«To tell a hundred tales, or children's stories or parables or stories»: il Decameron

One hundred novellas, split up across ten days and told by ten narrators, one could recap in such sterile numbers the contents of the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. But such a definition would be fallacious, as it would be based upon, if we were to take a closer look, a term that is ambiguous in its meaning: “novella”.

In the preface to his work it is the selfsame Giovanni Boccaccio who states that he wishes to narrate “a hundred novellas, or fables or parables or stories” (I: Proemio, 13[1]). The series of substantives implicated in the nomenclature has always been the subject of interpretations aimed at researching into semantic differences, made complex by the four terms used, which have resulted in the production of not so perspicacious definitions of the technical vocabulary and mitigate the synonymic intention  of this opening passage. More recent studies have shown how the author’s intention should rather be read as to be an attempt at the codification of the genre that is the novella. In the oral tradition before Boccaccio, the progressive loss of significance of the terms employed in the preface to the Decameron is by now ascertained, their meaning moving more and more toward the more generic idea of “storytelling”[2]. It was thus up to Boccaccio to restore literary meaning to these words, within a new and meditated poetic medium. Central to this operation would be the term “novella”, whilst the terms “fable”, “parable” and “story” would seem to play a supporting role, in an attempt to render the intrinsic polysemic nature of the genre that is the novella. If with “fable” one hints to the fictitious nature of the literary novella, with “parable” one tends more to specify its parenthetic value, whilst with  “story” one alludes to the recounting of concrete facts[3]. Boccaccio preached the extreme thematic variety of the Decameron, but at the same time insisting upon the generic unity of the collection, the vehicle to a disparate range of meanings being always and only the novella.

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[1]Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. V. Branca, Turin 1999, vol. I, 9.

[2]S. Sarteschi, Valenze lessicali di «novella», «favola», «istoria» nella cultura volgare fino a Boccaccio, in Favole parabole istorie. Le forme della scrittura novellistica dal Medioevo al Rinascimento. Documents from the Pisa Conference, 26-28 October 1998ed. G. Albanese-L. Battaglia Ricci-R. Bessi, Rome 2000, pp. 85-108.

[3]L. Battaglia Ricci, Boccaccio, Rome 2000, p. 135; E. Malato, La nascita della novella italiana, in Favole parabole istorie. Le forme della scrittura novellistica dal Medioevo al Rinascimento. Documents from the Pisa Conference, 26-28 October 1998, ed. G. Albanese- L. Battaglia Ricci-R. Bessi, Rome 2000, pp. 17-29.