Corbaccio

Retracting the Decameron

Built upon an evident reworking of Dante’s plot, the Corbaccio shares with the first two cantos of the Inferno the scene in which the action takes place (a forest and hills), the identity of the protagonists (the author-actor and the succouring spirit) as well as the way catharsis is reached, set off by a delicately constructed suasoria and thus entirely played upon a rhetorical and verbal plane. The polemical and satirical intent are made obvious by the way the narrative pattern, which the great success of the Divine Comedy made it possible to define as traditional already by the middle of the XIV century, is upturned. Dante is however not the only interlocutor of this recrimination of love and the open profession of misogyny in the Corbaccio may also be read in antithesis with the phylogeny of the Decameron. In particular, the novella about the widow and the scholar (Decameron: VIII, 7) would seem to offer a sure point of comparison if one thinks of the analogies between the characters of the protagonists, here too defined as a woman with a cruel soul and a sad unrequited lover. If the scholar in the Decameron is given the chance of vindicating the offence received, which confirms it as part of the day’s themes, mockery and counter mockery, and allows the widow the chance of thinking again as to her lover’s sentiments, in the Corbaccio there is no appeal that can lead to a positive evolution of the amorous relationship, destined to conclude itself without success.

Already Andrea Cappellano had sealed the De Amore, an exemplary treatise on courtly ideology, with a reprobate appendix (De reprobatione amoris); Ovid had himself drawn up Remedia amoris almost in answer to the Amores. The rhetoric model, structured in thesis and antithesis, was thus much used in the theorisation of eroticism. Boccaccio uses it for the purpose of parody, from which transpires an intended meta-literary polemic, tied to the discussion over the conventions of traditional courtly lyrics.