwards towards other genres, other languages, other authors, and other forms, Boccaccio’s English reception as manifested in translation at the end point of this study is curiously blinkered, insulated, and selfserving. Everyone can appropriate a bit of Boccaccio and turn him to their own ends, whether those ends tend towards the profitably pornographic or irredeemably philological. Dantists, Chaucerians, medievalists, Renaissance scholars, artists, bibliophiles, bookleggers, or utopian publishers of inexpensive classics for the masses: they all find what they seek in Boccaccio, and make of him what they will in their print productions. He is a floating signifier in the cultural field; an everyman text for everyone, equally able to be constructed as the master of prose style, bereaved father, advocate of free love, loyal admirer of Dante, or platitudinous medieval bore, depending on the intentions and prejudices of his editors and translators.

Conclusion

A study such as this one – of the longue durée of a single author’s reception in translation – poses many challenges.1 The historical timescale is forbidding, the range of competencies required to work not only with the text but with the material and visual aspects of the object is daunting, and the decision to roam so widely outside one’s disciplinary comfort zone into different languages, time periods, and specialisms is not always a comfortable one. Most problematic is the sheer amount of primary material, and the decisions that have had to be made about how to manage it: with so many hundreds of manuscripts and thousands, if not indeed millions, of copies of Boccaccio’s works in their original languages and in translation, how can a representative account be made of the multifarious transmissions and transformations of these texts over time, and of their interrelationships? For me, the only possible way to answer this challenge was to focus on the translated book as object, and to move beyond the simple source text/target text relationships to make visible other expressive systems found within the book. In this way, by locating my analysis within the unique copy, and focusing especially on the material form and the framing strategies of the paratexts, I have been able to tell a new story of Boccaccio’s presence in anglophone textual cultures, one that differs from the traditional views of his influence on English literature, and to map some of the many trajectories that his works have taken from their 1 In terms of the methodological issues around this kind of research, I have gratefully taken as a model Andrew Taylor’s Textual Situations: Three Medieval Manuscripts and Their Readers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).

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originating context in Trecento, Italy. Rather than aiming to simplify and explain, I have embraced the complexity, multiplicity, and downright disorderliness of these textual productions in their totality. The vast variation in book forms and editorial choices discussed here valuably underlines the inherent instability of what we often think of as stable texts, and highlights the fundamental importance of also seeing the material containers in which they are presented. The discipline of translation studies has taught us that translations are not neutral entities, but are instead expressive of their contexts and the ideologies of the agents involved in their production, and likewise I see my focus on the material and textual aspects of the translated book-object as a way to amplify our understanding of these phenomena. In the same way, the sheer quantity of Boccaccio books produced over the longue durée can even destabilize our automatic evaluative preferences about the quality and status of the editions we use; is the Illustrated Editions Pleasant Questions a less valuable object than the monumental Tudor Translations edition of the Decameron? Are our most revered critical editions in fact constructions just as artificial as those overtly romantic early twentieth-century readings that sought to depict Boccaccio as the suitor of the daughter of the king of Naples? If we reject the historical master narratives of Italian and English studies, and the comfort zone of the author-function, then how can we engage effectively with these translations as the cultural productions of a far distant past? All that can be done, in my opinion, is to view each book consciously as an object in time and space, something that is produced in its own specific context, often capturing other temporalities and production contexts within itself at the point of making, and that has its own (copy-specific) afterlife as it travels through time. In this book, I have given a general overview of the ways and forms in which Boccaccio has been translated into English. We have seen how in the earliest phases of his English reception, the manuscript book can speak powerfully of the context in which it was made and the transmissive processes inherent in its “translation” from one language, or place, or person, to another. Boccaccio’s De casibus moves through the FrancoItalian contact zones of Naples, then Avignon, and thence into England via the Anglo-French courts of Paris and London. The fifteenth- and sixteenth-century versions of the De mulieribus meanwhile show two very different uses of Boccaccio in the English context: the first modest, private, and possibly with a female-oriented devotional aspect, while

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the second is a highly public affirmation of elite homosocial values in the face of female concupiscence and betrayal. With the move to print culture, our horizons broaden to encompass a trans-European print culture; a much wider range of Boccaccio’s works are translated into English, but the crucial intermediary role of French source editions remains. The longitudinal study of the publishing history of Boccaccio’s most famous text, the Decameron, foregrounds the implied narratives of translation. The famously sexually explicit content of this text drives the editorial considerations of its publishers, while the unveiling of the censored content becomes a key trope in the text’s reception and material expression, with this text eventually becoming an immensely popular and notorious cause célèbre. Meanwhile, from the nineteenth century onward, the minor works begin to be translated for a more scholarly audience, as part of a broader wave of academic interest in the recovery of medieval texts. This period also marks an increased engagement with the “Italian” Boccaccio in English culture (as opposed to his being mediated via French), achieved through the agencies of the Romantic Italophiles and the Anglo-Italian Rossetti family. His works eventually penetrate even the medieval studies departments of English and American higher education establishments (albeit not necessarily for their own qualities, but in the service of Dante and Chaucer). Finally, the twentieth century sees an efflorescence of Boccaccio translations, produced for a range of readerships quite remarkable in their variety, from the worthy to the disreputable. But of course, the mobility of Boccaccio’s works and their afterlife adventures are wholly congruent with the views famously expressed in his own authorial conclusion to the Decameron, when he writes: “Confesso nondimeno le cose di questo modo non avere stabilità alcuna ma sempre essere in mutamento, e così potrebbe della mia lingua essere intervenuto” (I will grant you, however, that the things of this world have no stability, but are subject to constant change, and this may well have happened to my tongue; Aut. Concl., 27). An author has no control over what happens to his writings once they are sent out into the world, and cannot be held responsible for them. Books have their destinies, after all. I consider this work to be only the first stage in this project, which will hopefully now be taken up by others. My study stops at the start of the 1930s, and therefore thus does not cover any of the landmark translations published from the 1960s onward, which emerge from the

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scholarly study of Boccaccio in the anglophone world. A whole other book could, and perhaps should, be written on these. One of the most significant aspects of this post-1960 corpus of translations is the novel and pronounced presence of female translators, who were almost completely absent from the first five hundred years of his English reception history, and whose groundbreaking work in this particularly conservative field should be addressed as a matter of priority. From the bookhistory perspective, much more work could be done on the production context of Boccaccio translations in print, for example via quantitative research on print runs, distribution, and dissemination, and qualitative work on the specific agents and networks who produce these translations, the institutional drivers for these, and their place in the literary field. Boccaccio’s many and various anglophone readerships are another important area for investigation, as they have been treated in only the broadest terms in this study; here, once again, the recovery of female readers’ experience and their re-inscription in the reception history is paramount, as they have historically been so comprehensively written out of the editorial paratexts themselves. In addition, each of the individual translation performances in this book would repay further investigation, both as book-objects and as target texts, given the millions of translational choices made over the last five centuries. In 2013, the year of publication of this book, at the seven-hundredth anniversary of Boccaccio’s birth, many of his texts can be accessed electronically, in a variety of new book-forms: certain translations discussed in this book have been encoded to be delivered via the Internet, and can be read on computers and mobile browsers, while these translations and others have also been turned into eBooks and can be downloaded to personal devices. Most excitingly, the exponential growth in computing power and connectivity of the past decade means that complete digital facsimiles of certain book-objects are now being made available online, and can be accessed remotely from anywhere in the world (connections permitting). Scholarly digitization projects mean that the singular, unique copy, once limited by its location and viewable only in person, or as an expensive printed facsimile, is now becoming part of a network of distributed electronic resources, which will greatly assist further comparative textual studies of the kind begun in this book. At this moment, then, rather than our witnessing the death of the physical book (as is often lazily suggested), we can find instead an affirmation of its materiality, historical specificity, and uniqueness; and

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these digital facsimiles can comfortably coexist with, and even enhance, the historic book-object and traditional edition. Boccaccio’s translations may now be accessed in digital form, surviving alongside the physical artefacts in which they have been housed for the past seven centuries. But whether we read them in new electronic forms or as the historical physical artefacts, the essential and unarguable fact remains: the English “Boccaccio” is made in his books.

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Bibliography

PRIMARY SOURCES: MANUSCRIPTS AND EDITIONS Primary works are ordered by title, then language. For ease of reference, in all sections English translations are given first, followed by all other languages. For fuller details of the English translations, see my bibliographies in Studi sul Boccaccio. Primary and secondary electronic resources are grouped together at the end of the bibliography.

Manuscripts 1. boccaccio’s works Buccolicum carmen Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, MS 1232. Corbaccio Latin: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lat. Misc. d. 34. De casibus virorum illustrium English: Manchester, John Rylands Library, English MS 2. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 263.

404

Bibliography

Latin: Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Ottoboniano Lat. 2145 (Vo). French: Geneva, Bibliothèque universitaire, MS Geneva fr. 190. London, British Library, Royal MS 14. E. V. Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 5193. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS fr. 226. De mulieribus claris English: London, British Library, Additional MS 10304. Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, Devonshire Collection, “Of the ryghte renoumyde ladyes” (formerly Phillipps MS 10416). Latin: Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Cod. Pluteo XC sup. 98I (L1). Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Cod. Urbinate lat. 451 (Vu). Dublin, Trinity College, MS 343 (Du). French: London, British Library, Royal MS 20 C. V. Decameron English (translation of Dec. X, 8): London, British Library, MS Additional 12524. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C. 86. Italian: Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, MS Hamilton 90. Florence, Biblioteca nazionale centrale, MS II, II, 8 (“Frammento magliabechiano”). French: Paris, BNF, MS fr. 12421 Genealogia deorum gentilium Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS LII. 9.

