Paste your essay in here…“Grisilde is deed, and eek hire pacience:” Boccaccio and Chaucer’s Griselda
In terms of the historical and literary context to their writings, Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer have similar experiences. They wrote in the same time period of the late 14th century, although Boccaccio was born about thirty years earlier and wrote before Chaucer. They also both grew up in an environment of business and merchants, and Chaucer strove to further expose himself to this environment by visiting Italy. They both intimately experienced the world of court politics and the change that can come with this environment. They also both wrote the same story, Boccaccio in his Decameron and Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales, about a patient woman, Griselda, who endures suffering and tests at the hands of her husband. Even though both authors write the same story, their intentions and treatment behind the themes of constancy and stoicism are different when the language of the texts are considered closely.
The authors share similar biographical traits. Boccaccio’s family was part of the emerging mercantile middle class whose rise the Italian nobles were wary of and later tried to quash. His father was a merchant, and Boccaccio was raised to take up the same trade, learning accounting, customer service and working with clients, and inventory. In the late 1320s he worked as an apprentice merchant for the Bardi bank in Naples, but ultimately Boccaccio was unsatisfied with this work and moved to study canon law at a university in Naples. The 1330’s also saw Boccaccio begin writing and copying medieval texts into his works, but the 1340’s brought a significant amount of change in Italy. A plague hit Florence in 1340, and the Italian government changed hands from King Robert to the French military leader, who was ousted a year later and replaced by a popular government; this all serves to reveal that the power of the elites was fading at the time Boccaccio was finishing his writings before he began work on the Decameron. The fictional start date of the Decameron is 1348, when the Black Plague hit Florence and killed over half of the population, allowing elites to regain control of the Italian government. In the 1350’s, Boccaccio continued writing and also acted as a communal ambassador to the Pope at the time; he also interacted with one of his literary role models, Petrarch, by sending him letters and a copy of his Decameron. Historically, Boccaccio’s life was characterized by the fact that he was exposed to a multitude of people through his mercantile profession, and to a different set of values from the previous medieval ones. He interacted with elites and was comfortable at court, and lived during the Black Plague, which fundamentally changed structures in society. In terms of the ideological effects on him from his background, from his experience in the mercantile profession he came to understand and accept being calculating, ambitious, and realistic; this is in addition to the idea that as much as merchants deal in trading goods, they also swap stories to pass time and to relax after work.
Chaucer also grew up similarly and his work reflects the same focus on ranking and degree that defined medieval England and Italy. He grew up in a mercantile family near the Thames River, and the river’s location and role as an important waterway meant Chaucer was exposed to shipmen, traders, financiers, and merchants from Italy. In terms of his work experience, records first show him working as a servant in the royal household of the countess of Ulster, a position that would provide him with a court education and ability to network and create professional connections to use later in life. He later served in the army, and upon returning, he began work as a messenger, studied law, and entered a life of service as a diplomat; his work as a diplomat afforded him close connections with extremely important people in the royal court, giving him a similar opening to see the inner workings as Boccaccio had in the Florentine government. Chaucer suffered a series of changes in fortune, similar to Boccaccio’s business frustrations that led him to return to Florence; he changed jobs after political upheaval, including the ousting of Richard II of the duke of Gloucester which led to Chaucer’s discharge, and King Richard II’s later regaining of control which led to Chaucer’s position as clerk of the king’s works. This period in Chaucer’s life was characterized by political tension, especially after the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 and his experiences in the Merciless Parliament of 1388. Throughout all of this, medieval literature in England reflected this stress about physical circumstances and change by including themes of religion versus secularism, similar to themes throughout Boccaccio’s work in the Decameron.
In terms of literary influences, Chaucer was extremely influenced by Boccaccio, Dante, and Petrarch, in addition to Roman philosopher Boethius. Boccaccio was also significantly focused on the work of Dante Alighieri, but what is relevant to this paper’s study of Griselda is Francis Petrarch. Boccaccio met Petrarch in 1350, when Petrarch was the foremost Italian writer, but after Boccaccio sent him a copy of the manuscript, scholars glean from their exchange of letters and Boccaccio’s subsequent writings that Petrarch made Boccaccio somewhat ashamed of the Decameron. Petrarch likes “Renaissance humanism, the return to ancient values and ancient literature,” which partly explains why one of the only stories he liked from Boccaccio’s Decameron was the one of patient Griselda. He translated this story into Latin, which was the more popular and sophisticated language to write in instead of the Italian that people spoke in day to day life, the Italian that the Decameron was originally written in. The two authors actually had a relatively tense relationship as they had disagreements on content and ideas; Boccaccio wrote “amorous works in the vernacular” on human life, ingenuity, and desires, reflecting his upbringing around the merchant class; Petrarch’s moralistic and historical writings reflected Latin humanism. Petrarch argued that fictional works should “set forth truths physical, moral, and historical,” and Boccaccio expands upon this by adding another type of truth: theological. Boccaccio actually praises Dante Alighieri for including theology as one of the important themes in poetry and other fictional works, which fits with Boccaccio’s interest, education, and career in canon law. This helps place Boccaccio’s handling of Griselda into context, because there are heavy religious undertones throughout. Ultimately, it has been found that Boccaccio’s approach to writing combined classical and modern themes, and his idea was that people can balance a classic ideal of self-control with human sensitivity and compassion.
