Petrarch (1304-1374): Sonnets and the Figure of Laura; Boccaccio (1313-1375): The Decameron as a Cycle of Life
Presented on: Thursday, October 20, 1983
Presented by: Roger Weir
Italian Renaissance
Presentation 3 of 13
Petrarch (1304-1374): Sonnets and the Figure of Laura; Boccaccio (1313-1375): The Decameron as a Cycle of Life
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, October 20, 1983
Transcript:
The date is October 20th, 1983. This is the third lecture in a series of lectures on the Italian Renaissance by Roger Weir. Tonight's lecture is entitled Petrarca who lived 1304-1374. Sonnets and A figure of Laura; And Boccaccio who lived 1313-1375. Decameron as a cycle of life.
...the individuals who have been following this development for some years. So those of you who are just now coming or come sporadically, I've been engaged on reconstructing the history of the world in terms of people, for about four years now. And we've moved our ways from Homer up to David Hume. But we left out several large gaps and so this particular lecture series goes back and fills in one of those gaps. The, the gap known since Jacob Burckhardt and Basel Switzerland the nineteenth century as the Renaissance. And the Renaissance is now come to Petrarca and Boccaccio.
We started off with Dante and we showed the elements of Dante and his culmination His De Monarchia, his book on world government and The Paradisio the conclusion to The Divine Comedy. And we showed how Dante had brought together an incredible visionary capacity with an equally incredible literary facility and had astonished his time. And had created by the sheer dynamic force of his personality and achievement, coming into juxtaposition with the prevailing culture at the time, and raised up mountains of inner penetration and created a civilization where they had only been a culture. Dante created the civilization of the renaissance in Florence and northern Italy. And at the same time, we noted that in The Paradisio as well as all the way through The Divine Comedy Dante, while he is working with universal cosmic structures is working with individual human content. And we found in The Paradisio certain individuals were singled out for excellence. and among those considered the most excellent of all visual artists of all time by Dante with his great friend Giotto.
And so, the second week, last week, we took Giotto and developed an insight into his crystalline artistic, visionary capacity. His sharpening up the intensity of the vision of personality through the pictorial space and the portrait put into that pictorial space. And the relational coordination along dynamic lines that turned a painting into a reality. An artistic presentation instead of a representation. And that the symbolic visionary capacity which Dante had revived again and created again anew, was created again in painting by Giotto. And we follow Giotto through to the culmination of his career when he built the Campanile in the center of Florence. And laid the ground plan for the great Cathedral that was to be the monumental building. Not so much in the Gothic style as being monumental in having these buttressed, high flung transcendental arches. But a Cathedral that would resonate with the sense of human proportion mastered. And we saw how Giotto died three years after the campanile was begun. And how after him had become a problem of how to dome this Cathedral. That it was almost an impossibility. Yes, one could build domes, but Giotto and the humanists had set up an impossible structure that had eight sides. It needed to be an eight-sided dome and the structural technical capacities were not available. And so through two generations Florence the nascent(?) center, would be center, of a Renaissance of man's capacity to express meaning in the most powerful terms available to him lay undomed in the city itself.
Set like a jewel on the Arno and the gentle Tuscan hills seemed to be like a beauty without the front teeth. It needed a dome. And how a young Florentine named Brunelleschi dominated throughout his entire life by the vision that he would someday learn how to do this. Had actually finally accomplished this impossible incredible task and not only had domed the building but had created a masterpiece of world architecture. And that one of the characteristics of Il Duomo is that human beings could walk between the two cupolas all the way up to the apex so that God's house was permeable to man and man's motion ritualistically could now be raised to symbolical ceremonial heights. That he could carry himself by his own proportion, his own capacity, into the heavens. Only as Dante had done symbolically in epic literature in The Paradisio. Nor even in the sequencing of transcendental frescoes by Giotto, insisting all the while that the moving thread of the transcendental frescoes was the life of a man a human being. Nor even with Brunelleschi insisting that human beings be able to walk through God's house completely.