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Teseida Italian: Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Acquisti e Doni, 325. Trattatello in laude di Dante Toledo, Biblioteca Capitular, MS Zelada 104.6. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Chigiano L. V. 176.

boccaccio’s autographs of other texts: Zibaldoni Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS 29. 8 (“Zibaldone laurenziano”). Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, B. R. 50 (“Zibaldone magliabechiano”). Dante, Commedia: Toledo, Biblioteca Capitular, MS Zelada 104.6. Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, MS 1035. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Chigiano L. VI. 213.

2. other authors Dante, Commedia: Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. Lat. 3199. Moccia’s epitaph of Boccaccio: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fonds lat. 8410, c. 23b.

Printed Editions 1.1 boccaccio’s works: english translations Amorosa visione Amorosa vision. Translated by Robert Hollander, Timothy Hampton, and Margherita Frankel. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986.

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Thirteene most pleasant and delectable Questions, entituled a disport of diuers noble personages, written in Italian by M. Iohn Bocace, Florentine and Poet Laureate, in his booke named Philocopo. Englished by H.G. London: For Richard Smith, [1575?] [STC 3181.5]. Thirteene most pleasaunt and delectable questions, entitled, a disport of diuerse noble personages, written in Italian by M. Iohn Bocace Florentine and poet laureat, in his booke named Philocopo: Englished by H.G. London: A[bell] I[effes], 1587 [STC 3182]. Thirteene most pleasaunt and delectable questions, Entituled, A disport of diverse noble personages, written in Italian by M. Iohn Bocace Florentine and poet Laureat, in his booke named Philocopo: Englished anno 1566 by H.G. To which is prefixed an Introduction by Edward Hutton. London: Peter Davies, 1927. The Pleasant Questions of Love. New York: Falstaff Press, 1931. The Most Pleasant and Delectable Questions of Love. New York: Illustrated Editions Co., 1931. The Most Pleasant and Delectable Questions of Love. New York: Hartsdale House, 1931. The Most Pleasant and Delectable Questions of Love. New York: Three Sirens Press, 1931. The Most Pleasant and Delectable Questions of Love. New York: World Publishing Company, 1942. Il Filocolo. Translated by Donald Cheney with the collaboration of Thomas G. Bergin. New York: Garland, 1985. Filostrato Chaucer’s Troylus and Cryseyde (from the Harl. MS 3943) compared with Boccaccio’s Filostrato translated by Wm. Michael Rossetti. Publications of the Chaucer Society, Part 1, First Series, vol. 46 (1875 [1873]); Part 2, First Series, vol. 65 (1883). Il Filostrato: The story of the love of Troilo as it was sung in Italian by Giovanni Boccaccio, and is now translated into English verse by Hubertis Cummings. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1924. The Filostrato of Giovanni Boccaccio: A Translation with Parallel Text by Nathaniel Edward Griffin and Arthur Beckwith Myrick, with an Introduction by Nathaniel Edward Griffin. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press / London: Oxford University Press, 1929. Reprinted New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1967; New York: Octagon Books, 1978. Il Filostrato. Translated by Robert P. ApRoberts and Anna Seldis Bruni. New York: Garland, 1986. Troilus and Criseyde. Edited by Stephen A. Barney. New York: Norton, 2006.

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1.2 boccaccio’s works: other languages Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio. Edited by Vittore Branca. 10 vols. Milan: Mondadori, 1964–1998. Buccolicum carmen (Olympia) Hecker, Oskar. Boccaccio-Funde: Stücke aus der bislang verschollenen Bibliothek des Dichters darunter von seiner Hand geschriebenes Fremdes und Eigenes. Braunschweig: G. Westermann, 1902. Buccolicum Carmen. Edited by Giorgio Bernardi Perini. In Tutte le opere, edited by Branca, 5.ii (1994), 689–1090. De casibus virorum illustrium De la ruyne des nobles hommes et femmes. Bruges: Colard Mansion, 1476. Ioannis Boccacii Certaldi de casibus illustrium virorum libri. Paris: Jean de Gourmont and Jean Petit, 1514. De certaldo historiographi clarissimi, de casibus virorum illustrium libri novem. Nuc primum ab innumeris, quibus passim scatebat, mendis, studio & opera Hieronymi ziegleri rotenburgensis repurgatus, adiectisq’m paucis scholiis eiusdem, in lucem nunc denuo editus est. Hvc accessit index copiosus. Augsburg: Philipp Ulhart, 1544.

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PRIMARY AND SECONDARY ELECTRONIC RESOURCES Digital facsimiles used for this book include the John Rylands Library English MS 2 and the Geneva manuscript of the French B-translation of the De casibus, whose locations are given below. In addition, I have used numerous printed editions in the Early English Books Online (EEBO; http://eebo. chadwyck.com/home), the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), Gallica (http://gallica.bnf.fr), and many digitized nineteenth-century editions in the Internet Archive (http://archive.org). I have also used Google Books, and online texts of Boccaccio’s works and translations hosted on the Decameron Web (http://www.brown.edu/decameron), including the 1620 translation of the Decameron attributed to Florio, and Rigg’s 1903 translation. The American Association of Italian Studies: Mission and History: http://www.utm.utoronto.ca/~aati/aati_history.html. Bibliothèque virtuelle des manuscrits en Suisse, http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/ fr. MS Geneva, Bibliothèque universitaire, fr. 190. Vol. 1: http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/fr/list/one/bge/fr0190-1. Vol. 2: http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/fr/list/one/bge/fr0190-2. Biography of Charles Osgood, Pennsylvania Center for the Book: http:// pabook.libraries.psu.edu/palitmap/bios/Osgood__Charles_Grosvenor .html. The Bohn Bibliography [now defunct]: http://www.derekjones.org/ The%20Bohn%20Bibliography%201.htm (last accessed 21 February 2007). Collecting Everyman’s Library: http://www.everymanslibrarycollecting.com/. Collecting the Modern Library: http://www.modernlib.com/. Falstaff Press booklist: http://www.wolfshollow.com/Falstaff.html.

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Heliotropia: A Forum for Boccaccio Research and Interpretation: www.heliotropia .org. John Rylands University Library Image Collections, University of Manchester: http://enriqueta.man.ac.uk/luna/servlet/. The Johnson Papers at the New York Public Library: http://www.nypl.org/ archives/1492. Two-Gun Mutualism and the Golden Rule website, (formerly The Libertarian Labyrinth: http://libertarian-labyrinth.blogspot.co.uk/2006/12/ calvin-blanchard-miscellany.html Renaissance Cultural Crossroads: An Analytical and Annotated Bibliography of Translations, 1473-1640: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ren/ projects/culturalcrossroads/.

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Index of Boccaccio’s Works

Translations are indexed under the Boccaccian source text, with English first, then other languages, following their order in the bibliography. The autograph mss of other texts follow Boccaccio’s own writings. Manuscripts are signalled and identified by library and shelfmark, while printed books are identified by place and date of publication. Manuscripts Buccolicum carmen: Florence, Bibl. Ricc., MS 1232: 27n21, 344 Corbaccio (Latin): Oxford, Bodleian, MS Lat. Misc. d. 34: 68 De casibus (English): Manchester, Rylands English MS 2: 15, 19–20, 72–91, 81n135, 109, 162, 162n11, 377; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 263: 72, 376 De casibus (Latin): Vatican City, Bibl. Apostolica Vaticana, Ottoboniano Lat. 2145 (“Vo”): 29, 31, 44, 103 De casibus (French): Geneva, Bibl. universitaire, MS Geneva fr. 190: 46n58, 47, 49–65; London, BL, Royal MS 14. E. V: 142; Paris, Bibl. de l’Arsenal, MS 5193: 49; Paris, BNF, fr. 226: 46n58; Paris, BNF, MS fr. 24289: 47, 48 De mulieribus (English): London, BL, MS Add. 10304: 15, 94, 96, 109–38, 109, 345, 378–81; Chatsworth MS: 15, 96, 138–56, 302 De mulieribus (Latin): Florence, Bibl. Laurenziana, Cod. Pluteo XC sup. 98I (“L1”): 27n21, 97, 99; Vatican City, Bibl. Apostolica Vaticana, Cod. Urbinate lat. 451 (“Vu”): 98, 101n21; Dublin, Trinity College, MS 343 (“Du”): 107n26 De mulieribus (French): London, BL Royal 20 C.V., 107 Decameron (English) [X, 8]: London, BL, MS Add. 12524: 163n20; Oxford, Bodleian, MS Rawlinson C. 86; 163n20