At the time Boccaccio and Petrarch were writing, as well as Chaucer, the question of these values and how to fit them into life was evident. Boccaccio wrote the Decameron after the Black Plague first hit Florence in 1348, and finished around 1352, “when the values of the Middle Ages (valor, faith, transcendence) were yielding to those of the Renaissance (enjoyment, business, the real).” The tension between these medieval and Renaissance values is clear throughout the Decameron, and especially so with the inclusion of the tale of patient Griselda at the very end. Boccaccio was the first to put the tale of Griselda into literary form, followed by Petrarch’s idealistic version, and then Chaucer included it in his Canterbury Tales. Petrarch used his version of Griselda to align it with other work he had done on the classical ideals of constancy and virtue, and Chaucer’s version that came after this also reflects Petrarch’s Latin translation. Petrarch’s version puts forth his idea on what he saw as central ethical ideals, Stoic virtue and constancy, and this closely follows with the social and moral attitudes of their time. In a letter to a friend mourning the death of their son, he writes “the mind has to be separated from the senses, and forced into those innermost recesses where invincible constancy and masculine thoughts dwell;” this is how Petrarch characterizes Griselda in his version of the tale, because in his re-writing, he removed the language from Boccaccio’s original revealing Griselda’s emotional strife. Petrarch wanted to portray her as a perfect ideal of Stoicism and constancy, and so he removed language of her emotional turmoil; in Boccaccio’s tale, she struggles but still obeys, and in Petrarch’s, there is no language revealing an inner struggle or resistance, meaning for Petrarch human emotion is weakness, rather than a potential source for strength as Boccaccio views it.
While Petrarch and Dante served as literary figures for Boccaccio to learn from, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante all influenced Chaucer’s work. The most evident influences can be seen between Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. There are broad similarities between Boccaccio and Chaucer’s historical and life experiences, and there are similarities in how they structured and approached their tales. Both write in their vernacular, and Chaucer saw Boccaccio’s work as an essential example that one could write in familiar language. Boccaccio’s use of the Florentine dialect showed Chaucer that “poetry might be written in one’s mother tongue to the highest European standards,” and in doing so, ennoble and represent the lives of everyday people outside of elites. Chaucer was also helped by being born later in the century; over the course of his lifetime, English was “gradually superseding French as the normative language of royal, legal, and parliamentary business.” Additionally, both the Decameron and Canterbury Tales are a series of stories shared by travelers, with Boccaccio’s example having inspired Chaucer to finally take his“lifelong interest in communication between disparate social levels” and create a narrative like this; about one quarter of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales take their example from stories within the Decameron. The differences arise when the characters are considered. Chaucer’s tales are told from a variety of people within different professions and class levels who are all traveling together in the form of a pilgrimage; in the beginning of the Tales, those of a lower class even interrupt someone speaking from a higher class. Meanwhile, Boccaccio’s travelers are comprised of young aristocrats and their wealthy friends, who can afford to take a trip to their country estates in order to escape the suffering of the Black Plague in Florentine, and who spend the trip relaxing and telling tales to entertain each other. Although both authors desire to appeal to a broad range of audiences and readers by including popular content that could appeal to anyone, Chaucer takes this further by trying to represent nearly all levels of class and profession in addition to literary genre. In the Canterbury Tales, he includes many tales seen in the Decameron, including Griselda in The Clerk’s Tale.
