Boccaccio circumscribed the event of the Corbaccio within precise geographical and chronological coordinates. The setting recalls that of the preface to the Divine Comedy, whilst a temporal evaluation would indicate it a mature work:

 

[...] e primieramente la tua età: la quale, se le tempie già bianche e la canuta barba non mi ingannano, tu dovresti avere li costumi del mondo, fuor delle fascie già sono degli anni quaranta, e già venticinque cominciatili a conoscere. (Corbaccio: 119[1])

 

On the basis of textual reference the action should have taken place circa 1355, when the author was about forty. Close-knit inter-textual relations however link the Corbaccio to Boccaccio’s works of the 60s, as shown by Padoan and Marti[2]. The aporia is only apparent and may be cleared by distinguishing between the period of the narrative fictio and the actual time in which it was drawn up, ascribable to 1363-1365.

A more complex task is that of decoding the rather ambiguous title to the booklet. The term “corbaccio” has been put in relation with the Spanish corbacho, that is ‘whip’, in the sense that the work could have been intended to be a “whiplash” against women. To a pejorative sense of the word “crow” would lead Richard de Fournival’s Bestiary of Love, where this bird is correlated to the blinding force of love and thus to erotic passion.  This black bird is also a recurring image that is a symbol of the predator and could, in this sense, hint to Boccaccio himself, cleric repenting his amorous past[3]. Nor can we exclude an influence of Ovid’s short satirical poem Ibis, where the name of a sordid bird is used with allusive connotations, as indeed it could be that “corbaccio” should be read to mean ‘corvaccio’[4] or ‘foul crow’.

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[1]Corbaccio, ed. G. Padoan, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio. ed. V. Branca, vol. 5.2, Milan 1994, p. 462.

[2]G. Padoan, Sulla datazione del Corbaccio, in Id., Boccaccio,  le muse, il Parnaso e l’Arno, Florence 1978, pp. 199-228; M. Marti, Per una metalettura del Corbaccio, “Giornale storico della letteratura italiana”, 153 (1976), fasc. 481, pp. 60-86.

[3]Cfr. R. Mercuri, Genesi della tradizione letteraria italiana in Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio, in Letteratura italiana Einaudi. Storia a geografia. Vol. I, L’età medievale, Turin 1987, pp. 229-455.

[4]R. Hollander, Boccaccio, Ovid’s Ibis and the satirical tradition, in Gli Zibaldoni di Boccaccio. Memoria, scrittura, riscrittura. From the official documents for the Florence-Certaldo seminar (26-28 April 1996), Florence 1998, pp. 385-399

Corbaccio, Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, ms. Pluteo 42.34, c. 41r. Boccaccio visualizzato: narrare per parole e per immagini fra Medioevo e Rinascimento, a c. di V. Branca, Turin 1999, vol. II, p. 74.