444

Index of Boccaccio’s Works

Decameron (Italian): Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, MS Hamilton 90: 26, 27n21, 28; “Frammento magliabechiano,” Florence, Bibl. nazionale centrale, II, II, 8: 30n32 Decameron (French): Paris, BNF, MS fr. 12421: 70 Genealogia (Latin): Florence, Bibl. Medicea Laurenziana, LII. 9: 27n21 Teseida (Italian): Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Acquisti e Doni, 325: 27n21 Trattatello (Italian): Toledo, Bibl. Capitular, MS Zelada 104.6: 12, 27n21, 316; Vatican City, Bibl. Apostolica Vaticana, MS Chigiano L.V.176: 27n21, 316 “Zibaldone laurenziano,” Florence, Bibl. Medicea Laurenziana, MS 29.8: 27n21 “Zibaldone magliabechiano,” Florence, Bibl. Nazionale Centrale, B. R. 50: 28n22 Dante anthologies: Toledo, Bibl. Capitular, Zelada 104.6: 12, 27n21, 316; Florence, Bibl. Ricc. 1035: 12, 27n21; Vatican City, Bibl. Apostolica Vaticana, Chigiano L.VI.213: 12, 27n21, 316n67 Printed editions Amorosa visione (English): Hanover, NH, 1986, 374 Boccaccio’s Olympia. See Buccolicum carmen Buccolicum carmen (English eds.): London 1913, 342–51; London 1921, 345n20 Buccolicum carmen (Latin ed.): Braunschweig 1902, 349–51, 349n22 Caccia di Diana (English ed.): Philadelphia 1991, 374 De casibus (English): London 1494, 20, 162; London 1527, 142, 157, 162; London (Tottel) 1554, 157, 162, 377; London (Wayland, Tragedies) 1554?, 157, 162; London (Wayland, Fall of Prynces) 1554?, 157, 162; London 1924–7, 20, 163, 375–8, 390, 395 De casibus (French): Bruges, 1476, 47, 165n25; Paris 1483, 377; Chapel Hill, NC, 1968 De casibus (German): Augsburg 1545, 376 De casibus (Latin): Paris 1514, 377; Augsburg 1544, 377 De mulieribus (English): London 1792, 95, 138; Leipzig 1924, 95, 109, 378–81, 390, 394–5; London 1943, 95, 138; Brunswick, NJ, 1963, 350; Cambridge, MA, 2001, 97n3 De mulieribus (Latin): Ulm 1473, 143; Strasbourg 1475–76, 380, 143; Louvain 1487, 139, 143; Berne 1539, 380 De mulieribus (French): Paris 1493, 142–3, 165n25 Decameron (English): London 1620, 16, 213, 216–23, 231, 262, 270n92, 274; London 1625, 218, 222, 225, 262, 270n92, 274; London 1634, 218, 222; London 1657, 218, 222; London 1684, 218, 222; London 1702, 215, 223–8, 229, 230–1, 233, 240, 243n55; London 1712, 215, 223, 225, 228–32; London 1741, 230–4,

Index of Boccaccio’s Works

445

236, 250, 252, 266; London 1804, 232–7, 248, 251, 288; London (Griffin) 1821–22, 236–41; London (Sharp) 1822, 236, 241–8, 251; London (Richards) 1822, 236; New York 1843, 256; London [1845?], 250–2, 256; Hartford 1851, 256; London 1855, 252–5, 258, 266–7, 269; New York [1858?], 256–8; London 1886, 259–63; London 1893, 259, 263–6, 271; London (Gibbings) 1896, 265–8; London Mathieson [1896?], 268–9; London 1903, 270–3; London 1909, 273–5, 344, 390, 398; Philadelphia 1910–11, 334n5; New York 1927; Philadelphia 1928, 334n5; London (Dent) 1930, 275–7; Garden City 1930, 277–9; New York (Dell) 1930; New York (Covici & Friede) 1930; New York (Limited Editions Club) 1930, 277, 279–82, 394; Oxford 1934–5, 270n92, 274, 275n99; New York 1940, 275n99; London 1954–55, 279; London 1955; New York 1955, 283; London 1957, 279; New York 1958, 283; London 1968, 272; London 1969, 279; London (Sphere) 1972, 279n106; Harmondsworth 1972, 272; Ware 2004, 265; London 2007, 279n106; Richmond 2008, 213; London 2009, 213; London 2012, 213 Decameron (Italian): Venice 1471, 236; Venice 1492, 233, 271; Venice 1546, 220; Venice 1552, 171; Florence 1582, 220; Venice 1597, 220; Venice 1602, 220; Venice 1614, 220; London 1825, 236, 288 Decameron (French): Paris 1545, 165n25, 168, 171, 206, 220, 231; Lyons 1551, 220; Lyons 1558, 217–18, 221; Paris 1578, 220; Amsterdam 1697–99, 224, 229; “Londres” [i.e., Paris] 1757–61, 266; Paris 1802, 211, 244; Paris 1890, 334n5 Decameron (Danish): Copenhagen 1904, 334n5 Decameron selections (English): London 1566–67 (Painter), 161, 169, 174; London 1884, 313n62; London [1904?], 388n72; Edinburgh (Mandrake) 1930, 384; London 1937, 163n18; London 1962, 10n15, 243n55 Decameron tales (English): London 1525? (X.8), 163; London 1532 (IV.1), 163; London 1565? (V.1), 169; London 1569 (V.8), 160–1, 169 Decameron tales (Latin): Bologna 1491 (X.8), 163; Cologne 1499–1500 (IV.1) 163 Eclogues: New York, 1987, 374 Fiammetta (English): London 1587, 157, 161, 184–97, 198, 201–5, 217, 331, 337, 381–8; New York 1907, 196, 331–42; London 1926, 185n74, 381–8, 390, 395; London 1929, 382–6, 394; New York 1931, 386–8; Chicago 1990, 337n8 Fiammetta (Italian): Venice 1565, 189, 192–3 Fiammetta (French): Paris 1531, 165n25, 166; Paris 1532, 165n25, 166; Lyons (Juste) 1532, 165n25, 166; Lyons (Nourry) 1532, 165n25, 166; Lyons (Arnoullet?) 1532, 165n25, 166; Paris 1541, 165n25, 166, 167; Paris 1585, 165n25, 166, 186–7, 189 Fiammetta (Spanish): Salamanca 1497, 167 Filocolo (Italian): Venice 1551, 176, 181n69, 182n70; Venice 1554, 176; Venice 1564, 176 Filocolo (French): Paris 1542, 165n25, 166, 166n27, 167–8, 176–80, 182n70, 183

446

Index of Boccaccio’s Works

Filocolo, Thirteen Questions (English): London 1567, 157, 161, 172–84, 189–90, 389; London 1571, 172, 176; London [1575?], 172, 176; London 1587, 172, 176, 184, 190, 217, 381, 388–91; London 1927, 375n53, 382, 388–90, 393–4; New York (Falstaff) 1931, 390–4; New York (Illustrated Editions Co.) 1931, 390–4, 398; New York (Hartsdale) 1931, 391n75; New York (Three Sirens) 1931, 391n75; New York and Cleveland 1942, 391n75 Filocolo, Thirteen Questions (French): Paris 1530, 165n25, 166, 166n27, 175, 176, 179; Paris [1531?], 165n25, 166, 175, 176, 177, 179, 182, 182n70; Paris 1541, 175, 165n25, 166, 167 Filocolo, Thirteen Questions (Spanish): Seville 1541, 167, 175; Seville 1546, 167, 175; Toledo 1546, 167, 175; Toledo 1549, 167, 175; Venice 1553, 167, 175 Filostrato (English): London 1873–83, 310–15, 356, 375; Princeton 1924, 352, 356–65, 394–5; Philadelphia/London 1929, 365–74; New York 1967, 365n40; New York 1978, 365n40; New York 1986, 374 Filostrato (Italian): Paris 1789, 311n61; Florence 1831, 360 Genealogia (English): Princeton 1930, 350–5, 395; New York 1956, 353n29; Indianapolis 1956, 353n29; Indianapolis 1978, 353n29; Cambridge, MA, 2011, 350–1, 353, 355n32 Genealogia (Latin): Braunschweig 1902, 349–50 Ninfale fiesolano (English): London 1597, 15, 157, 161, 197–212, 219–20; Oxford 1946, 197n95 Ninfale fiesolano (French): Lyons 1556, 165n25, 168, 198, 202–12, 232 Rime (English): London 1861, 146, 293–306, 333 Rime (Italian): Palermo 1817, 300n37 Teseida (English): London 1871, 307–10, 375; London 1888, 307n50 Trattatello (English): Hull 1898, 317, 320–5; New York 1900, 317, 323–6; New York 1901, 317, 324–8; Boston 1903, 325; London 1904, 317, 325, 326n91, 328; Cambridge, MA, 1904, 317; San Francisco 1922, 317; New York 1990, 317; Greenbrae, CA, 1992, 328, 328n92; London 2002, 317; Richmond 2009, 317n71 Trattatello (Italian): Venice 1477 (in Dante, La Commedia), 146, 302; Florence 1888, 322

General Index

Acciaiuoli, Andrea, 30, 35n41, 98, 101, 118, 143 Acciaiuoli, Niccolò, 30, 98, 101 Adam, 38. See also Adam and Eve Adam and Eve: in De casibus, 39–41; in 15th-century English De mulieribus, 131–5; in Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes, 52, 53, 63–5; in Esposizioni, 40n44; in Fall of Princes, 84–8 Aeneid, 200, 201, 230 Agamemnon, 39 Agnes (of Rome), Saint 127n50 Aids to the Study of Dante, 325, 327 Aldington, Richard (Edward Godfree), 275, 277–9, 395 Alighieri, Dante, 68, 69, 141, 146, 170–1, 253, 254, 285–307, 313, 315–29, 358, 370, 395, 399; as character, 33; De vulgari eloquentia, 105; in English translation, 287; Epistole, 318n73, 321, 323; Monarchia, 321; 19th-century cult of, 236, 330–1, 395; sonnet in praise of, 146–7, 302; tenzone, 298; lives, 317, 320–1, 324–9; Vita nuova,

105n24, 293, 296n28, 296–7, 304–6, 318n73, 349 – Divine Comedy, 12, 69, 146, 289–90, 302, 318n73, 349; Inferno, 33; “Galeotto” (Inf. V), 62, 262; Paolo and Francesca (Inf. V), 287–88, 290; Inf. X, 297; Ugolino (Inf. XXXIII), 291; Purg., XI, 297; Par., II, 301; Par. XV, 291 – translators (see Boyd, Henry; Cary, Henry Francis; Rossetti, Dante; Rossetti, William Michael; Wright, Ichabod) Allen Press, 328 Almathea, 112 Amadis de Gaule, 168, 183, 211 Ambrose, Saint, 127 American Association of Teachers of Italian (AATI), 371, 371n48 Amorous Fiammetta, 184–97. See also Boccaccio: Fiammetta: English translation Andrus, Silas, 256 Anglistik, 6 Anne of Denmark (queen consort of James VI and I), 219