Within the Decameron, the tale of Griselda shows tension between medieval values and new Renaissance values. Most of the Decameron considers the realism, hedonism, and disorder that came with the duration and end of the Black Plague, but also nods back to “medievalisms” in terms of values represented as well as the inclusion of speeches and sections of verse in between the tales that consist of medieval rhetoric. After Boccaccio, the tale of Griselda was also used in a book in France in the late 14th century, The Good Wife's Guide (Le Ménagier de Paris): A Medieval Household Book. This book was written in the voice of a husband, a man of the “wealthy Parisian bourgeois,” addressing a young bride on how to become a wife befitting her new class in society, and uses the tale of Griselda in the chapter on obedience. The novel uses Petrarch’s version and cites the tale as an example of “how benefits come to a woman who is obedient to her husband,” which parallels Petrarch’s use of the tale as an example of the ideal virtues of Stoicism, constancy, and obedience. Petrarch’s focus is on using the tale as an example of how to live within classical ideals and does specify his intent to reference religion, and while Chaucer’s version refers to Petrarch and cites him as the source of the tale, Chaucer’s intentions, similar to Boccaccio’s, are less transparent.
In Boccaccio’s original writing of Griselda, her story is the last story of the last day in the Decameron. As each day has a theme, the tenth day’s theme is about “those who have performed liberal or munificent deeds,” or generosity and munificence. In choosing to tell the story of Griselda as the last story of this theme, Boccaccio creates ambiguity in whether her deeds of obedience, or her husband’s cruelty, are munificent. Her husband’s tests are certainly liberal, as her tests throughout the story include him pretending to have their children put to death, him expelling her from their home with none of her possessions, and him remarrying and having her prepare his bride for the wedding. Boccaccio creates this ambiguity by having the storyteller Dioneo introduce the tale by noting he will tell them of a marquis “whose actions, even though things turned out well for him in the end, were remarkable not so much for their munificence as for their senseless brutality. Nor do I advise anyone to follow his example, for it was a great pity that the fellow should have drawn any profit from his conduct.” Boccaccio includes this tale as an example of munificence, and leads the reader through Dioneo’s introduction to think that one is supposed to consider the marquis’s deeds as the munificent ones rather than Griselda’s, and establishes sympathy with Griselda by having Dioneo say that the marquis received better than he deserved. Boccaccio further surrounds this story with ambiguity by ending with Dioneo questioning the feasibility of Griselda’s actions as well as the marquis’s:
What more needs to be said, except that celestial spirits may sometimes descend even into the houses of the poor, whilst there are those in royal palaces who would be better employed as swineherds than as rulers of men? Who else but Griselda could have endured so cheerfully the cruel and unheard of trials that Gualtieri imposed upon her without shedding a tear? For perhaps it would have served him right if he had chanced upon a wife, who, being driven from the house in her shift, had found some other man to shake her skin-coat for her, earning herself a fine new dress in the process.
Boccaccio purposefully places these ambiguous and questioning statements at the beginning and end to prevent his audience from taking away any one example or lesson. He continues his religious undertones by referencing ‘celestial spirits,’ and leads the reader to consider that Griselda’s constancy and generosity are otherworldly and surpass the qualities that any mere human could possess, while her husband, despite being in a position of power, does not deserve the respect and authority he currently possesses. However, in asking who else but Griselda could have endured his trials, the narrator, and Boccaccio, point out that her ability is unique and not entirely realistic for others in society to follow. Her example is a perfect one, and may be the exception to the rule, not the rule for human conduct itself. After leading the reader to question whether her constancy is actually a desirable or common characteristic, Boccaccio notes that her husband should have been more punished for his tests, and that perhaps in real life, with women who won’t suffer this kind of treatment easily, that the men who test their wives like this, or bosses who test their employees like this, or more likely, the God who tests his followers and believers like this, deserve more of a comeuppance than to continue to receive constant faith and loyalty.
Throughout Boccaccio’s Griselda story, the connections to religion are obvious, but what conclusion he wants his readers to draw, and his own intent, are less clear. He very much addresses constancy in terms of religious faith, and establishes this by including multiple covenants: the promise the marquis makes to his people to marry, and the promise Griselda makes to the marquis to obey him in all things and not question his will. However, Boccaccio’s treatment of constancy also brings a discussion of free will and human agency into play. When the marquis promises to choose a bride, he “insist[s] on marrying a wife of [his] own choosing, providing an example of him bending to their will, but on his own terms and with his own means. When Griselda is forced to give up her children, she gives in yet asks the messenger is he will please give her children a proper burial; this is Griselda’s only ability to gain some aspect of agency and control over her circumstances, by adding her own request and obeying her lord, but in her own way and through her own means. Boccaccio’s representation of agency in combination with the virtue of constancy is unique to his writing; while Chaucer represents Griselda’s request, he followed Petrarch’s example and removed the language revealing Griselda’s inner turmoil and struggle. This leads his treatment of the tale to seem more of an unequivocal example rather than a story meant to encourage rumination. Chaucer does not change the fact that when asked to give up her child to be murdered, Griselda acquiesces and requests that her child be given a proper and respectful burial:
And continually so patient was she
That she made no appearance of sadness,
But kissed her son, and afterwards it blessed;
Save this, she prayed him that, if he could,
Her little son he would bury in earth
His tender limbs, pleasing in appearance,
From birds and from beasts to save.
