Gentile’s rejected love generates gift of Catalina to Niccoluccio

Men are creepy.  That’s a scientifically measured social valuation in late-twentieth-century America.  Biological anthropologists have established that males are demonic.  Moreover, according to medieval French literature, men’s genitals are ugly.  Not surprisingly, men experience much more frequently sexual rejection than women do.  Men must strive for the love to which women are naturally entitled.  In the context of this reality, Boccaccio’s Decameron tells the story of a gentleman named Gentile, the beautiful lady Catalina, and her husband Niccoluccio.[1]

Gentile became enamored of Catalina.  She did not requite his love.  In despair, Gentile left his home city, Bologna.  Catalina became pregnant.  After  a number of months, she suddenly became gravely sick.  In a short time, several doctors pronounced her dead.  Catalina was buried in a church in Bologna.

Gentile responded to the news of Catalina’s death with self-abnegation.  He was overcome with grief.  Then he said to himself:

So there you are, Madonna Catalina, you’re dead.  Well, I never managed to get as much as a single glance from you while you were alive, but now that you’re dead and can’t defend yourself, it’s only right that I should take a kiss or two from you.

The double assertion of “dead” underscores how Catalina defended herself in life.  Catalina refused to acknowledge Gentile’s presence.  The dead can also do that.  In life, Catalina’s defense against Gentile was her live threat of actively scorning him.  Social power, not physical power, is how women keep men subordinate.

Gentile dramatized men’s sexual interests being put to death.  During the night, he secretly journeyed to Catalina’s tomb.  He opened the tomb and went inside:

lying down beside her, he drew his face close to hers and kissed her again and again, all the while weeping profusely.

The narrative here injects, even for a deprived, weeping man within a tomb, the voice of social disparagement of men’s sexuality:

But as we know, men’s appetites — and especially those of lovers — are never content to stay within bounds, but always want to go further

That’s the same social voice that today suggests that nearly a quarter of men deserve punishment for rape, if enough prisons could be built to hold them.  Gentile vacillated, and then transgressed the suppressive moral bound:

just as he was deciding that it was time to leave, he said to himself: “Ah, why don’t I fondle her breast a little, seeing as how I’m in here?  I never touched her in the past, and I will never have the opportunity to do so again.”

Gentile’s pathetic, creepy acts within Catalina’s tomb symbolize men’s disenfranchised sexual desire.[2]

The transgression led to resurrection and new love outside of the established legal order.  In The Story of Apollonius King of Tyre, a young doctor’s masculine touch brought a beautiful woman back to life.  Gentile’s masculine touch also led to resurrection:

overcome by this desire, he placed his hand on her breast, and after keeping it there for some time, he thought he could sense her heart faintly beating.  Having subdued his fears, he began examining her with greater care and discovered that she was in fact still alive, although the signs of life in her were minimal and very weak.  Consequently, as gently as he could, he removed her from the tomb with the aid of his servant, and having set her across his horse in front of him, he carried her in secret to his house in Bologna.

Gentile didn’t carry Catalina secretly to his house in order to ravish her.  Gentile’s mother lived there.  She revived Catalina.[3]  Catalina subsequently gave birth to the son conceived before she was buried.  With a new orientation to love, Gentile declared to Catalina:

I propose to stage a solemn ceremony in which I will make a precious gift of you to your husband in the presence of all the leading citizens in the town.

The solemn ceremony enacted in allegory the Christian Holy Week, with Catalina as Jesus:

Little prized by her own people, she was thrown out, like something vile and worthless, into the middle of the street from which I retrieved her, and through my care, I saved her from death with my own hands. Recognizing my pure affection, God has transformed her from a fearsome corpse into the beauty you see before you.