All of this seemed larger than life. It seemed to be that there were Titans again on the planet. There needed to be some way to gear this to the man on the street. The proverbial man on the street. There had to be some way to take this enormity of achievement, this mastery of conception and bring it in hand sized portions to every man. And so, the two individuals that we have tonight are the two individuals that did just this. And it is they who created that philosophy known as humanism. That is to say, it was already implicit in the structural achievements and even explicit in some of the contextual demonstrations in Dante and Giotto and so forth. But it was up to the genius of Petrarca and Boccaccio to bring home the achievements that had been made and to then have laid the complete cycle for that higher learning that was to come with the very next generation.
And we'll see that with these three lectures the foundation is laid very carefully, masterfully. And when we get to the high Renaissance with Michelangelo, which will be a special Saturday lecture in November, Michelangelo seriously wrote several times that every man on the street in Florence felt that he could do as well as any of these architects and sculptors and painters and writers if he only could get the time free. That he was just as competent and powerful in his perception of the world in his capacities his hands were the same as theirs and if he wished he could do that too. This utter confidence in man bred the springtime of the civilization to which we fall as final errors.
Boccaccio is actually the major figure yet seems strange because for generations Petrarca seemed to be the major figure. It seemed that the wonderful meditative solitary genius of Petrarca, with his insistence upon there being some humanistic spark kept alive even in the most ascetic life. Famous for his great sonnets to Laura a woman to whom he was barely acquainted. She was the wife of another. She was like the image to him that Beatrice was to Dante. An inner Madonna. A human Madonna. Someone he had seen. A human being, a woman and shepherding those feelings that the age of chivalry had raised to be the symbolic apex of the courageous life. So that one would be able to brave any destiny including the dragons, and his treasure for the love of the woman. But these were Knights of culture not of armor. And Petrarca like Dante held the image of his beloved sacred in the sense that it was through the pen and not the sword that knighthood would be consummated in this time. And so, his great cycle of love poetry to Laura, our religious sonnets with the humane décor. And they mark for the first time in the appearance of the Italian language the great genius of the lyric voice.
Petrarca, who had been moved by his father from place to place and it's been 20 years in Avignon where the Pope said had their exile were hid. Prepared for the law but had found on the death of his father at the age of 22 that the only place open to an educated pauper was the clergy. He took orders, did eventually become a priest. Proved himself. Eventually became chosen for very great honors. Lived alone in wild solitudes for years on end composing his vision of rebirthing the classical age. He had remembered as a boy his father who had wanted him to study the law found him reading Virgil and Cicero, threw the boys books on the fire. And the boy with tears streaming from his eyes rescued the burning shards and maintained to the end of his life a half-charred copy of Cicero. He had traveled to Paris and to Cologne. He had found translations when he could of the great Latin authors. Italians from another era and he recognized a kinship with those souls and with their achievement. And felt as a man on the street Michelangelo's day would feel a century and a half later, he could do as much if he would just devote himself. Which he did throughout his lifetime he could do as much. And he spent a great deal of his life writing an epic poem called Africa.
Somewhere back in the ancient dim, classical Roman past there had been a greatness of equanimity. There had been a religious conviction that equanimity and adversity was the triumph of life and the proof of man's courage. It had been recorded classically in the Roman historians in the great figure of Scipio Africanus. And then the converse of it had been shown in Tacitus history that when that is lost all is lost, everything comes unraveled, one could be the emperor of the world and be as degenerate as the worst demon or animal. Tacitus who had had to live through Nero's reign and Domitian's reign of terror. And written in the histories in the annals the unraveling of the great character of the Roman people through degradation, through the loss of the equanimity of facing adversity but that had been the key. That had been the primal matrix around which all the values of Roman life had been collected and held in sacred trust.