448

General Index

Antonio d’Arezzo, 47 Apiarus, Mathias, 380 Aquinas, Thomas, Saint 319 Aretino, Pietro, 217 Ariosto, 168, 186, 206, 254, 289 Aristotle, 281, 319 Arthemisia, 112, 136 Arthur (king), 33n39 Atreus, 39 Augustus, 145 Avignon: Boccaccio readership in, 43; papal court, 42, 398; papal library, 43, 43n49 Balguy, Charles, 230–1, 242 Bandello, Matteo, 171, 186, 260 Banester, Gilbert, 163 Barrie, James Matthew, 388 Beatrice (character), 333, 336, 342, 344–5, 348–9 Beauchamp, Richard, Earl of Warwick, 70 Beccaria, Antonio, 68, 70 Bell, Thomas, 391, 393 Belleforest, François de, 165n25, 171, 221 Benedict XIII (anti-pope), 43, 45 Beowulf, 138n54 Bergen, Henry, 375–8 Beroaldo, Filippo, 163 Bibliophilist’s Library, 273 Blackie, Walter, 388 Blackman, William, 197–8, 201 Blanchard, Calvin, 256–9, 278 Blandford, Marquess of (George Spencer-Churchill, 5th Duke of Marlborough), 236, 238 Blomefylde, Myles, 183–4

Boccaccio, Giovanni – biographical myths, 242–3, 243n55, 281, 304, 334–6, 368–70, 398 – Catalan translation, 164 – and Chaucer: critical history, 7, 7n7, 107; source for Chaucer, 285, 291, 298, 307–15, 328, 356–66, 369 – classic status, 252, 267, 275 – dantista, 285–307, 299, 315–29 – defence of poetry, 38, 38n43, 353–4 – Dutch translation, 164 – English translation: amplification of sexual content, 200, 205–11, 215, 244–50, 263; and Chaucer, 7, 16; and Dante, 16; continuity between 16th and 17th centuries, 219; critical history, 6–9, 214n2, 274; French as intermediary, 15, 158, 161, 168–9, 171–2, 184, 198–9, 206–7, 221, 224, 283, 328–9, 399; German scholars of Anglistik, 6, 378–81; Italianist perspective, 7–8, 7n10; late translation of Decameron, 11, 217; new interest in Latin works, 342; popular “romance” reception, 17, 156–7, 161, 216, 232, 291, 329, 330, 333–6, 356, 370–1; republication of historic translations, 16–17, 273–5, 329, 330, 374–94; scholarly reception, 216, 232, 234–5, 260, 262, 275, 291, 296, 307–29, 330, 343–53, 356, 370, 374–81, 399; shift from Latin to Italian STs, 157 – European reception, 158, 161–5, 366 – feminist criticism, 12n21, 17–18, 185n76 – French reception, 43, 45–6, 165–9, 206, 223

General Index – gendered audiences: Dec., 106; DMC, 101–3, 105–6, 118–19, 125n49, 136, 148, 193–5 – German translation, 164 – “Giovanni della Tranquillità,” 290–1 – Greek translation, 164 – historic female readerships, 31–2, 102–3, 126, 135n52, 137, 148, 154–5, 193–5, 193n91, 204 – influence on English literature, 216, 236, 251, 254, 267, 271, 285, 288, 298, 315, 350, 369, 397 – as linguistic model, 147, 172, 227 – manuscripts: autograph mss, 12n22, 25–7, 97, 99, 316, 344, 349; Boccaccio mss in Duke Humphrey’s donations, 69; gift of Dante ms to Petrarch, 43, 43n47; manuscript book-forms 27–9, 31, 99; publication practice, 35, 43, 98; scribal hands, 27–8; scribal practice, 25–9 – and Naples, 29–30, 42, 98, 101, 173, 184, 185 – narrative frames, 12–13 – Spanish translation, 164, 167 – Violante (daughter), 344–9 – voicing, 12 Boccaccio, Giovanni: works of – Ameto, 166n27, 288, 300n37, 335 – Amorosa visione, 33, 43, 100, 300n37, 335 – Argomenti, 12, 300n37 – Buccolicum carmen, 99; Eclogue XIV, 330, 342–50, 395 – Caccia di Diana, 105 – Corbaccio, 164; French, 165n25; Latin, 68–70, 68n103

449

– Decameron, 100, 164, 165, 168, 169, 174, 304, 306, 328, 330, 335, 353, 358, 359, 370, 399; abridgement, 16; additions, 215; association with children’s literature, 265; blasphemy, 215, 222, 246, 246, 248; first American editions, 256; first female translator, 18, 277, 279–82; first French translation (c. 1414–17), 45–6, 70, 165, 231, 235; first mass-market unexpurgated ed., 278; first named English translator, 253; first unexpurgated ed., 259; French translations (see Le Maçon, Mirabeau); immoral content, 172, 215, 219, 232, 234, 240, 258; influence of French conte, 224, 232; as libertarian/libertine text, 257–9, 278, 384; moralizing rubrics, 220–1, 229, 231; obscenity trial (see Mathieson); serial publication, 237–41; for sexual education, 278, 281–2; 17th century, 216–3; 18th century, 223–36; 19th century, 232–69; 20th century, 270–83 – Decameron sections: authorial conclusion, 100, 103n22, 221, 221n25, 231, 260, 267, 271, 278, 399; authorial proem, 221, 225, 231, 260–2, 267, 271, 274, 281; Intr. I, 221, 225; Intr. IV, 226, 231, 260, 267, 271; frame, 215, 221, 225, 231; rubrics, 26, 50n75, 226, 231; songs, 221, 221n24, 225, 300n37; subtitle, 260–2, 267, 271 – Decameron tales, 14, 160, 229–30, 384; Day I: I.7, 229; II.1, 229; Day II: II.6, 238; II.7, 284, 293n19, 298;

450

General Index

Day III: III.1, 229, 384; III.5, 226; III.6, 226; III.10, 210, 221, 226, 231, 233–4, 240–1, 243–8, 251, 254–5; 257–8, 262, 264, 266, 268–9, 272, 282; Day IV: Filippo Balducci, 226; IV.1, 163, 171–2, 174–5; IV.2, 100n16; IV.5, 288, 315; Day V: V.8, 160–1, 169; V.10, 229; Day VI: VI.6, 221; VI.9, 297–8; Day IX: IX.10, 210, 231–4, 240, 243, 248–52, 255, 262–6, 269, 272; Day X: X.4, 174; X.5, 174; X.8, 163; X.10, 163 – De casibus, 142, 164, 370, 398; authorial directives, 37; dedication to Mainardo Cavalcanti, 24, 29, 30, 33, 34–5, 36, 37, 47, 55, 60, 101, 377; early diffusion, 29; European dissemination, 21–2; Fortune, 32, 37, 38, 39, 78; French translation (see Premierfait); Italian originating context, 23–42; moralizing sequences, 41–2; proem, 36–8, 51, 76, 104, 377; structure, 32, 33, 99, 106; studies on translation history, 22–3, 48n67, 376, 378; textual history, 24–5, 33, 74; transmission to France, 42–3 – De montibus, 69, 353, 370 – De mulieribus claris, 95–156, 164; authorial frame, 100; conclusion, 137; dating, 28, 96–7, 96n2; dedication to Andrea Acciaiuoli, 30, 35n41, 98, 100–3, 118, 139, 143, 148, 195, 380; early readerships, 99–100; first French translation (c. 1401), 45–6, 50n75, 165n25; Italian originating context, 96–107; proem, 104–6, 116–17, 119, 143, 149–52; reception in Italy, 100, 107; relation to De casibus, 32, 97;

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structure, 96–7, 100, 106–7; textual history, 96–7 De mulieribus, 15th-century English version, 107–38, 345, 395, 398–9; conclusion, 136–7; dating, 109; early reception in England, 107–8; envoy to female readers, 135; framing, 112; Latin poems, 113–15, 128–30, 379–80; manuscript form, 110–11; ownership, 113, 138; popularity and survival, 95–6, 109; prologue, 115–16; relation to Fall of Princes, 108, 108n29, 109, 116, 118, 120, 126, 130–1, 133, 135, 137; structure, 111 De mulieribus, 16th-century English version (see Parker, Henry) Epistola consolatoria, 165n25 Esposizioni, 16, 287, 287n4, 288, 290, 320, 395 Fiammetta, 185–6, 335; continuations, 167, 186; European reception, 185–6, 212; in France, 165n25, 165–9, 186, 189; Giolito’s dedication to women of Città di Casale, 188–9, 192–5, 204, 382, 385; in Spain, 167, 186 Fiammetta, English translation (1587), 161, 184–97, 201–5, 211–12, 381–8; epigrams, 188, 190–1; Epistle Dedicatory, 191–2, 382, 385; relation to 1597 translation of Ninfale fiesolano, 201–5; republication, 381–8 Fiammetta, Brogan translation (1907), 330–42; expurgation of sexual content, 339–42 Filocolo, 164, 165n25, 166, 169, 172–3, 195; structure, 173–4

