Family and Vocation in the Early Italian Renaissance: Boccaccio and Narratives of Filial Freedom

Introduction

In Bk. 15 of his massive scholarly encyclopedia, Genealogy of the Pagan Gods (Genealogia deorum gentilium), Boccaccio included a chapter devoted to vocational choice in which he recounts the agon between a father's ambition and a son's disposition:

In truth to whatever pursuits nature led others, experience indeed testifies that from my mother's womb it bred me to poetic studies, and in my judgment for that I was born. I well remember how my father even in my boyhood directed all my endeavors toward business and even before I entered adolescence he put me in the charge of a great businessman for instruction in arithmetic. For six years I did nothing in his office but waste irrevocable time. Then, as there seemed to be some indication that I was more disposed to literary pursuits, the same father decided that in order to become wealthy, I should study canon law. My teacher was famous, but I wasted under him almost as much time as before. In both cases I so tired of the work that neither my teacher's learning, nor my father's authority, by which I was continually tormented with new orders, nor the pleas and importunities of my friends, could make me yield, to so great an extent did affection draw that one [me] to poetic matters! ¹

The history of the medieval and early modern family has generally been a fairly grim one regarding the autonomy of children. As Marco Cavina, Thomas Kuehn, and others have shown, the revival of Roman law in Italy starting in the late eleventh century led to the reemergence of the notion of patria potestas, a legal authority that obtained until formal emancipation in early adulthood. The extent of this paternal authority was virtually absolute: fathers could control the property of children, restrict their legal transactions, and mandate their religious and marital choices—even sell them if necessitated by hunger! ² The perdurance of these prerogatives can be seen in a ritual of emancipation in Turin from as late as the eighteenth century, in which the father raises the son from a kneeling position and declares, “I exempt you from my paternal power and for the future you will be a free son….who from now and forever is able to dispose, bequeath, contract, conduct business, and do all that you wish to do.” ³ Although perhaps not explicit in legal formulations, the authority of fathers also often extended to the control of the vocational destinies of both sons and daughters, deciding on professions for the former, the cloister for the latter. ⁴

While Boccaccio offered the most varied literature on the theme, he was not the first Renaissance figure to attest to a vocational resistance to the control of a father. In a letter in his collection On Familiar Matters (Familiares 20.4), when writing to Marco da Genova in 1356, who had asked him for encouragement to continue his legal studies, Petrarch perversely decried the decadence of the law's modern practitioners, speaking of his own early misadventures: “As a boy, my dear friend, I was destined to such study by my father (destinatus a patre) when I was barely twelve.” ⁵ Toward the end of his life, in a famous passage in one of his Letters of Old Age (Seniles 16.1), Petrarch gave a rather cryptic account of his father's burning his literary books during the period when he was supposed to be completing the legal studies to which his father committed him:

I recall that my father, seeing me so sad, thereupon quickly grabbed two books, already nearly burned by the fire, and, holding a Virgil in his right hand and Cicero's Rhetoric in his left, handed both to me and smiled at my tears. ‘Take this one [the Virgil],’ he said, ‘as an occasional recreation for your spirit, and this one [Cicero's Rhetoric] as a prop for your law studies.’ Comforting my heart with so few companions, but such great ones, I dried my tears. Later, on the threshold of adulthood, when I came of age and renounced law books, I returned to my old studies all the more fervently. ⁶

The death of the father may often have been an occasion for a vocational turn. In his biography of the humanist Niccolò Niccoli, Vespasiano da Bisticci remarks that Niccolò was “one of four sons of a rich merchant, all of whom became merchants. In his youth Niccolò, by his father's wish, entered trade, wherefore he could not give his time to letters as he desired. After his father's death he left his brothers so as to carry out his aims.” ⁹ Similarly, in his life of Giannozzo Manetti, Vespasiano claims that Manetti could not take up Latin until the late age of 25, “not having been able hitherto follow his own wishes on account of his father.” ¹⁰ A more flexible prescription for paternal control of sons’ professions can be found in Paolo da Certaldo's fourteenth-century Book of Good Customs (Libro di buoni costume), which in three different places emphasizes that fathers should place their sons in a trade to their liking and not try to force all into the same trade. ¹¹ In like manner, a slightly later advice book (ca. 1405), Rules for the Management of the Family (Regola del governo di cura familiare), written by Giovanni Dominici, a Dominican offering advice to a new widow, also argued that parents should follow the inclinations of their children in guiding their choice of profession. ¹² How much this bit of advice in both books was intended to correct a norm and how much to validate one is unclear, although the case of Dominici might suggest the former, as prior to his entry into religious life his mother had sent him to Venice for two years to engage in trade. ¹³ It is also possible that merchant/artisan customs (depicted in these popular works) differed from those of the more learned class. Kuehn argues that “among artisan families one can see sons having much more control of their futures.” ¹⁴ For the more educated class, as in the case of Petrarch's father, Ser Petracco, parental control was apparently more tightly enforced. In any case, for Petrarch the release even had a symbolic significance. That he eventually (at least by the time of laurel crowning in 1341) even changed his surname from his father's “Petracco” to “Petrarca” testifies to his desire for a new identity, literally and figuratively. ¹⁵