I'm reminded of having seen the tough physique of a Roman general in a statue. Not of bronze that had patinated itself somewhat with age. All the strong features looking invincible until one approached close on to the sculptor and was able finally to see the eyes. And it was in the eyes that the pathos of human misery floated free and was given a home by the strong strength of the boned and muscled features. That was the genius of the Roman psyche. This was something that Petrarca wanted to bring back into reality. Why could we not bring it back. Man can create all things he will do it. But even so it was not Petrarca really who was the crowning figure to bring this realization back to every man. It was a man who for several generations now has been thought negligible. It was Boccaccio who did it.
Boccaccio much maligned. One used to find his books surreptitiously being sold under the counter because they had risqué illustrations and they were to be classified as wry bald classics, typical. The Most Pleasant Delectable Questions of Love by Giovanni Boccaccio illustrated by Alexander King, New York, Fifth Avenue. And so, for several generations Boccaccio was someone who for whom private editions in limited clubs in New York and London, these things were printed and sent to you in plain brown wrappers. Misunderstood, misappropriated, civilization belongs only to those who live it otherwise it is lost and doesn't exist. But Boccaccio can be seen. And increasingly in the last few decades Boccaccio has been seen again as he once was. As he really once was. The great friend of Petrarca. Somewhat junior to him. Born about nine years later. Petrarca is born in 1304 and Boccaccio in 1313. They died within 18 months of each other. Petrarca in July of 1374 and Boccaccio near the end of the year in 1375, late December. It was Boccaccio who was the genius. Petrarca is important for the love, lyrics, the songs. He's important for the revival of classical learning but it's Boccaccio who is able to take all this and put it into some form, which belonged to every man. And is Boccaccio who set the style for hundreds of years of literature. Is Boccaccio who is a model for Chaucer. Is Boccaccio whom Shakespeare cribbed so often when he was looking for characters and plots. Because all writer really has to sell our ideas and dreams. Somebody to populate them and others to contest them. What else is there on this planet?
But it was Boccaccio who put all of it together in a great popular cathedral known as The Decameron. And it's interesting because it is still looked upon and read today as it was 600 years ago. It's too good to pass up. One is looking for the juicy parts and one finally, if one reads carefully through, comes in realization that this is a very great writer. And he is doing something. What is he doing that it isn't just a collection of stories? What is he up to? This has a shape. It has a pattern. It is in fact an architectural creation. But Boccaccio in order to come to The Decameron, found himself as a youngster much in the same position. His father was associated with the wealthy Italian house known as the Bardi. And his father had been a business associate of them and had in fact been associated around the court of Naples. And Boccaccio because his father was very high up in the legal counsels of the aristocratic circles controlling Naples found himself very much free to be the young man about town. He didn't really want to follow in his father's footsteps.
He in fact, very young began to fancy himself as a writer. As a littérateur. And Boccaccio had this talent for collecting characters. Much like a writer who will take a notebook with him and sit in the local bistros and instead of sketching people will write down mannerisms and quirks and qualities. And after 20 or 30 years of this will have a suitcase packed full of humanity. Boccaccio without notebook used his eyes and mind and as he began to fill himself with this vision of man as he is, humanity as it really is. As we live and breathe and eat, sleep, populate this planet. He became to use Chaucer's phrase, a fair field full of folk, he became in himself a fertile field of human perception and tried in various ways to bring this out of himself and put it into form. He wrote an enormously interesting series of biographies of women, On Concerning Famous Women. 104 women throughout history. He was fascinated by the feminine. You see Dante was and Petrarca was. But for Boccaccio it wasn't a Beatrice or a Laura, it was the interesting fact that humanity comes male and female. And that the feminine seems to be the key to the organization. And that without the feminine man drifts wildly and savagely in the world. That somehow the feminine bestows an ordering. And if a man observes the etiquette of proper interchange, he will learn that order and with his energies put into that order he will create a world.