By established legal reasoning, which Catalina’s husband Niccoluccio publicly endorsed, Catalina belonged to Gentile.  In Christian understanding, the law of God the Father is fulfilled in God’s loving gift of Christ.  Gentile gave Catalina and her newly born son back to Niccoluccio.  God’s gift of Christ is the higher meaning of Gentile’s gift. Gentile saved Catalina “with my own hands,” with “pure affection.” In all his masculine creepiness, Gentile acted as an earthly deputy of God the Father in the new Christian dispensation.[4]

The Decameron’s tale of Gentile, Catalina, and Niccoluccio isn’t just a love story.  It’s an allegory of the Christian Holy Week deliberately stretched against social disparagement of men’s love.  Gentile implicitly acknowledged this stretching.  To proclaim Catalina’s chastity, Gentile swore “by that God who perhaps made me fall in love with her so that my love might be, as indeed it has been, the cause of her salvation.”  The “perhaps” and “might be” signal questioning.  Uncertainty about the allegory is reasonable.  But the story is “as indeed it has been.”[5]

Christ rising from the dead

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Notes:

[1] Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, Day 10, Story 4.  The story gives Gentile’s full name as Messer Gentile de’ Carisendi.  Niccoluccio is given as Niccoluccio Caccianemico.  Both Carisendi and Caccianemico were historically the names of noble families living in Bologna.  Rebhorn (2013) p. 937, n. 2.  The English form of the Bolognese name Catalina is Catherine.  The subsequent quotes are from the story as translated from Italian in id. pp. 771-8.  Here’s an online version in the English translation of Riggs (1903), with section links to the Italian text. This story shares the false entombment motif with the twelfth-century French romance Floris and Blancheflour {Floire et Blancheflor}. Boccaccio also used it in his Filocolo in its thirteenth question of love.  There the story is oriented toward rhetorical debate.  In the Decameron, allegorical enactment trumps the forensic conclusion for the story.

[2] For a violent approach to this text in the service of supporting dominant academic misandry, see Moe (1995).

[3] Gentile’s mother skillfully revived Catalina “with the aid of a series of warm baths and a good hot fire.”  Heat is a relatively simple treatment.  It’s also associated with love.  Other ancient, non-Christian accounts existed of physicians reviving the dead.  Upon reviving, Catalina begged Gentile “to do nothing to her in his house that would impair her honor or that of her husband.”  The revived young woman in Apollonius King of Tyre made a similar request.  Moe (1995) describes Gentile’s treatment of Catalina as “sexual aggression.”  That’s literally and literarily obtuse.  Hollander & Cahill (1997), p. 140, declare that Gentile “paradoxically ‘saved her {Catalina’s} life’ as a result of his necrophiliac exploitation of her.” Within the story, Gentile actually did save Catalina’s life.  Describing Gentile’s sexual creepiness as “necrophiliac exploitation” doesn’t provide a good starting point for understanding the significance of how Gentile saved Catalina’s life.

[4] In Isaiah 65:4, God, speaking through Isaiah, threatens just punishment for those “who sit inside tombs and spend the night in secret places.”  But then Isaiah 65:17-25 declares a new creation: “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.” Failure to appreciate biblical allegory in the story of Gentile, Catalina, and Niccoluccio obscures a significant verbal play.  In giving Catalina back to Niccoluccio, Gentile described them as his comare and compare, respectively.  These Italian words mean both godmother and godfather and close, status-symmetric friends.  Gentile acted as a godfather for Catalina and Niccoluccio’s child. Catalina and Niccoluccio are godparents to Gentile born again in Christian love.  Catalina and Niccoluccio are both godparents and friends — comare and compare — to Gentile in the sense of John 15:15.  Cf. Rebhorn (2013) p. 777, note, which identifies the relevant meaning as only “close friend.”

[5] Boccaccio isn’t writing normal Christian allegory:

in our opinion, the work {Decameron} should not be read as an allegory that conforms to Christian exegetical norms.

Hollander & Cahill (1997), pp. 112-3.  Lauretta tells the story of Gentile, Catalina, and Niccoluccio.  As the example of Marie de France also illustrates, women have often appreciated men more than men have.

[image] Jesus emerging from the tomb.  From the Prayer Book of George II of Waldenburg. Waldburg-Gebetbuch, WLB Stuttgart, Cod. brev. 12, fol. 111v, dated 1486.  Thanks to Wikipedia and Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart.