Whereas Petrarch was virtually silent about his mother, Boccaccio proclaimed that his poetic interests came “ex utero matris,” suggesting a father–mother binary not unlike that found in Augustine's Confessions, where a pagan father urged a traditional career in rhetoric, and a Christian mother a religious vocation. This attribution to the mother is especially notable, given that Boccaccio, an illegitimate child, never knew his mother. Moreover, he states that this inborn inclination was one assigned by “natura”—and in fact, earlier in this same chapter (more on which later) Boccaccio suggests that it is “natura parens” that predisposes humans to their varying pursuits. ¹⁶ The juxtaposition of these statements regarding “parent nature” (or Mother Nature) and the mother's womb does suggest that he viewed his true vocational calling as rooted in the female realm in implicit opposition to the patriarchal realm. This female trope may also relate to his interest generally in the experience of women, as particularly seen in the Decameron and the De mulieribus claris. Certainly, it invites us to explore exactly how he allied the power of nature to the realm of women, and, as we shall see, extended the discourse of vocational freedom from himself to women. ¹⁷

Fictive Families

Starting with some of his earliest romances written in his twenties and continuing up through the Decameron and even the regrettable Corbaccio, Boccaccio incorporated episodes of family division or family advice regarding life-choice. ¹⁸ Especially in the case of depictions of father–child relationships, these works suggest a sustained, if never explicit, resentment toward paternal control. As an illegitimate child who was never legitimated, Boccaccio was not legally under the authority of patria potestas. Nonetheless, his father did treat him as a son, for both good and ill, attending to his education and bringing him into his banking world both in Naples and back in Florence. In terms of vocational interference, Boccaccio arguably had even more to complain about than Petrarch. As his narrative above reveals, he spent six years apprenticing as a banker. Then, again at the direction of his father, he studied canon law in Naples for about five years (ca. 1330–35), in all “wasting” over a decade that could have been better spent in literary studies. ¹⁹ He claimed that the cost to him was not merely frustration but his promise as a poet, which was compromised by a late start. ²⁰ As Vittore Branca shows, however, Boccaccio's time in Naples, where he resided until his return to Florence in 1341, was not completely wasted in terms of his literary development. During his legal studies at the Studio (university), he encountered the poet Cino da Pistoia, who had an impact on both Petrarch's and his own poetry; he availed himself of the library of King Robert and its librarian Paolo da Perugia; and he was inducted into his study of Petrarch by the Augustinian Dionigi of Borgo San Sepolcro (who gave to Petrarch the pocket edition of Augustine's Confessions that he opened at the top of Mt. Ventoux). ²¹

It was during this time in Naples that Boccaccio produced his first literary works, a few verse compositions and most notably the Filocolo, his inaugural effort in prose. Tentatively dated to his mid-twenties probably shortly before Boccaccio ended his legal studies in ca. 1335, the Filocolo is a lengthy retelling of the French love story of Floire and Blancheflor. ²² In its general structure, the tale concerns two lovers who grew up in the same household: Florio, son of the Spanish king; and Biancifiore, the orphaned daughter of a Roman noble who was killed in combat with the king. In the course of their youth and education together they fell in love, which distressed the king and queen, who felt that the girl was beneath the station of their royal son. Hoping to separate the two, they first sent Florio off for an education; then they tried to frame her for a crime and have her executed, but Florio returned to rescue her; then they tried to divert her with another love; then they sold her to merchants and eventually Florio rescues her and is reconciled with his parents.

Turning this rather short twelfth-century poem into a five-book, 470-page novel obviously occasioned much opportunity for Boccaccio's embellishment. At several layers, the novel bespeaks a vocational mission and parental conflict: in the larger narrative frame, in the general details of the inherited plot, and in a story within the story. Reading these three layers against each other opens up avenues to consider to what degree the young Boccaccio, still in his twenties, uses the stor(ies) to model his own journey from obedient son, to restive son, to liberated son free to labor as a romantic writer. First, at the level of the narrative structure, at the start he depicts himself as the narrator presenting the story to his beloved who has heard of the tale. At the end, he steps back to address his book: “O my little book, for many years now my pleasant labor, your bark has been driven by favoring winds, and now it touches the shores it has sought with such labor.” ²³ This emphasis on labor will be relevant to the quest of Florio in the tale, who when setting out on his journey to find Biancifore renames himself “Filocolo,” which he explicates as Greek for “labor of love”—fusing, he says, the Greek philos and kolon (though the latter is apparently a garbling of kopon). ²⁴ The labor of love is thus both the quest for the lover and the labor of the author.