And so, Boccaccio's concerned with, with women began. And he writes in his preface here, "a long time ago some ancient authors wrote brief works on the lives of famous men, Lucius Plutarchus [Plutarch]. And in our own times that renowned man and great poet my master patriarch is writing a fuller work in a loftier style." Do you see the emphasis? Plutarchus was great but my pal Petrarca is doing him one better and one higher. "This is fitting for assuredly those who have given all their energy substance and when the occasion required it their life's blood in order to surpass other men with their illustrious deeds have deserved that their names be forever remembered by posterity. But I have been quite astonished that women have had so little attention from writers of that sort that they have gained no recognition in any work devoted especially to them. Although it can be clearly seen in the more voluminous histories that some women have acted with as much strength as valor. And so, if men are praised constantly and the cycles of their renown make those authors of those cycles forever famous isn't it about time for women to have their writer."
And it's interesting because at the same time as Boccaccio is beginning to draw this out of him, he met Petrarca. Probably when he was about thirty years of age and they just they saw eye to eye. They were opposites. Petrarca loving the, the wild retreats. The solitary moonlight walks. He liked the...he liked the contemplation of the Divine image coming to him in a human form and how might one sing with beautiful love language and create some way in which this could actually come into reality. But Boccaccio loved the cities. He loved the urban life. He loved the pull and push of people.
And for him in writing On Concerning Famous Women he also wrote one of the earliest lives of Dante. And in this earliest life of Dante, we have beautifully encapsulated by this artist and the cover and Dante's mind is the figure of a woman. The feminine. Boccaccio is interested in the feminine. He's interested in the pattern of order that could be revealed if a man could only pay attention, not just long enough to a woman but full enough to women. To woman as a feminine. So, he began to compose a volume known as lily as Decameron which has 100 short stories in it. But the De Cameron was actually written, as it declares at its beginning "in a time of ultimate chaos". What better time to begin a search for order then in a time of ultimate chaos. Things could not get any worse. It's the perfect starting point for order. In fact, there is a school of thought that says before you can learn anything you have to jumble everything you know up. As long as you try to fit something new into your order it's going to be very hard.
Boccaccio was in Florence when the Black Plague hit Florence. And the Black Plague hit Florence in 1348. And it came in the spring, it came in March when Tuscany is supposed to be beautiful. And it got worse through April and May and by the hot summer months of July and August there were so many people dying that there were empty houses and buildings all over Florence. But what was worse than death was the shredding of the social order, Boccaccio says in his introduction to The Decameron, "it was a time when everyone shunned everyone else. It didn't matter who you were or what relation you had you could be a carrier of their death. And so, households, marriages, every conceivable human relationship was shattered and shredded. And everyone became suspicious of each other. The dead lay untouched, and the stench permeated the city so that Florence began to resemble hell as much as hell could ever be realized."
So, Boccaccio begins his order in the plague in Florence in 1348. He says there was a church and there were seven women. Seven women ages 18 to 28 and they were gathered in this church to pray. They were all young, spry women and they resolved that they could be no better off than to take themselves to the countryside. If they were to die at least they could die, there. But that young women even in this time could not go on chaperoned. Because the seven women still kept intact among themselves the idea of decency. The idea of their femininity. The etiquette of some kind of an order. And so, they resolved that they would go if they could find protection. And just as they had resolved on that issue into the cathedral came three young men, about 25 to 30 years of age. And the seven women and the three young men in talking it over decided that the ten of them would leave Florence for a vacation. A chaste, decent vacation so that no one could talk about them. But they would go about two miles out of the city. There was a certain Palace on a hillside overlooking the city.
And so, Boccaccio sets his quest for order with ten people, seven women and three men. On a hilltop overlooking plague-infested Florence. They decide among themselves that each one in their turn will be the king or queen for the day. And whatever they decide as king or queen shall be the operations of the day. That is what they will do within bounds of decorum. And so, they prepare themselves for three days and then they begin a 10-day cycle of storytelling. And the king or queen of the day allows each one to tell a story each day so that there's a cycle of ten stories over ten days by ten people. So, this perfect number is compounded again and again. And that the cycle is circular it comes back full round each time because we're having something very valuable and timeless happened here. Boccaccio without saying it. Generations of recent readers without having to realize that Boccaccio was doing exactly what was needed to purify the cosmic air. We're going through a timeless purification ceremony.