General Index – Thirteen Questions (Filocolo): English edition (1587), 388–90, 393; English translation (1567), 161, 169, 172–84, 187, 189, 211–12, 375, 388–90, 393; English translation strategies, 179–82; in France, 165n25, 165–9, 174–5; Italian terza rima version, 166n27; republication of historic translations, 375, 395; Spanish translation, 167n34, 174–5 – Filostrato, 16, 165n25, 286, 310–15; 328, 330, 356–74 – Genealogia, 38n43, 69, 99, 142, 165n25, 288, 350–5, 359, 370 – Letters: Letter to Martino da Signa (Epistle XXIII), 345–7; Letter to Petrarch (Epistle XV), 345–6 – Ninfale fiesolano, 197–9, 288, 299–300, 335; French translation, 165n25, 168, 198–212 – Ninfale fiesolano, English translation (1597), 197–212; relation to 1587 Amorous Fiammetta, 201–5 – Olympia, 330, 342–50, 395 – Rime, 16; sonnets on Dantean subjects, 298–306, 333, 395 – Teseida, 16, 164, 165n25, 286, 299–300, 307–10, 328 – Trattatello, 16, 38n43, 286, 315–28, 330, 395; textual history, 316–17 Boethius, 32–3, 313 Bogue, David, 252 Bohn, Henry George, 252–3, 256 Bohn’s Classical Library, 253 Bohn’s Extra Volumes, 252–3 Bohn’s Illustrated Library, 254 Bohn’s Standard Library, 252–3, 275 Boiardo, Matteo Maria, 289 Boiastuau, Pierre, 171

451

book: formats and readerships, 157, 167–8, 175, 192, 198, 203–4, 211, 217–18, 222, 237, 274–7, 308–9, 311, 320–1, 323–7, 331–3, 343–4, 357, 365–7, 370–1, 374–5, 379, 381–6, 388–94, 397–401; mise-en-page (see mise-en-page); as object, 5, 13, 332, 397; sociology of, 4, 26, 26n16; support, 99; as text-container, 11, 398 books: court gift-giving of, 49; have their destinies, 3, 399; historic style, 275, 275n99, 343–4, 357, 372, 382–5, 388–91; prices, 236, 238–9, 252–3, 253n64, 259, 260n78, 384, 386, 393–4; reading communities, 11,159, 356. See also editions Botel, Heinrich, 167 Botolph Printing Works, 385 Bourdieu, Pierre, 5, 5n3 Boutcher, Warren, 155, 273n95 Boyd, Henry, 287 Bradshaw, Henry, 311n61 Briseida. See Criseide British Academy, 343 Brogan, James C., 196, 331–42 Brown, Carleton, 367 Bruni, Leonardo, 163, 321, 324–5 Bryant, John, 11n18 Bullen, Arthur Henry, 264, 270–1 Bumpus, John and Edward (publishing house), 273 Bunyan, John, 290 Buonarroti, Michelangelo, 331 Burton, Richard, 391 Burton, Robert, 254 Butterfield, Ardis, 7, 67 Bynneman, Henry, 172, 176 Byron, George Gordon Noel (Lord Byron), 314, 358

452

General Index

Cabanel, Alexandre, 334 Cabanes, Augustin, 391 Cadmus, 39 Cain and Abel. See Adam and Eve Camilla, 112 Capponi, Giovanni d’Agnolo, 26n18 Carmenta, 112, 130 Carpenter, George Rice, 317, 323–5 Cary, Henry Francis, 236, 254, 287n7 Castiglione, Baldassare, 170, 174, 212, 217 Catullus, 253, 265 Cavalcanti, Guido, 297 Cavalcanti, Mainardo, 24, 25, 29, 30, 51–2, 62; Boccaccio’s letter to (Epistle XXII), 30 Cave, Terence, 6 Caxton, William, 159 Cecco d’Ascoli, 298–9 censorship, 215, 221, 231–5, 240–1, 243–55, 283, 339–42, 393–4; expurgation, 16, 221, 339–42; minimal paratexts as subversion strategy, 269; non-translation strategy, 241–4, 251–5, 263–4, 272, 328; restriction as subversion strategy, 259, 261, 263, 391–2; vs. display, 16, 215, 250, 252 Ceres, 111, 136 Certaine tragicall discourses written oute of Frenche and Latin, 203 Cervantes, Miguel de, 253, 254 Chalon, Louis, 265, 271, 273, 276, 284, 328, 381 Chanteprime, Jean de, 47 Chappuys, Gabriel, 165n25, 166, 186–7, 189 Charles II, 223 Charles V of Valois, 34, 57 Charlewood, Alice, 197–8, 219

Charlewood, John, 188n81, 219, 382 Chartier, Roger, 4 Chatto & Windus, 273 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 74, 80–1, 93, 135, 235, 251, 286, 291, 332–3, 374, 399; Clerk’s Tale, 81; Franklin’s Tale, 174; Knight’s Tale, 335; Monk’s Tale, 81; Parlement of Foules, 308; Troilus and Criseyde, 308n56, 310–15, 356–9, 369 Chaucer Society, 299, 307, 310, 328, 343, 356, 375 Christine de Pizan, 18 Churchill, Awnsham, 218 Cicero, 81, 118, 145 Circe, 112, 130 Civil Conversation, The, 185 classics: series, 272, 275, 317, 328, 333; unintimidating, 280 Cleland, Thomas, 280 Clement VII (anti-pope), 45 Clement XIII (pope), 331 Cloran, Timothy, 395 Col, Gontier, 52 Coldiron, Anne E.B, 6, 7, 158–9 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 288 Colonna, Vittoria, 334 “communications circuit,” 23, 23n8 Compagni, Dino, 297 Condensed Classics, 333 contact zones, 42, 398 Cook, Albert S., 324 Cooper, Florence Kendrick, 332–3 Cortegiano, Il, 170, 174 Cotes, Ellen, 218, 218n12 Cotes, Richard, 218n12 Cotes, Thomas, 218 Cotier, Gabriel, 202 Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, The, 212 Courtier, The, 170, 174, 217

General Index

453

Cowen, Janet, 109, 111 Criseide (Briseida, Cressida, Criseyde), 135, 368. See also Chaucer: Troilus and Criseide Criterion (literary journal), 277 Cromwell, Thomas, 140–1 Crowley, Aleister, 384 Cummings, Hubertis, 356–69, 371–4, 394–5 Cursi, Marco, 26, 29, 30

Dionysius (tyrant), 182n70 Dodsley, Robert, 230 Dolce, Lodovico, 192n90, 195 Donati, Forese, 298 Doolittle, Hilda, 277 Dryden, John, 229, 335, 353, 369 Dubois, Edward, 232–3, 235, 236 Dunlop, John Colin, 254 du Pré, Galliot, 166n27 Dutton, E.P. & Co., 273, 275

Daly, Charles, 250 Dammartin, Bureau de, 47 Daniels, Rhiannon, 26–7, 30n30, 99 Daniel, Samuel, 186 Dante. See Alighieri, Dante Dante Society, 323, 370 Dantists, 292, 318–19, 329, 331, 396 Darcy, Lady Elizabeth, 113 Darnton, Robert, 23 Davies, Peter Llewelyn, 375n53, 382, 388–90, 394 de Banville, Théodore, 366 de Beauvau, Louis, 165n25 de Boschère, Jean (de Bosschère), 277, 279 de Cambis, Marguérite, 165n25 Decameron Web, 272 de Herberay, Nicholas, 168, 179n66 de Hooghe, Romeyn, 224 Dell (publisher), 279 Dent, Joseph Malaby, 275–6 Déplourable fin de Flamete, La 167 de Worde, Wynkyn, 159, 162 Diana, 185 Diana (goddess), 199 Dictionary of National Biography, 270 Dido, 135 digital media, 20–1, 272, 400–1 Dinsmore, Charles, 325

Early English Text Society, 307, 343, 375–6, 376n55, 379 Early Italian Poets from Ciullo d’Alcamo to Dante Alighieri, The, 293–306, 333 editing: abridgement, 189, 215, 223, 225, 228, 232, 337–8, 378; modernization, 251, 368, 381–3, 393 editions: composite, 378; limited, 259–64, 270n92, 277, 317, 323–5, 328, 343, 381, 383–6, 388, 394; pirated, 256, 387, 392, 394; privately printed, 259–63, 273, 276, 320–1, 326, 387–8, 394; scholarly, 307–15, 317, 320–9, 349, 352–6, 365–81, 394; school, 388n72 Edward III, 34, 146 Elek (publisher), 279 Eletta, 344–5, 348 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 277 Elizabeth I, 163, 169, 191n88 England, Nicholas, 176 English studies, development of discipline, 343, 370, 376, 376n55, 378–9, 394 English translators of Boccaccio. See Aldington, Richard; Balguy, Charles; Brogan, James C.; Carpenter, George Rice; Cummings, Hubertis; Florio,

454

General Index

John; Golburne, John; Gollancz, Israel; Grantham, Henry; Griffin, Nathaniel Edward; Guarino, Guido; Hunt, Leigh; Kelly, Walter Keating; Lydgate, John; Myrick, Arthur Beckwith; Osgood, Charles Grosvenor; Parker, Henry; Payne, John; Rigg, James McMullan; Rossetti, Dante Gabriel; Rossetti, William Michael; Smith, James Robinson; Wicksteed, Philip Henry; Winwar, Frances; Young, Bartholemew Enschedé, Johannes, 389–90 epigrams, 188, 190–1, 200–1, 357, 382 erotica: “classic,” 230, 275, 386; classical, 253, 265; “gallant,” 265, 265n83, 391–4; mail-order, 391 Erythrea, 112 Europa, 111, 130 European story collections, 265, 280 Eve, 106, 111, 124, 128–31, 136, 152–3. See also Adam and Eve Everyman’s Library, 272n94, 273, 275–6, 283 Fables Ancient and Modern, 229 Fables of Jean de la Fontaine, The, 280 Falstaff Press, 391–2, 395–6 Fénelon, François de Salignac de la Mothe-, 230 Fenton, Geoffrey, 203, 212 Fiammetta (character), 173, 187, 303–6, 344–5, 384–5 Finding Neverland, 388 “First Folio,” 218 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 366 Flameng, Léopold, 259 Floire et Blanchefleur, 173 Flora, 122