Second, at the level of the main story itself, Boccaccio substantively expands the conflict between Florio and his parents. Given some of the details that he adds, it is worth considering that this conflict could have been a chief reason that he chose this particular tale to novelize. As in the French tale, the Spanish king sends Florio away to study in order to separate the two lovers. ²⁵ Boccaccio stages a lengthy encounter between father and son in which both disguise their true motives. The father's excuse is that his heir and future king needs to “improve [your] position by studying the experimental sciences…so that great honor will accrue to you, inasmuch as learning is nowhere more glorious and splendid than among princes.” ²⁶ For his part, Florio feigns concern for his aging father who could be threatened by enemies, though he finally admits that his devotion to Biancifiore is the real reason for not wanting to leave. Boccaccio thus not only adds transactional depth to the original tale, but also, and more importantly, he assigns the father the feigned (and thus realistic) pretense of concern for his son's reputation, one going beyond his marital choice. In a sense, Boccaccio depicts a struggle between paternal status anxiety and filial freedom. The analog to Boccaccio is sounded when the father declares he will send the son off in his fifteenth year, just a few years short of Boccaccino's enrollment of his son in advanced studies in canon law.

Florio repeatedly in the story refers to the actions of one or both of the parents as “crudele,” “iniquo,” and “dispietato,” which makes all the more symbolic his decision to rename himself as he is about to set out to find Biancifiore . ²⁷ Overtly, his stated reason is to disguise his identity to ward off suspicion of him from those who may be holding her, but the name change might also signal something more. If one can accept here an autobiographical analog, then the moment of Florio's renaming himself “labor of love” as he leaves his parents parallels Boccaccio's departure from his father's wishes to launch his new identity as a romantic author—and both parallel Petracco's renaming himself “Petrarca” once he fully assumed his new literary persona.

In particular, one story within the story suggests that he was in fact tracking his own early and current life. In Bk. 5, as the reunited couple makes their way back to Spain, they stop in Parthenope (Naples), where they encounter a character named Idalogos, who for lovesickness had turned into a tree. Branca, and various scholars after him, have noted the autobiographical resonance in this character. ²⁸ A close reading reveals that it not only reflects a father–son estrangement but also does so in such a way as to launch a narrative of vocational discovery. Idalogos's tale begins with the story of his father, a shepherd who devised a bagpipe by which he seduced a young woman, with whom he sired Idalogos and another son. But he soon “abandoned the innocent young woman,” remarried and produced other children. ²⁹ To some degree this reflects the actions of Boccaccino, who sired Boccaccio by an unnamed woman and then married another woman (Margherita de’ Mardoli), with whom he had a another son (Francesco). ³⁰ Idalogos was indignant at this behavior, saying that when his father left his mother and returned to his fields, “I was innocent and restless, and I followed the footsteps of my treacherous father.” ³¹ Given that Idalogos's story occurs in Naples, the young figure following the footsteps of his father echoes Boccaccio's move from Florence to Naples. But then he abandoned his father: “one day when I tried to enter my father's house, I saw two ferocious bears in front of me with their eyes flaming and desiring my death. In fear of them I turned away my steps; and from that hour on I have always hesitated to enter that house.” ³² Whether the bears menacing Idalogos were meant to represent his father's carnal sin (as the she-wolf did for Dante In the Inferno 1), or his betrayal of Idalogos's mother, or his general way of life, Idalogos set out on his own.

This new path would not only mark Idalogos's departure from his father but also his launch of “higher” pursuits. He says: “Abandoning my father's fields (paterni campi), I came to these woods to practice the work that I had learned. And as I lived here with Calmeta, most exalted of shepherds, to whom, as it were, the greater part of things were known, I aspired to higher things (più alto disio).” ³³ This statement could signify Boccaccio's abandoning his father's banking career with the Bardi house—and possibly also the father's recommendation that he pursue canon law. The “higher things” associated with the shepherd Calmeta likely indicated the contacts he had with scholars in Naples, most notably the astronomer and astrologer Andalò del Negro, whom Boccaccio praised in the Genealogia. ³⁴ At some length, Idalogos recounts what he learned from the shepherd with his “sweet style,” who regaled him with the movements of the planets, their phases, and their grounding in classical myths. Idalogos characterized this phase of his life by saying “having already abandoned the pastoral life I prepared to follow Pallas exclusively.” ³⁵