References:

Hollander, Robert, with Courtney Cahill. 1997. “Day Ten of the Decameron: The Myth of Order.”  Pp. 109-168 in Hollander, Robert. 1997. Boccaccio’s Dante and the shaping force of satire. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Moe, Nelson. 1995. “Not a Love Story: Sexual Aggression, Law and Order in Decameron X 4.” Romanic Review. 86 (4): 623-638.

Rebhorn, Wayne A., trans. 2013. Giovanni Boccaccio. The Decameron. New York : W.W. Norton & Company.

political-natural records of Jesus in Syriac chronicle of Michael the Great

Syriac Patriach Michael the Great's world chronicle

In twelfth-century Syria, Patriarch Michael the Great wrote a massive world chronicle in Syriac.  That chronicle began with the creation of Adam and continued chronologically to Michael’s own time.  Michael didn’t create from events a story, a history.  Michael, as a Christian, believed in all-encompassing Christian history.  Michael the Great’s chronicle presented events in time for fellow learned clerics to study and ponder Christian history.[1]

Michael organized the pages of his chronicle to relate visually events.  Typically a chronicle page contains three vertical columns of text above a canon table synchronizing different calculations of years.  The sixteenth-century Syrian scribe who copied from Michael’s autograph stated:

{Michael} sorted out ecclesiastical events and, where possible, he gathered them in the superior column, just as we have written, and the succession of the kingdoms in the middle column, and the accidental things and miracles in the inferior column. He had great trouble with the separation, for the accounts were written helter-skelter [2]

The autograph apparently had columns arranged symmetrically about the book opening.[3] Superior columns meant the outer columns, and the inferior columns, the innermost columns. The Complutensian Polyglot Bible, completed in Madrid in 1517, used a three-column form for the Hebrew Bible.  The Complutensian Polyglot Bible placed the Hebrew text in the superior position.  It collated the Hebrew text with the Vulgate and the Septuagint.  Michael’s three columns collate sacred events, high-political events, and extra-institutional events (signs and wonders).  In Michael’s Christian understanding, these three columns presented different translations of God’s over-all plan in history.

Michael recorded serially four contemporary political-natural accounts of Jesus.  The first account is via Tertullian, a Christian scholar who lived from about 160 to 225:

Tertullian says that Pilate informed Tiberius about the teachings of the Lord Jesus.  In turn, Tiberius informed the Senate.  He {Tiberius} did not accept the accusation about him {Jesus}, but determined to kill the slanderers. [4]

The point of this account seems to be Jesus’s status in the eyes of the Roman Emperor Tiberius.  That’s a matter of political chronology.  The second record is attributed to Phlegon of Tralles, a non-Christian writer who lived in the second century:

Phlegon, the heathen philosopher, says that the sun darkened, the earth trembled, and the dead resurrected and entered Jerusalem and heaped woe upon the Jews.  He says in Book Thirteen of his history concerning the Olympiads that, “In the fourth year of the 204th Olympiad, darkness occurred six hours on Friday.  The stars appeared and Nicaea and Bithynia trembled from quakes, and many regions were destroyed.” [5]

Michael didn’t include this account to prove that Jesus existed or that Jesus was God incarnate. He seems to have used this account to document natural phenomena that occurred during the time of Jesus’s death.  The third record apparently is attributed to Ursinus of Bourges:

In his Book Five, Ursinus says: “A terrible distress came upon us. We heard of horrible calamities in the Hebrews’ cities.  We have now known something about the letters sent by Pilate from Palestine to the heathen King Tiberius.  In these letters Pilate says, “Miracles happen upon the death of a man who was crucified by the Jews.  When Caesar heard of this, he relieved Pilate of his position because he succumbed to the Jews and connived with them.”

The Romans, not the Jews, crucified Jesus.  Ursinus of Bourges is a French saint who probably actually lived in the third or fourth century.  Michael apparently included Ursinus’s text because it was a relevant political-natural record from a Christian authority credible in twelfth-century Syria.  The final account is from the first-century Jewish-Roman scholar Josephus:

In his Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus says, “There was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works — a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure.  He drew over to him both many of the Jews and the gentiles.  It is believed that he was the Christ, and not as the leaders of the peoples say.  When Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, condemned him to the cross, those who loved him from the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct to this day.”