Each of these stories is a little vignette about life. And in fact, the first day seems to be witty disputation. Little talking's. Day two and three are all tales of adventure and deception. To get the juices flowing. Wonderfully inventive. And on day four the stories of unhappy love come up from each of them and a pall of gloom begins to settle over the company. Day five with the gloom not quite dissipated comes and there are some stories that are lighter. But then day six comes back and everyone is gay, and the stories are interesting. And then day seven, eight and nine the stories become very risqué. A lot of hidden innuendo and double meanings in the language. Then day ten, the final day, all the themes of the previous days are all brought and woven in together into a whole.
And the tenth story of the tenth day is a story about true love and the equanimity of facing adversity. And it's about a woman named Griselda. And in the story, there is a prince who as a wealthy bachelor is told by all of the population of the towns and the castles that he should marry. He says he will not marry, has no need to. But if they insist on him marrying, he will marry whom he likes, and they must treat her as the sovereign. And he has in mind a serving girl. A common village girl named Griselda. And he brings her in, weds her with great pomp and everyone is so pleased because Griselda makes the transition from peasant woman to aristocratic woman. And makes it without changing her personality because she has equanimity in face of the adversity. But then the young prince when he realizes that she is pregnant and gives forth the daughter he wonders if this is skin-deep. So, he decides that he will test her over a long period of time with adversity. So, he goes to her, and he says this baby daughter is unfitting and must be taken away and done away with. And the daughter picked up by Griselda is delivered over.
This is the tenth story of the 10th day. Boccaccio's come to the end of a cycle. We've been prepared for 500 pages of all the possibilities of being human. All of the incredible things that can happen. All of the scheming clevernesses. All of the lies that human beings are capable of. But in this tapestry of universal capacity mankind is also capable of unflinching equanimity under diversity, adversity. He's capable of that also. That also exists.
So, the child is taken away and he sends the child to another city to be raised. And secretly he's watching Griselda. And four years later a son is born, and the same thing happens with the son. He's taken away. Finally, she burying up and maintaining her equanimity, he tells her that she will no longer do as his wife. He has a special dispensation the papal bull allowing him to remarry. She must return back to her father, back to the rags. And then she reminds him that before she was brought to the castle, he had had her stripped naked and then had given her the cloaks, two dressers. So that she had come to him with nothing and therefore she was willing to return everything. Except that she had brought her virginity and could she have an old cloak to cover herself going back to her father. And this was agreed upon and she went back. But then to even twist it further he ordered her to come back to the castle to attend upon his new wedding. His new bride to come, to prepare the castle. And she comes back and there was a very young bride about 12 or 13 years old. And just before the wedding is to be consummated, he then turns to Griselda and says, this is your daughter, our daughter she was not killed. And this little boy is our son. And you have proven yourself beyond any shadow of doubt and therefore in one hour I returned to you everything. And she was dressed again in royal robes. And he said I will devote the rest of my life to you unstintingly.
And so, the tenth book, book of the tenth day ends with this image of achievement. That equanimity comes in life because we make it so. And by one side of adversity holding equanimity the other side eventually comes round. But there is a sympathy between man and nature, between the human and the divine and that sacrifice works. And that this right of transition, of purification was possible in Boccaccio's time because he was doing it. He was making it so by writing the Decameron which was then read and passed around and the stories.
And it's interesting because there are levels surrounding the tales. Besides the tales themselves. The 100 tales is what is called the cornice, which is the story surrounding the whole story. Like a cornice the early introduction of the plague and conditions under which these stories are going to be told. Each story has a little paragraph or sometimes a page introducing it and linking it up with the previous stories. Each story ends with a song, a canzone. Beautiful, lyrical poetry and all of it put in one piece. But all of that is seen within the plague. The plague is populated and within the plague is the sphere of the sense of the feminine. And finally with all that the Decameron as a perceptible, architectural unifier using the kinds of stories that would have been told in the taverns and homes of any man, anyone. But arranging them in an order which emphasized that the human had a possibility of being organized by superior intelligence into a divine order. And it was with Boccaccio's Decameron that the earliest formulation of the Renaissance for the every man, every woman was laid.
