In the early 1570s, under the leadership of Vincenzo Borghini, a team of clerical scholars in Florence set about emending its text. To this purpose, one of the several measures taken by the Council of Trent was to create a commission to assemble and manage a list of forbidden books resulting in the fabled Index Librorum Prohibitorum which identified books which were heretical, anti-clerical or explicitly sexual.īut how was the Church to manage The Decameron? Quite craftily was how. Faced with the Reformation, the Catholic Church needed to defend itself and reconsolidate its position of authority. The Roman Catholic Church did indeed ‘ban’ The Decameron but knew that they could not simply obliterate such a well-known and widely circulated work the 15th and 16th centuries saw an estimated 192 printed editions alone. The Decameron is also widely known for its erotic components and it has quite unfairly led to its author and his work bIl eing associated with ‘obscenity’.Ī common perception is that it is this supposed obscenity which has led to the book having been banned and suppressed here and there by the usual powerful groupings of offended sensibilities. Two texts in particular, one prepared by Ruscelli in 1552 and one by Salvati in 1587, are notorious for their meddling emendations. Despite being one of the most meddled-with texts to have endured, its ‘Frame story’ structure – ten tales told by each of ten people gathered together for a fortnight – has become canonised as a model for literary prose. He composed Il Decamerone ( The Decameron) in the mid-14th century and it was first circulated in manuscript form in the 1370s. As well, I would like to mention how Chaucer formally uses Licisca’s interruption at the beginning of Day 6 in the Decameron (Biggs) where the specific narrative framework of that day is intertwined with its specific subject, when Chaucer creates his characters and their tales.Giovanni Boccaccio, poet, Humanist, orator, narrator and ambassador, father of the Italian novel, is one of the greatest storytellers known. Among other points for comparison, I shall be looking at the narrative frames the pilgrim-narrators in Chaucer, who create a polyphonic text the ambiguous, ironic presentation of the “narrator” figure Chaucer, who soon leaves the narrative ordering to the Host. Although “quiting” has been seen, in general terms, as inherent to the construction of literary histories, (how inherited material is recast in new contexts), in Chaucer we find a degree of subversion of Boccaccio’s novella. I would like to explore to what extent Chaucer’s Tales constitute a “quiting” of the Decameron. “Quiting” implies freeing, responding, retorting. I shall take the idea of “quiting” as proposed in the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales as a possible axis for a comparison of The Canterbury Tales and Il Decameron.

Decamerone giovanni boccaccio