This passage from Josephus, known as the Testimonium Flavianum, has been a subject of intense scholarly controversy since the sixteenth century.[6]  The controversy concerns the extent of Christian interpolations in the text.  Surviving manuscripts of Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews date from the eleventh century and later.  In the place of “It is believed he was the Christ,” these manuscripts have “He was the Christ.”  A Jew surely would not have declared that Jesus was the Christ.  Michael’s source for Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews apparently pre-dated surviving manuscripts and is more textually credible.[7]  The credibility of the text attributed to Josephus wasn’t an issue for Michael.  Michael independently believed everything that Josephus stated about Jesus.  Michael cited Josephus not in Christian polemic, but as a record of political chronology.

Michael’s political-natural records of Jesus support the over-all structure of his chronicle.  Those records document that Jesus won the favor of his political ruler and extraordinary events marked Jesus’s death.  Michael the Great’s chronicle insists that sacred events, high-political events, and extra-institutional events are all the coherent history of the divine plan being realized through time.

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Notes:

[1] The Hebrew Bible begins with the creation of the world.  Michael’s choice of beginning with Adam indicates that his chronicle concerns events in relation to humans.  Michael explicitly addressed readers of his Chronicle as brethren and scholars.  Within the text he recommended to readers further theological reading.  He used Greek technical terms without translation.  The implications:

we may safely assume Michael’s readers to be, like himself, well-trained clerics. It is therefore a work meant for “insiders”.

Weltecke (1997) p. 21.

[2] Michael the Great’s Chronicle, MS 377 (II, 357), from Syriac trans. Weltecke (1997) p. 27.  The scribe was Bishop Moses of Mardin.  On Moses of Mardin, see id. p. 7.  This text apparently is missing from Moosa (2014).  Id. does not preserve the three-column structure of the manuscript.  Many manuscripts exist in Armenian of abridgments of Michael the Great’s Chronicle.  See Bedrosian (2013).

[3] Weltecke (2000) pp. 185-6.  The scribe apparently mixed up the position of the columns on some pages.

[4] Michael the Great’s Chronicle, Bk. V, Ch. 10, from Syriac trans. Moosa (2014) p. 106.  The subsequent three quotes are from id.  A Letter of Pilate to Tiberius is thought to have been written in Renaissance Latin, perhaps in the 16th century.  Michael’s Chronicle indicates that the tradition of such a letter is much older.  The Gospels suggest that Pilate knew little about Jesus’s teachings.  The Roman Emperor Tiberius, who died 37 GC, surely did not threaten to kill those who disparaged Jesus.

[5] The passage from Phlegon of Tralles exists in Eusibius’s Chronicle, which Michael used as a source.

[6] Whealey (2003).  Prior to the sixteenth century, Christians in Europe probably viewed Josephus’s text much as Michael the Great did.

[7] That some Christian interpolation exists in the Josephus passage was an easy claim for early textual scholars to make.  The extent of Christian interpolation is a much more difficult question.  Jerome’s De viris illustribus contains a Latin translation of the passage from Josephus and uses the phrase “credebatur esse Christus”  (he was believed to be the Christ).  The earliest manuscripts of that work date to the sixth or seventh century.  Syriac scholars typically didn’t read Latin works.  Whealey (2008) pp. 580-1.  Michael the Great’s version apparently represents text that existed before the sixth or seventh century.

[image] Composed photo by Anneli Salo, 2008.  Thanks to Anneli Salo and Wikipedia.

References:

Bedrosian, Robert. 2013. The Chronicle of Michael the Great, Patriarch of the Syrians. Online at rbedrosian.com

Moosa, Matti, trans. 2014. The Syriac Chronicle of Michael Rabo (the Great): a universal history from the creation. Teaneck, N.J.: Beth Antioch Press.

Weltecke, Dorothea. 1997.  “The World Chronicle by Patriarch Michael the Great. (1126––1199): Some reflections.” Journal of Assyrian Academic Studies 11 (2): 6–29.

Weltecke, Dorothea. 2000.  “Originality and Function of Formal Structures in the Chronicle of Michael the Great.”  Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 3(2): 173-202.