And in fact, we have several studies in the last few years, Five Frames for the Decameron Communication and Social Systems in the Cornice published by Princeton University Press. We have statements like this, "the details of the contrast between the overall realistic atmosphere of the stories and the stylized quality of the cornice are interesting in the minuteness of their consistency.
...tells of the contrast between the overall realistic atmosphere of the stories and the stylized quality of the cornice are interesting in the minuteness of their consistency. Boccaccio was a very careful builder. The days spent by the ten protagonists are monotonously similar. The young people rise at dawn, walk a little way, refreshed themselves always with excellent wines and sweetmeats, linger in a pleasant garden. Sing, dance, dine, rest gathered to tell their stories, elect the next day's sovereign, amuse themselves at chess, checkers, and backgammon or by reciting from and discussing romances. Sup (?), dance again and end each day with an amorous canzone. But this is a ritual reappearance of the good life again and again.
And in fact, the literary form in which this is done introduced the early Renaissance style it's called the sweet simple style. And Boccaccio is the master of that. This purely delightful, limpidly accurate way of presenting great truths in such little steps and increments that anyone could go up those steps. And you don't realize until you have circumambulated all of it what an enormous ritual transition you have accomplished. You have purified yourself of the infestation of what the plague always brings. Regardless on what level one would understand the plague. That those forces that would shred the human world have been ordered and reinstated through this rite of purification.
If some of you wish to go into this a little more there is a wonderful book called The Rites of Passage which I'm going to use in January on a course called Rituals in our Saturday school. Along with some other materials. I'll come into this just a little bit after the break and show you how some of Boccaccio's Decameron has a remarkable similarity to rituals and rites of purification at all times and everywhere. Well let's take a little break and I'll be down selling cassettes in the street.
What does give you a few ideas. I don't want to overload it for him, one can actually go by far in this direction. But the lattice like intricacies of late 20th century thought demand a lot more time and patience than I think any of us have. It needs painstaking application by academics, financially sequestered and irreproachable.
The Decameron has ten people, seven men and two women. But the ten people also make two pairings of five different levels. And for Boccaccio because he was using language in a very specific way, very intelligent about language. He used a pair of narrators for each of five levels of language. Or if you wish media of communication. Right, I don't use those phrases very much, but it turns out to be useful in this term. Two of them represented the capacities of lyric narrative. And two of them represented the capacities for epic, really renewal of the epic scale and grandeur. Two for the lyric. Two for the pastoral narrative.
Boccaccio in a very real way creates the great prose style as opposed to the great poetic style. Boccaccio's Italian prose for hundreds of years became the standard to which one would aspire as a writer. And this standard was a restatement in contemporary terms of what had been the standard in classical literature. So that increasingly the successors to Boccaccio and Petrarca attempted to have their works come up to a standard, which if it was good enough at this rate would have been good enough in the classical realm. The final pair were for the psychological novel because each of the stories of each of the days is called a novel. A novel. This edition has some beautiful artworks and paintings.
Along with this, for instance, this is how the third day begins just to give you the tone and translation of Boccaccio his elegance. His humanity. And it's over a long duration of reading that one begins to appreciate his enormous structure. "The rising sun had now changed the complexion of the morning from scarlet to yellow. When the Queen arose on Sunday and had all her company called up, whilst the master of the household had sent long before many things that were necessary. As also people to order what should be done. And seeing the Queen now upon the March he had everything else packed up and removed bag and baggage. The company of ladies and gentlemen following behind the Queen marched on with an easy pace. Attended by her ladies and the three gentlemen and conducted by the music of nightingales and other tuneful birds. Along a path not much frequented but enameled with various flowers."
