Boccaccio

Boccaccio is a 1981 biography and critical appraisal of the fourteenth-century Italian poet, by American poet and academic Thomas G. Bergin, at the time, Sterling Professor of Romance Languages at Yale University. Boccaccio provides an overview of the poet’s life and times, followed by a summary and analysis of each of Boccaccio’s surviving works in chronological order (except for his masterpiece, the Decameron, which Bergin considers last). Boccaccio is an introductory work for students and those curious about the poet who influenced Chaucer, Shakespeare, and many other major figures of European literature.

Bergin begins with a brief biography, drawing on the few facts available about Giovanni Boccaccio’s life. An illegitimate child, nothing is known about his mother, although rumors suggest she may have been French. He was brought up in Florence and Naples. Inducted into his father’s banking business, Boccaccio quit to study canon (church) law, before quitting that to write poetry.

His early poems were love poems, romantic and erotic. He soon branched into prose romances. Bergin notes that some critics credit him with writing the first example of “psychological-realistic” fiction in “The Elegy of Madonna Fiammetta.” He composed several major works of poetry in the Florentine vernacular before beginning the Decameron, his masterpiece. He became friends with the great Italian poets Petrarch and Dante, later becoming Dante’s first biographer.



Boccaccio never married, although he fathered five children, all of who died before he did. In middle age, Boccaccio abandoned literature and began to produce scholarly works—in Latin, rather than Italian. The exact reason for this profound shift is unknown. He was appointed as the Florentine ambassador to the Pope, and he took minor holy orders, which in turn may have prompted him to denounce his own literary works as profane. Hints from his writing suggest that he may have been soured by experiences with lovers, or undergone a religious epiphany. However, his primary goal, to earn a paid sinecure at a ruler’s court, never came to fruition, and he died disappointed. His legacy, however, is incontestable. Bergin follows previous scholars in crediting Boccaccio with helping to rediscover the culture of ancient Greece and lead Europe into the Renaissance.

Alongside his account of Boccaccio’s life, Bergin provides illuminating detail about the context of the fourteenth century: “It is doubtful,” he observes, “that the average man of the twentieth century could survive a week of life in a medieval town.” Bergin discusses the contemporary rediscovery of classical Greek texts in which Boccaccio played an important role, Boccaccio’s service to the Florentine government, and the possibility that Boccaccio’s love poetry was addressed to a real mistress or mistresses. Bergin is fond of Boccaccio, calling him a “kind and unpretentious man,” and he argues that underneath their complex allegories, much of his writing is autobiographical.

From his biography of the poet, Bergin proceeds to a series of essays on each of his works, major and minor, including comedies, elegies, and epics, as well as writings Boccaccio called “visions” and “nymph songs.”



Bergin addresses the question of Boccaccio’s “nympholepsy”: the poet’s works contain a notorious number of nymphs, often described in minute physical detail, even when they are representing virtues such as Temperance. In Bergin’s account, Boccaccio advocates for the “civilizing influence of sexual love…on the uncouth, but happily malleable young male.” On the other hand, Bergin finds that “the figure of the betrayed and abandoned lover is one of Boccaccio’s most persistent obsessions.” On that score, he accuses the poet of “emotional self-indulgence.”

Bergin offers critical judgments on many of the minor works. He finds the “Teseida of the Nuptials of Emilia” an artistic failure and suggests that Boccaccio was simply not temperamentally suited to epic or war poetry. He also concludes that “The Vision of Love” is unsuccessful, although in its defense he makes the case that it may have been intended as a parody of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Bergin also offers original translations from some of Boccacio’s works, including “Bucolics,” “The Fates of Illustrious Men,” and “Concerning Famous Women.”



Bergin closes his book with an extended essay on the Decameron, Boccaccio’s masterpiece and one of the major works of European literature. The Decameron incorporates a hundred stories, presented as tales told by ten young people sheltering from the Plague (a device which would influence Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales). The book was probably written between 1348 and 1353, and it is remarkable for its mixture of styles and tones: erotic tales blend with tragic, witty, and moral ones. Bergin praises the Decameron’s “worldly affability” and “buoyant naturalism.” He also finds it a “marvelous anomaly” in the poet’s oeuvre, anticipated hardly or at all by Boccaccio’s earlier work.

Kirkus Reviews found Bergin’s volume a “valuable but (deliberately) pedestrian introduction” to Boccacio’s work, and both Kirkus and the New York Times suggested that serious students might prefer to refer to Vittore Branca’s Bocaccio: The Man and His Works, from which Bergin himself concedes much of his knowledge is drawn.