Florence Press, 343n17 Florio, John, 216n5, 219–20 “fluid text,” 11n18 Foscolo, Ugo, 236, 332 Francesca (character), 287 Francesco da Barberino, 298 Frederick III of Sicily, 35 French-language learning. See language learning Friede, Donald, 392n78 Furnivall, Frederick James, 307–9, 343, 375 Gaius Caligula, 39, 377 “gallant” texts. See erotica Gallet, George, 224–5 Garden City Publishing Co., 277–8 Garden of Boccaccio, The, 288 Garden of Florence and Other Poems, The, 288 Gardner, Edmund, 369–70 Genette, Gérard, 8, 13; epitext, 8, 8n11; paratext, 13 George IV, 286 George, Robert, 275 Gertzman, Jay, 387 Giacomo di Giovanni di Ser Minoccio, 166n27 Giolito, Gabriele, 188, 192–5, 204 Giorgione, 304, 306 Giovanna I, 31, 35n41, 44, 101, 148, 154; in DMC, 101 Giovanni del Virgilio, 320–1 Giovio, Paolo, 186 Gissing, George, 264 Giunta printing house, 217, 220 Golburne (Goubourne), John, 197–212, 219; other translations, 197 Goldston, Edward, 384–5

General Index Gollancz, Israel, 286, 343–52, 375, 382; translation of Pearl, 345, 351 Gouge, Martin, 47, 49 Grandgent, Charles, 368 Grantham (Granthan), Henry, 176 Greene, Robert, 192 Griffin, James, 237–8 Griffin, Nathaniel Edward, 356, 361, 364–74, 395 Grigely, Joseph, 4 Grimalte y Gradissa, 167 Griselda, 81, 160, 264, 284 Grolier Club, 317, 323–6 Guarino, Guido, 350 Guazzo, Stefano, 185, 212 Gucht, 233 Guercin du Crest, Antoine, 165n25, 198–211, 232 Gulliver’s Travels, 280 “habitus,” 5 Hannibal, 122 Harper, Samuel, 368 Hartsdale House, 391n75 Hatton, Sir Christopher, 191n88 Hatton, Sir William, 188, 382, 385 Hauvette, Henri, 200, 205, 378 Hazlitt, William, 287 Hecker, Oskar, 349–51, 354 Hecuba, 39 Hedeman, Anne D., 48–9, 52, 60 Helen of Troy, 129, 135 Henley, William Ernest, 273 Henry II of Castile, 34 Henry IV, 66 Henry V, 66, 67 Henry VI, 66 Henry VII, 142–3 Henry VIII, 5, 15, 96, 107, 138, 145–9, 154–5, 162

455

Heptaméron, 168, 169, 253, 264 Herbert, Philip, 4th Earl of Pembroke and Earl of Montgomery, 218 Herbert, Sir William, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, 218n10 Herford, Charles Harold, 319–20 Heroides, 197 Hesperus Press, 317 Histoires tragiques, 221 History of English Poetry, 233 Hoby, Thomas, 174, 217, 332 Homer, 205, 335n7 Horace, 145 Hortis, Attilio, 22, 32n38, 33n39, 378 Howard, Catherine (queen), 141, 153–4 Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey, 163 Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, 66–71, 81–5, 89, 107–8, 138, 156; commissioning translations, 70; donations to Oxford University, 66, 69–70, 107, 142; languages, 68–9; Latin De casibus, 72; reading tastes, 68–70 Hunt, Leigh, 16, 286–91, 297, 306, 328 Husner, Georg, 380 Hutton, Edward, 185n74, 274, 276, 281, 361, 370, 375n53, 381–3, 385–90, 395–6 Io, 111, 130 Iliad, 335n7 Illustrated Editions Company, 375, 375n53, 386, 391n75, 392, 395–6 illustrations: author and love-object, 334; author-portrait, 31n35, 222, 225, 226, 233, 237, 254, 267, 324, 326; brigata image, 233, 251, 281;

456

General Index

colour lithographs, 237, 383, 386; colour plates, 237, 278; datedness, 279; engravings, 224–5, 229, 233, 237, 250–1, 259, 266; explicit, 264, 271, 284, 384; frontispiece, 31n35, 144n72, 222, 225, 229, 233, 251, 254, 324, 332–3, 376; medievalizing, 252, 271, 275n99; photogravures, 271; portrait of beloved, 333–4; presentation scene, 48; 143, 334; woodcuts, 143, 183, 217, 218n9, 219, 221–2, 271, 376 Isabella (painting), 315 Isabella and the Pot of Basil, 288 Italian-language learning. See language learning Italian literary culture, England, 169–71, 184, 254, 287, 292, 399 Italian literary culture, Scotland, 169 Italian studies, development of discipline, 315, 317–18, 370–1, 394–6, 394n82 Italica, 394–6 Italomania, 285 Ivy League, 318, 354 Jaggard, Isaac, 217–18, 219 Jaggard, William, 219 James I, 169, 223 James VI, 169, 223 Jane, Lady Rochford, 141, 153–4 Janot, Denis, 166–7 Jean, Duke of Berry, 47, 49 Jean Sans Peur, Duke of Burgundy, 49 Jocasta, 39 John, Duke of Bedford, 67–8 John I of France, 54 John II of France, 54, 74

Johnson, Rossiter, 331–3 Josling, K.H., 383–6 Juan de Flores, 167 Judith, 138n54 Jugurtha, 122 Julius Caesar, 81 Juste, François, 167 Juno, 111 Katherine of Alexandria, Saint, 127 Keats, John, 286, 288 Kelly, Walter Keating, 252–5, 257, 312, Kent, Rockwell, 279 King, Alexander, 391–2, 392n78 King’s Classics, 317, 325, 327 Kirkham, Victoria, 8 Knapton, James, 224, 228 Knickerbocker Press, 256 Knox, Alexander, 288n11 Koeppel, Emil, 378 Kredel, Fritz, 275n99 Lamelin, Jean, 165n25 Lameth, 87 Landor, Walter Savage, 288 Lang, Henry R., 324 language learning, 170–1, 184, 187, 190, 211, 290; giving access to censored texts, 255 Laterza, 350 Laudomia and Protesilao, 341 Laura (character), 205, 333–4, 336 Lawrence, D.H., 384 Lawrence, H.W., 264 Lawrence & Bullen, 263–6, 270, 270n92 Lefebvre, Jules, 334 Le Maçon, Antoine, 165n25, 168, 171, 206, 220, 231, 264, 266, 268, 274

General Index Lentulo, Scipio, 176 Leone, M., 383 Libia, 111 libraries: British Museum (later British Library), 138, 382–3, 386; English royal collections, 67–8, 142–3; Harvard, 256n67, 366n44; Leeds, 229; Louvre, 67–8; Manchester, John Rylands, 15, 19, 146n79, 239n51; Oxford, Bodleian, 66, 69–70, 237n47, 383, 386; Oxford, Worcester College, 197; papal library, 43, 43n49; Yale, 237n47, 256 Libro delle Difinizioni, Il, 166n27 Limited Editions Club, 277, 279–82, 394 Literature of Italy, The (series), 331–3 Little Classics, 333 Livy, 68, 229 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 318n73 Louis III of Hungary, 34 Louvre library, 67–8 Love, Harold, 23 Lowell, James Russell, 318n73 Lucchesi, Edmondo, 384 Lucretia, 122, 138–9, 141, 153–4 Luna, Pedro de (cardinal), 43, 45 Lydgate, John, 39, 158, 314 – Daunce of Machabree, 377 – Fall of Princes, 15, 19–21, 65–94, 142, 161–2, 314, 375–8; amplification in, 89, 91; critical history, 66n91, 92; Duke Humphrey in, 81–3; envoys, 88–91, 107, 378; extracts, 157; influence, 161; prologue to book 1, 73–84; prologue to book 2, 89–90;

457

structure, 71–3, 83–4; 83n135, 90–1; translation strategies, 77–8, 83 – Siege of Thebes, 107 – Troy Book, 312, 314, 376 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 140–1, 217, 253 Macrì-Leone, Francesco, 322–3 Madox Brown, Lucy, 292n16 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 261–2 Manchester New College (Nonconformist college), 319 Mandrake Press, 11, 381–6, 394 Mansion, Colard, 47 Mantho, 112, 130 Maria d’Aquino (Fiammetta), 304, 335–6, 369, 371 Marguerite de Navarre, 18, 168, 169, 220, 253, 254, 264, 393 Marquis de Sade, 391 Martia, 393 Mary Tudor (queen), 140, 162, 163 Massèra, Aldo Francesco, 303 Masuccio Salernitano, 265 Mathieson and Co., 268 Matthews, David, 307n51, 379n60 Maurus, Terentius, 3 McGann, Jerome, 4, 293–4 McKenzie, Donald Francis, 4 McWilliam, George Henry, 270n89, 272, 278, 281 Medea, 112, 122 medievalism, 285 medieval studies, development of discipline, 285, 291, 307, 313, 329, 330, 343, 370, 376, 378–9 Meyers, Joseph, 392n79 Michelangelo, 331 Middle Temple (Inns of Court), 185, 191