You see Boccaccio's exquisite eye and hand. "Which began to open their blossoms to the ascending sun and directing their chorus full west. Chatting merrily with her company all the way. In a little more than two miles she brought them to a most beautiful palace seated upon an eminence in the mid of a large plane. When they were entered there in and had seen the Great Hall and the chambers most elegantly fitted up and furnished with everything that was proper, they greatly extolled it judging its Lord to be a truly magnificent person."
You see this in the midst of a tornado of the Black Plague and Boccaccio is saying we need not be shredded by this. We need not be cowered. We may rise to an elegance and every detail of our lives and our relationships to each other may be not only purified but beautified. And our humanity will triumphantly carry the day because what god or gods could see us and our elegance in this time of great distress and not come to our aid. Going afterwards below stairs and observing it's spacious and pleasant court, the cellar stored with the richest wines and delicate springs of water everywhere running. They commended it yet more. From thence they went to rest themselves in an open gallery which overlooked the court set out with all the flowers of the season. Whether the master of the house had brought wine and sweet meats for their refreshment. So continuously through The Decameron Boccaccio is reinstating this quality not only of humanity just struggling to surviving but of humanity choosing to elegantly insist upon the best surviving. We may die but we will die well.
The fourth day begins like so, "The Sun had now driven out all the stars from the heavens and dispelled the vapors of the night from the earth when Philo stratus arose and ordered all the company to be called. They walked then into the garden and dined when the time came where they had supped the preceding night. Taking a nap afterwards whilst the Sun was at its height. They returned at the usual time to the fountain side. Here Philostratus commanded Flamento [sp?] to begin who spoke in a soft agreeable manner as follows and she tells her story."
And of course, in the course of the fourth day many stories will be told that our fill of unhappy love. One story there was a brother and sister. Several brothers and a sister and the brothers always took care to protect this sister. And they noticed that a visitor to the household had caught her eye and that she was beginning to have late-night rendezvous with the young man in question. So, they resolved that instead of bringing this issue up they would just band together and invite the youth out into the countryside. Which they did and they dispatched him and buried him and told their sister that he was off on a journey to some city on business. She moaned, increasingly wept. The brothers finally said you cannot ask again we don't know what has become of him if you said anything more, you'll be harshly treated.
So, she took herself, in the story, to her bedroom and weeping fell into a deep sleep. And in her sleep her lover came in the dream blood dripping down and shattered and rags. And he said I am buried such, a such a part of thee would. She early in the morning, taking several maid servants and a workmen went out in the early morning and came to the spot in the wood and uncovered the leaves and there under the earth his body not decomposed at all but dead. And she wanted to have the body removed so that she could take it to a more proper burial, but it was so difficult and heavy. So, she had the head removed and had the head wrapped into a linen cloth and brought this back to the house. And she took a large flowerpot and put the head in it and then covered it with earth and planted sweet herbs. And this became the shrine in her room. And of course, the unhappy part of the story, if this doesn't get you is that the brothers discover she's attached to the pot. And they break the pot they find the head and they tell her that she will have to go into a convent. That there's nothing more for her.
So, Boccaccio brings us in The Decameron to all of these tones and qualities in our feelings. And all of this is set within an elegant tone. That all of this has a way of making an order. and yet all of that elegant border is set within this tornado of the Black Plague. There are so many bodies that they're stacking them like cordwood. And they're having to bury them in by the hundreds and long pits. Boccaccio says that in 1348 more than 100,000 people died in Florence. And that before that one of those scarcely have thought there were that many people in the entire city. And yet the plague is not the ultimate context. Beyond the plague there's an ideal of humanity in its feminine mode having the graciousness to nourish the ideas of love. And a tower of sacrifice and courage.