Whealey, Alice. 2003. Josephus on Jesus: the Testimonium Flavianum controversy from late antiquity to modern times. New York: Peter Lang.

Whealey, Alice. 2008. “The Testimonium Flavianum in Syriac and Arabic.” New Testament Studies. 54 (4): 573-590.

system, not signals, for biological analysis of communication

The world is filled with animals communicating.  Just listen:

It is early summer in the temperate zone, with concerts at dawn and at dusk. In the morning, a babble of sparrows, finches, starlings and warblers greets the early riser. The rich tapestry of sound woven around a late evening stroller is no less palpable: the eerie whine of katydids, the gentle chirping of crickets, the visceral croaking of frogs. [1]

Male birds and other male animals predominately generate those songs and sounds.  The males are seeking mates.  Females, in other words, generate those songs and sounds.

geese displaying wings

Symbolic communication involves a constructed relation between signifier and signified.  Humans pervasively engage in symbolic communication, e.g. speaking, reading, writing.[2]  Determining the meanings of symbols has been central to human understanding of human communication.

Study of animal communication has treated animal signals like symbolic communication, but simpler.  Signals can be understood as communication in which signifier and signified are rigidly and organically bound.  Animals pervasively engage in signaling.  That has created scholarly confusion:

there is widespread and often unrecognized confusion about the kinds of signals that exist, the mechanisms responsible for their evolution, and the terms to be used to describe them. [3]

Animal communication is often described as “animal signals,” and theoretical study of communication between animals, “signaling theory.”[4]  That’s an information-theoretic understanding of communication.

Communication among animals often consists of ongoing, highly interactive behavior.  Mate-seeking provides circumstances for such communication.  A study of mating communication in cowbirds reported:

We found that the non-singing females displayed two rapid responses to song, wing stroking and gaping.  Wing stroking is a rapid and silent response to song in which the female flicks her wing away from her body: when gaping, a female arches her head and quickly opens and closes her beak. … Females do other things as well, most noticeably, showing no change in behavior when a male sings, thus ignoring his overtures….  Males become very excited when the female departs from this demeanor and does something even so small as turning her head.  We have found that even brief wing strokes or gapes can lead a male cowbird to levitate off his perch, hop excitedly toward the female, and sing whatever song elicited the female’s movements.  Thus, the contrapuntal use of acoustics and visual signals between males and females may serve to orchestrate the sustained kinds of interaction necessary to each sex to profit from the encounter. [5]

Focusing on determining the meaning and reliability of particular signals can obscure systemic communicative effects.  A single signal in mating communication cannot be understood apart from the ongoing signals to which it is related.

Communication does not depend on organisms having highly developed brains.  Formal models demonstrate that information transfer and decision-making can occur “in the absence of explicit signals or complex mechanisms for information transfer.”[6] Despite very small brains, tandem-running ants engage in teaching.[7]  Single-cell bacteria engage in communication:

Over the past two decades, our view of bacteria has dramatically changed.  Bacteria have often been studied as populations of cells that act independently, but it now seems that there is much interaction and communication between cells….

The realization that bacteria can communicate, cooperate and alter their behavior, according to changes in their social environment, has led to an explosion of research in this area….  Most studies have focused on the molecular aspects of cell-cell communication, and much less attention has been paid to the ecological context of why bacteria produce signaling molecules and respond to both intraspecific and interspecific signals. [8]

The literature on bacterial communication shows some concern to define what types of signals count as communication.[9]  Categorizing signals by their intentions or effects is not likely to be the best approach to understanding communication. Communication between organisms typically involves ongoing interactions of a particular formal type.  A time frame of analysis, a form of behavior, and the organisms’ sets of feasible, conditional state transitions within those bounds provides a reasonable scope for analyzing communication among organisms from bacteria to humans.[10]

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Notes:

[1] Balaban (1994) p. 243.

[2] Some non-human animals, e.g. apes, are capable of symbolic communication.  Some appear to engage in such communication in the wild.  See Arnold & Zuberbühler (2006).

[3] Maynard Smith & Harper (2003) p. 1.