458

General Index

Miélot, Jean, 165n25 Migiel, Marilyn, 12n21 Millais, John Everett, 315 Minerva, 111 Mirabeau (Honoré Gabriel Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau), 211, 244–51, 264 Mirror for Magistrates, 94, 162 mise-en-page, 13, 52, 114, 143n67, 175, 182–3, 188–9, 198, 201, 203, 221, 242, 248–9, 251–2, 255, 262, 265, 308–12, 314–15, 354, 380–1; parallel-text, 139n58, 308–12, 314–15, 347, 354–5, 366–7, 371–2, 374, 380–3, 386 Moccia, Giovanni, 43–5; epitaph of Boccaccio, 44–5; links with Boccaccio’s correspondents, 44 Modern Library, 283, 283n116 Montaigne, Michel de, 219 Montemayor, Jorge de, 185 More, Sir Thomas, 270 Morley, Henry, 275–6, 313n62 Morley, Lord. See Parker, Henry Morley’s Universal Library, 275–6, 313n62 Moutier, Ignazio, 311n61, 360, 371–2 Muses, 80, 83, 301 Myrick, Arthur Beckwith, 356, 365–74, 395 Naples: Angevin court, 29, 398; Florentine expatriate community, 30; in romance narratives, 173, 190; presence of Giovanni Moccia, 44; Studio napoletano, 30 Nash, John Henry, 317, 328 National Alumni, The, 331 Navarre Society, 273, 381–3 neo-medievalism, 285, 286

Newman, Thomas, 191, 203, 382 Nichols, John Gordon, 317 Nicholson, John, 224, 228 Nider, Johannes, 107n26 Nimrod, 39, 49 Nonconformism, 319 Norton, Charles Eliot, 318n73, 323, 331–2, Notable Historye of Nastagio and Traversari, A, 163, 169 Novellino, 265 Nutt, David, 273, 273n95 obscenity trial, 268, 268n87 Ó Cuilleanaín, Cormac, 259, 278–9 Olson, S.W., 267 Oneworld Classics, 328 Opis (Ops), 111, 136 Orlando furioso, 168, 254 Orsini, Jacopo, 44n54 Osgood, Charles Grosvenor, 350–5, 395; edition of Pearl, 351 O’Sullivan, Carol, 252–3, 268 Ovid, 118, 145, 186, 197, 212, 341, 380 Oxford English Dictionary, 376 Painter, William, 161, 169, 171, 174–5, 212 Palace of Pleasure. See Painter, William Palaestra, 379 Palladius, 70 Paolo and Francesca, 287–8, 290 parallel-text, 139n58, 307–12, 314–15, 347, 354–5, 366–7, 371–2, 374, 380–1 paratext, 13, 13n23. See also Genette, Gérard paratexts in printed books: address to reader, 200–1, 225, 226, 229, 233–4, 236, 240; author biography,

General Index 216, 225–6, 229, 233, 241–2, 251, 260, 265, 281, 334–6, 383; chapter titles, 321–2; colophon, 176, 385, 389; dedications, 13, 177–8, 188–9, 191–5, 203, 212, 261–2, 275, 364, 367, 377, 380, 382, 387, 390, 393; epigrams, 188, 190–1, 200–1, 357, 382; Epistles Dedicatory, 191–2, 203–4, 218, 220, 274; glosses, 26, 175, 183, 188, 216, 226n34, 275, 311, 382; printer’s/publisher’s address, 218, 256, 266; running titles, 226, 229–31, 274; scholarly apparatus, 234, 308–15, 352, 365–8, 374, 376–81; synopsis of persons and subjects, 267–8; table of contents, 177n64, 188, 191, 200, 226, 229, 254, 261, 267, 352, 357, 367, 379, 381–2, 385, 387–8, 393; translator’s address, 204, 219, 226, 233–4, 254, 294–5, 312, 323–4, 326–7, 337, 347–8, 354; transmission of editorial paratexts, 215–16, 242–3; verse, 178–9, 344–5, 379–80, 393 Parker, Henry (Lord Morley), 15, 96, 107, 158; book-gifts, 140–1, 146n79; other translations, 141, 147, 170; translation strategies, 150–6 – English translation of De mulieribus, 138–56, 160, 302, 398–9; dating, 139; dedication to Henry VIII, 139, 144–9; manuscript form, 144–5; production context, 139–41; relation to FP, 142 Paulina, 100n16 Payne, John, 259–67, 271, 273, 312 Pearl, 345, 347–9, 395 Pearl (character), 344–5, 348

459

Pecorone of Ser Giovanni, 265 pedagogy, 318–21, 325–8, 353, 355, 374, 388, 394–5 Pelops, 38 Penelope, 122 Penguin Classics, 272, 277, 279n106 Pervigilium Veneris, 253, 265 Peter IV of Aragon, 34 Petit, Jean, 377 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), 37, 38, 43, 44–5, 68, 69, 80, 104, 120, 141, 147, 150–1, 170–1, 190–1, 204, 286–7, 301, 303, 313, 316, 331, 334, 358, 359, 370; Boccaccio’s gift of Dante ms, 43; Canzoniere, 147, 303, 331; as character, 38; De viris illustribus, 37n42, 104, 120, 150–1; in Duke Humphrey’s collection, 69–70; Eletta (grand-daughter), 344–8; Latin translation of Dec. X. 10, 81; Parker’s Trionfi translation, 147, 170; sonnet 140 as epigram, 190–1, 191n86, 382; translations by Surrey and Wyatt, 163, 170; Trionfi, 147 Petrarchism (English), 170, 190–1, 212 Petrina, Alessandra, 66–72 Petronius (Gaius Petronius Arbiter), 253, 257 Petrucci, Armando, 28 Pettie, George, 212 Philological Society, 343 Pickering, William (“Guglielmo”), 236–7 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 270 Pierce, Anna, 292 Pilato, Leonzio, 335n7 Pistoia, Cino da, 30 Pitt, Christopher, 230

460

General Index

Pleasant and delightfull history of Galesus Cymon and Iphigenia, 169 plurilingualism: in 15th-century England, 67 Polidori, Frances Mary Lavinia, 292 Polidori, Gaetano, 292 Pope, Alexander, 230, 353 Pound, Ezra, 277, 293, 294n23 Powell, Thomas, 288n11 Premierfait, Laurent de, 39, 156; first version of De casibus translation (c. 1400), 47–8, 55n85, 59–60, 65, 74, 93, 150, 165n25; French translation of Decameron, 46, 46n58, 47, 231; friendship with Giovanni Moccia, 44 – translation of De casibus (1409), 15, 42–65, 116, 150, 165n25, 377; dedication to Jean, Duke of Berry (first prologue), 51, 53–7, 76, 377; proem (second prologue), 51, 62–3, 76, 78, 377; readerships, 60; structure, 49, 51, 52, 83–4; textual amplification strategies, 48–51, 62, 64–5; translator’s prologue, 51, 57–62, 74, 377; visual framing, 48, 49n70, 51 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 5, 291, 292n16 Pre-Raphaelites, 288, 307, 329 Priam, 39 Prince Regent (King George IV), 286 Princeton University Press, 352 print culture: effect on Boccaccio’s reception, 158; in France, 165–9; influence of French print culture in England, 158–60, 186–7, 399; Italian printing in London, 217; languages of STs in 16th century, 159–60; links between American and British publishers, 258,

258n70; “pirating” books, 387; republication, 10, 381; transnational transmission, 158–9, 174–5, 184, 186, 224, 399 Printer of Nebrija’s “Gramática,” 167n32 printing, two-colour, 343–4, 381–2, 389 print runs, 218n11, 259, 264, 324–5, 328, 343, 385, 388, 400 Propertius, 253 publishers: erotica, 5, 286, 330, 386, 386n66, 391–4; fine-press, 260, 270n92, 279n107, 280–3, 317, 323–4, 328, 343, 383–6, 388–90; libertarian, 256–9; private presses, 273, 276, 317, 381, 383–6, 393–4; university presses, 356, 365, 367 Pulci, Luigi, 289–90 Putnam and Sons, George (publishing house), 258. See also Wiley and Putnam Pynson, Richard, 20, 159, 162 Quatrains of Omar Kheyyam, The, 260 Queen Giovanna. See Giovanna I Quellenforschung, 292, 313 querelle des femmes, 96 questioni d’amore. See romance Rabelais, François, 265 Ranous, Dora Knowlton, 331–7 Rarity Press, 386–8, 386n66, 396, Rascoe, Burton, 281–2 readerships: aspirational, 280, 332; courtly, 31–2, 43–4, 47, 66–9, 99, 107–8, 139–42; devotional, 126, 138; gendered, 17–18; mass, 252, 394; mercantile, 99; middle-brow, 251, 266, 275; multilingual, 174, 176, 187; popular, 252, 279;

General Index scholarly, 43–4, 99, 107–8, 235, 251, 275, 309, 328; in 16th-century England, 164, 174, 184; subscribers, 259–60, 263, 280, 394; transnational, 356; university, 184, 328, 374, 394–5 reception: survival, 95–6 Reformation (English), 162 Reynolds, John Hamilton, 288 Ricci, Pier Giorgio, 21 Rice, William, 177, 390, 393 Rigg, James McMullan, 270–3, 278, 281, 381, 395 Riquetti, Honoré Gabriel, Comte de Mirabeau. See Mirabeau Riverside Press (Cambridge, MA), 325 Riverside Press (Edinburgh), 382, 384 Robert of Anjou (king), 242 Roberts, James, 197–8, 201, 219 Robinson Crusoe, 280 Rogers, Bruce, 326 Roland furieux, 168, 206 romance: chivalric, 69, 168, 186, 211; debates, 174, 177, 187, 194; English/anglophone readerships, 186–7, 203–4, 212, 276, 331–3; exemplary functions, 178, 186, 190–3; formats, 167–8, 175, 192, 198–9; 200, 203–4, 211; French genres, 165, 168–9, 171–4, 174n52, 199, 211–12; questioni d’amore, 175; of translation, 284, 399 Romance of the Rose, 210 Romano, Vincenzo, 350 Romanticism, 235, 254, 285–7, 329 Rose, William Stewart, 254, 332 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (Gabriel Charles Dante), 286, 291–307, 328–9, 332–3; translation of Boccaccio sonnets, 298–306, 358;