And yet even beyond that there is the mind of man which conceives of a vehicle to express all of this. And so, the work itself The Decameron from Boccaccio becomes the ultimate context through which all these layers as it were. All these levels, these concentric circles are not a celestial hierarchy so much as the penetrable waves of realization of humanity. What one needs then, is a way to circulate one sensibility around this onioned level capacity of human sensibility. That we need to move ourselves through this order in order to affect its wonder-working architecture. That the effect of that ordered architecture only comes from our willingness to move ourselves through it. To have the experience of it ourselves. And so does the reading of The Decameron. That going through this cycle that produces the purifying right of reinstating the courage and decency, the risqué and the elegance of aspects of man. And there are ways of understanding these kinds of rights. In fact, rituals have through very sophisticated anthropology in our century come to be understood to likewise have an order.
And I've put up here a classification from The Rites of Passage. This is published by the University of Chicago Press about 20 years ago, that rights often come in pairs. And just as there are some rights that are direct some are indirect. There are some that are positive some are negative. Some are sympathetic others are contagious. There are animistic rights and dynamistic rights.
In The Decameron, Boccaccio seeks to go to the indirect way. He seeks to go to this positive aspect. He seeks a sympathetic type of a right and there really dynamistic. So that he follows an interesting selection in path. One that what perhaps not really naturally occur in primitive manner(?). That there are quirks in the order that let us know and make us recognize, finally, that Boccaccio is intentional. That his patterning of The Decameron does not follow a simple primitive mode but has its twists and turns that come from conscious reflection upon its meaning in signification. So that Boccaccio finally has a language of great significance. And this of course, I think, here's what the Renaissance at this period was introducing.
I have from a biography of Petrarca is paragraph, short paragraph to read about Petrarca and you can see in the context of what I've uttered about Boccaccio. Makes good sense, he begins this. This is part three the father of humanism. Petrarca the father of Humanism. Boccaccio is still at the time this book was written was considered a rival writer of the second reign. He wrote a Petrarca, which is now also eminently true of Boccaccio for us. "Every age has a philosophy of life which reaches and affects in greater or less degree the thought and action of all its members. To the centuries before Petrarca the world was a place in which to prepare for a light beyond. The noblest subject of thought was theology. The task of saving the soul was the one important task. The centuries since have realized in some measure that the present life is also precious in itself and is not to be thus subordinated."
This shifting of the view is of immense significance ended as owing to Petrarca and so now too to Boccaccio more than any male that this was affected. So that we were at this time in our career of attaining consciousness realizing that this life was not to be thrown away. That it was in itself precious. Had capacities for refinement that were worth observing. That there were qualities of human nature worth disciplining ourselves to attain. And there were clues to this, but the clues lay in ruins. Because when Petrarca and Boccaccio and Giotto and Dante when they went to Rome the classical civilization were these monumental ruins. Think of these engravings of pureness Piranesi(?) of these huge mountainous areas of rubble that on closer inspection were the remains of buildings. That there were human beings who lived in a scale of proportion that seemed like gods or titans. And yet when they found their writings, their books, they were men. They were women just as we are.
So, it became imperative with that generation of Petrarca Boccaccio, first of all rescue the books. Petrarca and Boccaccio were the first to read Homer in Latin. And when they rediscovered Homer and they found that the clue. And Homer all the way through the balance of the Iliad, the reoccurring balance of the Odyssey was all about equanimity under adversity. And how after suffering through the wrath of Achilles, the multi-faceted mind of Achilles achieved his homecoming. Had they realized that even the great structure of the antique civilization had all been balanced upon a single epic voice, upon Homer. And balanced again for its own time under Virgil. And they realized and then their own midst, in the very city that they lived in, Dante had done it again. They realized that they were on their way.
And this change. This emphasizing of the capacities for the preciousness of man's realization to shift from the theological to the humane without letting go of the divine was a key. And so, it's not surprising that very quickly it began to have its reverberations among the priests.
Next week we'll take two of them who were two of the world's greatest painters. Fra Angelico and FRA Filippo Lippi do not pray alone in the cloisters they paint for the millions. And that's part of the Renaissance. So that's all for tonight.
END OF RECORDING