[4] Id.  Id., pp. 11-2, recognizes some major limitations of this perspective.

[5] West, King & Goldstein (2004) pp, 377, 378.  Such communication can evolve through pair interactions involving different partners over time and does not depend on the congregation of conspecifics.

[6] Couzin et al. (2005) p. 515.

[7] Franks & Richardson (2006).

[8] Keller & Surette (2006) p. 249.

[9] E.g. id. pp. 252-3; Redfield (2002).

[10] On a systems approach to animal communication, Owings & Morton (1998), Shanker & King (2002), and West, King & Goldstein (2004).

[image] White Fronted Geese.  Public domain image from the U.S. Fish and Wild Service National Digital Library.

References:

Arnold, Kate and Klaus Zuberbühler. 2006. “Language evolution: Semantic combinations in primate calls.” Nature 441: 303.

Balaban, Evan. 1994.  “Sex differences in sounds and their causes.”  In Balaban, Evan, and Roger Valentine Short, eds. The differences between the sexes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Couzin, Iain D., Jens Krause, Nigel R. Franks and Simon A. Levin. 2005. “Effective leadership and decision-making in animal groups on the move.” Nature 433: 513-516.

Franks, Nigel R. and Tom Richardson. 2006. “Teaching in tandem-running ants.” Nature 439: 153.

Keller, Laurent and Michael G. Surette. 2006. “Communication in bacteria: an ecological and evolutionary perspective.” Nature Review | Microbiology 4: 249-258.

Maynard Smith, John and David Harper. 2003. Animal signals. New York, Oxford University Press.

Owings, Donald H. and Eugene S. Morton. 1998.  Animal vocal communication: a new approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Redfield, RJ. 2002. “Is quorum sensing a side effect of diffusion sensing?” Trends in Microbiology 10(8): 365-370.

Shanker, Stuart G. and Barbara J. King. 2002. “The emergence of a new paradigm in ape language research.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25: 605-656.

West, Meredith J., Andrew P. King and Michael H. Goldstein. 2004. “Singing, socializing, and the music effect.” In Marler, Peter, and Hans Willem Slabbekoorn. 2004. Nature’s music: the science of birdsong. Amsterdam: Elsevier Academic.

frame tales: comparison of Decameron and 1001 Nights

Boccaccio’s Decameron is a frame tale with death set outside the frame.  In the Decameron, seven women and three men (the brigata) leave plague-stricken Florence for country estates.  There they enjoy telling each other stories.  The transition from story to story is a matter of civilized, turn-taking within the brigata.  In 1001 Nights, Shahrazad tells the King stories to forestall being executed. That’s similar to the Sindibad frame tale in which a king’s advisers tell stories to forestall the king from executing his son on a false rape charge.  Other ancient frame tales such as the Panchatantra and the Sukasaptati are not generated against the threat of death.  Story-telling creates imaginary lives.  The threat of death highlights the creativity of story-telling.  In contrast to the 1001 Nights’ frame, the Decameron’s frame doesn’t make the creativity of story-telling directly ward off death.  Story-telling in the Decameron shares pleasure in the face of death.

basmala in pear-shaped calligraphy

Both the 1001 Nights and the Decameron have highly conventional frames.  The 1001 Nights repeats day after day:

But morning overtook Shahrazad, and she lapsed into silence.  Then Dinarzad said, “Sister, what a strange and entertaining story!” Shahrazad replied, “What is this compared with what I shall tell you tomorrow night if the king spares me and lets me live!”

The following night Shahrazad said: [1]

The continuing story indicates that the King has spared Shahrazad.  The Decameron repeats not frame text, but motifs.  Days begin with a description of the natural scenery, eating a meal together, singing and dancing.  From one story to the next within a day, the brigata reacts briefly to the story.  Then the King or Queen for the day instructs another to tell a story.  The day ends with appointing a new ruler, adopting a new theme, supper, more singing and dancing, and an elegiac love song explicitly set out in verse.  The conventions of the frames give the stories considerable independence.  In the 1001 Nights, the stories merely have to be good enough for the King to want them to be continued.  In the Decameron, stories subtly hint of interactions and characterizations among the brigata.  Those subtleties are submerged in the direct action of individual stories.