But she no answer of him might have.
What he does change, however, is her emotional response. Chaucer copies Boccaccio’s language in writing that outwardly she revealed no sadness, but removes any sign of emotion. In Boccaccio’s writing, he includes that “albeit she felt that her heart was about to break,” she agreed and gave up her child “without any trace of emotion.” Boccaccio includes notes about Griselda’s emotional response throughout his story, such as “Griselda was secretly filled with despair,” “the lady, with an effort beyond the power of any normal woman’s nature, suppressed her tears,” and “Since Griselda was unable to lay aside her love for Gualtieri as readily as she had dispensed with her good fortune, his words pierced her heart like so many knives.” In Chaucer’s tale, there is no language allowing Griselda to seem as human as Boccaccio’s Griselda. Boccaccio and Chaucer both wrote for a wide and varied audience, but Chaucer maintained Petrarch’s somewhat elitist treatment of virtue and constancy in The Clerk’s Tale.
Boccaccio’s handling of Griselda’s story reflects a more ambiguous intent. His story clearly references the relationship between religion and its followers, and is reminiscent of the trials of Job in the Bible, but depicts a cruel God in the form of the marquis. The marquis is suddenly “seized with a strange desire to test Griselda’s patience, by subjecting her to constant provocation and making her life unbearable;” Boccaccio’s depiction of the marquis and comparison of him to God could be a response to the sudden tragedy of the Black Plague and how many in the population either turned to stoicism to cope, or questioned their God. This would be consistent with how Boccaccio personifies Fortune as hostile, and how Griselda maintains her constancy because she promised her lord her loyalty and obedience, and trusts that he knows best even in the face of some horrific trials. Chaucer’s depiction includes all of these elements and certainly mimics the underlying idea of the virtue of constancy. His intent, if possible, is less clear than Boccaccio’s. In the end of the story, when the husband recognizes Griselda’s steadfastness and returns her to her station, wealth, and children, he portrays Griselda as “disconcerted” and waking “from her trance.” He could either be trying to show how unnatural it is for anyone to truly be that steadfast, and be subtly aligning with Boccaccio’s desire to portray people in society as just that – people. In any case, Chaucer’s removal of Griselda’s emotional response and inclusion of more speeches and flowery, elegant language praising her husband’s generosity and her desire to obey, makes this tale more absurd in its rejection of realistic human tendencies. Why he chose to do that will always be up for interpretation, similar to Boccaccio’s treatment of the tale.
Overall, Boccaccio’s treatment of constancy involves more ambiguity and welcomes more of a reader response. His framing of the story by clearly questioning the actions of Griselda and her husband call for consideration rather than acceptance at face value. One cannot accept his story as an unequivocal example of a virtue to follow, like Petrarch sought to portray. Boccaccio’s story could be seen as a response to the sudden cruelty of the Black Plague, and the idea that one way to survive it could be to remain steadfast in the face of adversity. The ironic part is that the rest of his tales offer hedonism and disorder as the other coping mechanism, and the narrator who tells the story of Griselda is part of a group that have the wealth and privilege to be able to escape and not have to rely on conservative virtues like constancy. Chaucer’s intent is even more unclear, and his treatment of constancy in Griselda makes it seem almost like a spell or unnatural characteristic. To consider why Chaucer included it would be interesting, especially because it is so vastly different from other women, like the Wife of Bath. He too, includes a conversation on religion in the end, and notes that wives can’t “follow Griselda in humility for it would be intolerable,” but rather the tale serves to call humanity to receive God’s will as easily and consistently as Griselda received her husband’s because God tests men for their own good. On the other hand, Chaucer cheekily includes the line that “Griselda is dead, and so is her patience,” leaving it to the reader to determine whether conservative values will still have a place in a changing society. Whether constancy is seen as infeasible or as desirable, one thing is clear: Boccaccio and Chaucer chose not to directly endorse either point of view because in the end, it is up to the audience to read and interpret as they will.
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