461

translation of Vita Nuova, 293, 296n28, 296–7, 304, 331; translation practice, 293, 293n21, 296, 298, 302, 309, 312 Rossetti, Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe, 292 Rossetti, William Michael, 16, 291–2, 296n28, 299, 307–15, 328–9, 332, 343, 358; as Dante translator, 296n28, 297, 375 Rouillé, Guillaume, 218, 220 Routledge, 273 Roxburghe Decameron, 236, 239n51 Roxburghe sale, 236, 238 Ruscelli, Girolamo, 171 Ruskin, John, 307 Sacchetti, Franco, 297 Sallust, 380 Salviati, Lionardo, 220, 221 Samson, 39 Sansovino, Francesco, 176, 220 Sappho, 112 Saturn, 39 Satyricon, 253, 257 Saul, 90 Scève, Maurice, 167 Schleich, Gustav, 378–81 Schneider, Herman, 334 Schoeffer, Peter, 389 Schofield, W.H., 347 Scipio Africanus, 122 Scott-Warren, Jason, 140 scribal culture: “copisti a prezzo,””copisti per passione,” 24; 16th-century English, 140–1 Secundus, Johannes, 253 Semiramis, 111, 136 Sempronia, 122 Seneca, 54, 80 Serictha, 221, 226

462

General Index

Serravalle, Giovanni da, 69 Sevin, Adrien, 165n25, 166, 176–80 Shakespeare, William, 218, 251, 254, 369 Shakespeare’s Head Press, 270n92, 274n98 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 286, 353, 359 Sidgwick, Frank, 270n92 Sidney, Sir Philip, 212, 359 Simpson, James, 141 Solomon, Jon, 350–1, 353, 355n32 Smith, James Robinson, 324–8 Smith, Richard, 176 Spenser, Edmund, 353, 360 Spirit of Boccaccio’s Decameron, 288 Stallybrass, Peter, 8–9 Standfast, George, 250 Stationers’ Company, 198 Stationers’ Register, 217 Stephensen, Percy, 384–5 St John’s College, University of Cambridge, 184 Stories from the Italian Poets, 288 Story of Rimini, The, 287, 289–90 Strada, Zanobi da, 44–5 Straparola, 265 subscription, 259, 280, 392 Sulpicia, 122 Surprising Adventures of Rip Van Winkle, The, 280 Symonds, John Addington, 332, 334, 336, 361 Tales from the Arabic, 261 Tamyris (painter), 112 Tamyris (queen), 112, 130 Tasso, Torquato, 230, 254, 289, 353 Taylor, Andrew, 397n1 Terence, 118 “textualterity,” 4

Tiberius Caesar, 39, 377 Tiraboschi, Girolamo, 241–2, 244 Titian, 233 Theseus, 39 Thomas, William, 170–1 Thomson, W. M., 268n87, 269 Thousand and One Nights, The, 260–1 Three Sirens Press, 386, 391n75 Thyestes, 38, 39 Tibullus, 253 Tooke, Benjamin, 224, 228 Tottel, Richard, 162, 170 Tottel’s Miscellany, 170 Toury, Gideon, 9, 11n20 Toynbee, Paget, 318n73 translation: abridgement (see editing); absence of author name, 202, 219; adequacy, 214, 214n3, 284, 342, 373; amplification, 49–50, 50n70, 89, 199; archaism, 261–4, 271, 273, 312, 328, 338–9, 360, 372–4; censorship (see censorship); domestication, 309, 309n57; equivalence, 133, 150, 153, 155, 199, 294, 328, 338, 358, 361, 367–8, 373; fidelity, 155; fluency, 215–16, 2156n4, 279, 281, 325, 327, 355; free, 227, 244, 264; humanistic practices, 150–6, 158; intermediate translations, 163, 198–9, 224; invisibility, 155n96, 227; medieval textual practices, 91–4; metaphors of, 58, 83, 128, 228; need in receiving culture, 11, 199; nontranslation (see censorship); of paratexts, 188–90, 195, 198–201, 204–5; pedagogical function, 318; polysystem, 199n102; as reception, 9–11; retranslation, 9, 58, 214, 214n3, 283–4, 353; sending/

General Index receiving cultures, 9, 354; in 16th century, 159–60, 199, 206; source text/target text (ST/TT), 4, 397; translations as “facts,” 9, 10; use of multiple STs, 72, 171, 183–4, 219; verse, 293–4, 302, 314, 357–65; verse to prose, 198–9, 204–11, 372–4; visual expression (see mise-en-page) translation studies: Bourdieusian model, 4–5; descriptive translation studies, 9; sociological turn, 4–5 translators: anonymous translators, 108n28, 219, 223, 230; female translators, 18, 108, 283, 400 (see also Winwar, Frances); scholarly/ academic, 16–17, 311–12, 318–29, 330, 342–74. See also English translators of Boccaccio Troilus and Criseyde, 308n56, 310–15, 356–9, 369 Tudor Translations, 273, 390 typography, 188–9, 201, 261–2, 314–15, 343–4, 355, 372, 377, 385, 388–90; archaicizing, 260–1, 274, 275n99; black-letter, 168, 175, 182, 189, 261, 315, 382, 390; Enschede roman, 390; italic, 175, 179, 188, 201, 204, 249, 261, 357, 372, 382; ornaments, 201, 204, 385; roman, 168, 175, 188–9, 201, 204, 372, 382 Tytus & Gesyppus, 163 Ubaldini, Federigo, 298 Ugolino, 291 Ulysses, 50 Universal Library, 275–6, 313n62 universities: Birmingham, 394n82; Brown, 272; Cambridge, 343, 394n82; Cambridge, King’s

463

College, 311n61; Cambridge, St John’s College, 184; Cincinnati, 356, 367; Harvard, 318, 323–4, 347, 366; Johns Hopkins, 365; Leeds, 319n75; London, King’s College, 292, 343; London, Manchester New College, 319; London, University College, 313n62, 319; Manchester, 15, 319n75, 320, n77, 394n82; Oxford, 66, 72n115, 318–19, 394n82; Oxford, Worcester College, 197n95; Princeton, 350, 365, 366; Trinity College Dublin, 394n82; Yale, 237n47, 238, 256, 318, 324–5 University Extension Scheme, 318–20, 320n77 University of Pennsylvania Press, 365 Valdarfer, Christophorus, 236 Valdarfer Decameron, 236, 239n51 Valeria Messalina, 39, 377 Valgrisi, Vicenzo, 171 Varian, George, 324 Varro, Marcus Terentius, 145 Venus, 111, 129, 130 Venuti, Lawrence, 9n16, 155n96, 214n3, 367 Vérard, Antoine, 142–3 verse: blank, 291, 347; Chaucerian rhyme royal, 71, 91, 109, 150; dominance in 15th-century English, 92; Latin elegiac couplet, 114; metrical (verse) translation, 293–5, 357–65; octave metre, 288n11, 314; ottava rima, 168, 198, 314, 359; paratexts, 178–9, 344–5, 379–80, 390, 393; prose translation of, 198–9, 206–11, 372–4; terza rima, 12, 166n27, 290–1

464

General Index

Verzelini (Verseline), Francis, 200, 203 Verzelini, Jacopo, 203 Vida, Marco Girolamo, 230 Villani, Giovanni, 297, 321, 324 Villon, François, 260–1 Villon Society, 259, 263, 271, 276, 312 Vinciguerra, Francesca. See Winwar, Frances Violante, 344–9 Virgil, 54, 55, 118, 145, 163, 200–1, 205, 230, 380 Voltaire, 230, 257 Voronoff, Serge, 391 Wagrez, Jacques, 334, 334n5 Wallace, David, 7 Wallis, Alfred, 267 Walter, William, 163 Warton, Thomas, 233, 241 Wayland, John, 162–3 Webster’s Dictionary, 365 Wendolin of Speier, 146, 302 Westminster Press, 385 White, Robert, 222n30 Wicksteed, Philip Henry, 286, 317–29 “Widow Charlewood,” 197–8, 219 Wiffen, Jeremiah Holmes, 254 Wiley and Putnam (publishers), 289 Wilkins, Ernest Hatch, 368 Windsor-Clive, Robert George, 1st Earl of Plymouth, 275 Winwar, Frances (Francesca Vinciguerra), 18, 275, 277, 279–84, 395

Witart, Claude, 165n25 Wolfe, John, 217, 220 woodcuts. See under illustrations Wordsworth, William, 332–3, 353 Wordsworth Classic Erotica, 230 Working Men’s College, 307 World Publishing Company, 391n75 women: female translators, 18, 108, 283, 400 (see also Winwar, Frances); historic female readerships, 31–2, 102–3, 126, 135n52, 137, 148, 154–5, 193–5, 193n91, 204; as negative exemplars, 149; pagan women as Christian exemplars, 103, 106, 124–7, 138, 155; survival of texts on female subjects, 138 Wright, Herbert G., 6–7, 171, 189, 203, 219–22, 358, 389n74 Wright, Ichabod, 254 Wyatt, Thomas, 163, 332 Yale University Press, 327 Yeats, William Butler, 264 Young, Bartholemew, 185, 188, 190–7, 331, 381, 383, 385–6; other translations, 185; translation strategies, 195–7 Zaccaria, Vittorio, 21, 24 Zelig, 285 Zieriksee, Kornelius von, 163 Zin Bollettino, Vincenzo, 317