The Decameron’s stories are more regularly structured within the frame than are the stories of the 1001 Nights.  Days necessarily interrupt stories in the 1001 Nights, and the stories are many fewer than the days.  Stories get nested within stories and are continued with a statement of a narrative chain:

I heard, O happy King, that the Christian broker told the king of China that the young man said: [2]

The Decameron, in contrast, consists of ten days of story-telling, with exactly ten stories told on each day. While characters in the stories manipulate and deceive each other with stories, characters don’t narrate stories.  The narrator is always implicitly a member of the brigata.  Unlike in the 1001 Nights, the frame participants in the Decameron are directly responsible for the surface meaning of the stories and their inner or allegorical meanings.

The Decameron’s ending gives its stories more independent social significance than the stories of the 1001 Nights.  The 1001 Nights, or more literally translated from the Arabic, a thousand nights and one night, is plausibly interpreted to mean an innumerably large number of nights.  The fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript of the 1001 Nights has no narrative ending.  The Egyptian recession published in the early nineteenth century ends with the King pardoning Shahrazad.  In either case, the stories have the effect of keeping Shahrazad alive.  The Decameron, in contrast, ends with no significance for the brigata.  For no good reason, the members of the brigata merely go home.[3]  Their lives don’t seem to be permanently affected by the stories they told. Each story in the Decameron is prefaced with a plot summary positioned outside of the frame tale.  The significance of the Decameron‘s stories can be only for its readers.

Structural differences between the frame tales of the Decameron and the 1001 Nights plausibly relate to differences between oral tales and written literature.  The 1001 Nights seems to have arisen as a continually generated oral tale.  Its frame structure supports continual modification, elaboration, and extension.  The Decameron’s frame, in contrast, presents a regular, complete, encompassing order.  It presents the stories’ surfaces for literary interpretation and encourages allegorical interpretation of members of the brigata.  Boccaccio used the established oral tradition of frame tales in a new literary way.

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Notes:

[1] From the 14th-century Syrian manuscript of 1001 Nights, 97th Night, trans. Haddawy (2010) p. 197.  Many other nights have the same text.

[2] 114th Night, id. p. 216.  Such chains are similar to isnad that support the authority of particular sayings in the Muslim world.

[3] At the conclusion of the Decameron’s tenth day, the King said:

to keep things from becoming tedious because of an established custom too long observed, and to prevent people from being able to raise frivolous objections to our having stayed here all this time, I think it proper, since all of us have had a day’s share of the regal honour I still possess, that with your approval we should go back to the place from which we came.

That statement wasn’t mean to be reasonably convincing.  Ten days of story-telling hardly makes “an established custom too long observed.”  There’s no indication of persons objecting to the brigata’s presence at the country estates and no reason why the brigata should care if persons did object. That each has been ruler for a day is irrelevant and ironic in the context of the ruler seeking everyone’s approval for his proposal.  The ruler goes on to declare:

Furthermore, if you examine the matter carefully, there is also the fact that our company has already become known to many people around here, with the results that our numbers could increase to such an extent that it would take away all our pleasure.

This concern runs opposite the concern that persons would object to the brigata’s continuing presence.  That an onrush of persons would occur and prevent the brigata members from enjoying each other’s company cannot be taken seriously.  Like Boccaccio’s claim to have written the Decameron for women, the motivation for going home requires a literary rather than literal interpretation.  Quotes above trans. Rebhorn (2013) pp. 851-2.

[image] Basmala in pear-shaped calligraphy by Shaykh Aziz al-Rufai.  Thanks to Nevit Dilmen and Wikipedia.  The basmala is an Arabic text that can be translated as “In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.”  The basmala begins every sura of the Qur’an except Sura 9.  On the basmala in relation to the 1001 Nights, Saleem (2012) pp. 37-42.

References:

Haddawy, Husain, trans. and Muhsin Mahdi, ed. 2010. The Arabian nights. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.

Rebhorn, Wayne A., trans. 2013. Giovanni Boccaccio. The Decameron. New York : W.W. Norton & Company.

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