Elegia di Costanza (Elegy to Constance)

A “copyist by passion”, since his early youth, Boccaccio was not only a careful  creator of codicils for the popularisation of the works of the vernacular tradition but also an active amanuensis, engaged in the production of texts for his own use. Evidence of this comes from the contents of the Laurenziano XXIX 8 (onetime Santo Spirito IV 2) and Laurenziano XXXIII 31, both parchments and palimpsests, and the manuscript Banco Rari 50, better known as zibaldoni boccacciani[1]. The contents of these three miscellaneous works include Latin and vernacular authors,  and point to how widely read Boccaccio was. We here also find Boccaccio’s first literary experiments of his own, in a somewhat muddled series of annotations conceived of as a diary for the cultural development of the author, as well as a personal note of his exercises in writing and his intellectual curiosity.  

The Elegia di Costanza of 1332 develops round the epitaph to Omonea, a work of the I century AD that is partly reproduced in the zibaldone Lurenziano XXIX 8. Boccaccio fundamentally changes the original beginning to the story, constituted of the allocution of a dead young girl to someone who happens to pass by her grave, by transforming this into a conversation between two unhappy lovers. We find here many traces of Seneca and Ovid, mingled with medieval elements  from Joseph Exter and Mathew of Vendôme, Alan of Lille and Henry of Settimello. There are also elements of Dante, but rigorously translated into Latin, and there is also an element of asceticism and penitence, which confer a macabre tone to the tale told. A scholastic exercises, the elegy shows certain inclinations that are typical of Boccaccio’s style, from a taste for the cento to the reappropriation of the classical and vernacular models, through their hybridisation.

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[1]Gli Zibaldoni di Boccaccio. Memoria, scrittura e riscrittura. Atti del Seminario internazionale di Firenze-Certaldo (26-28 aprile 1996), a c. di M. Picone-C. Cazalé Bérard, Firenze 1998.