Soon, however, from this devotion to wisdom, Pallas Athena's domain, Idalogos turned in another direction, when Cupid's arrow struck him and he left behind “more useful things” to pursue love and love poetry. Fearing this new love may have been deceiving him, he nonetheless moved forward and credited his courage to his mother: “the nobility of my heart, derived not from my shepherd father but from my royal mother, made me bold” to pursue his new love. ³⁶ This binary between the influence of the “lowly” father and the grander mother resembles the contrast found in the Genealogia, where he bewails the pressure of his father to undertake “lowly” pursuits in contrast to the influence “ab utero matris” of his inclination to poetic pursuits. Finally, Idalogos's journey went from love to its acquisition through poetry:

having committed myself to this undertaking, and left the accustomed path (usato cammino) and abandoned the things I had learned, I began to desire, under my new master, to know how artful words might have power to move human hearts; and following the woodland pheasant [his newfound love] I long used those words in piteous style, along with many other things necessary to bring such desires to fulfillment. ³⁷

At three levels, then, the Filocolo pulses with the Boccaccio's vocational quest. First, there is narrator's goal of providing the “labor” of the story to his beloved, identified as the illegitimate daughter of King Robert of Naples. ³⁸ Second, the story's main arc is the journey of an eponymous “labor of love” as Filocolo defies his treacherous parents and pursues his love against all odds. Third, the story of Idalogos offers a back story to his pursuit of both love and love poetry, which began with a rejection of his father and his “fields.” At the heart, then, of the main story and of Idalogos's story within the story, Boccaccio embeds scenes of parental conflict and filial liberation. A writer still in his twenties, Boccaccio uses his novel to retell an old tale and tell his own new one.

Once Boccaccio left Naples and returned to Florence in 1341, his fictional works offer venues for even more explicit comments about his father and his work with him the banking business. ³⁹ In ca. 1342, he wrote a pastoral romance, the Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine (better known as the Ameto), which bears witness to his unhappiness at being trapped in his father's world. In it, he imagines a shepherd Ameto's encounter with various nymphs and other shepherds who sing about love and other matters: in several cases, maidens describe their unhappy marriages to men chosen by fathers or Fate and their eventual deliverance to find true love elsewhere. ⁴⁰ Toward the end of the story, Boccaccio reveals his own desire for deliverance. The fictional Ameto is revealed as an enviable alter-ego for the author, who has been transported at least temporarily from his captivity by his father, where “the house, dark, mute, and exceedingly sad, receives me and keeps me against my will, where the crude and horrible sight of a cold man, rough and miserly, saddens me ever more.” ⁴¹ Then, his call for liberation, his invocation of the experience of Ameto, and the gloom of his circumstances reveals how much Boccaccio used his pastoral romances to escape his professional prison:

Oh, how happy one can call whoever possesses himself in all liberty! Oh, what a happy life and most beautiful of all! And how much Ameto, if he perceives this well, must know delight in his spirit (if he recognizes this, as I believe), seeing himself surrounded all of a sudden as the subject and high lord of so many ladies, such as today he had before him.

Shortly after the Ameto, in ca. 1342–43, Boccaccio wrote another work that explicitly named his father and addressed competing views of vocation. In the Amorosa visione, he staged a dream vision in which his beloved takes him on a tour of the worldly temptations (or “triumphs”) of Wisdom, Power, Wealth, Love, and Fortune—a journey he preferred to a higher, straighter path heavenward. In the parade of Wealth, one canto cites four archetypes in regard to the allure of riches: the clergy, King Robert of Naples, Boccaccio's father, and himself. One of these, Robert, compared elsewhere to Midas by Boccaccio, was known for his avarice, but it is the juxtaposition of the other three professions that is telling. ⁴³ The friars (mendicants who preach poverty) are presented as hypocrites who should be the last to seek wealth. ⁴⁴ Boccaccio the poet (one who endures poverty) laments that he is another type of “mendico” whose lack of wealth earns society's contempt. Sandwiched in between is his father, who (as merchant) pursues wealth, rather vainly chipping away at the mountain of gold: Further on, scratching at the mountain [of gold] with hooked nails, there was one who, in my opinion, despite his many attempts was clawing away but little. I saw that he was anxiously putting so little in his purse that he himself could hardly be said to possess any of it, not to mention anyone else. Toward him I took myself somewhat closer in order to see clearly who he was; I discovered that it was he himself who Freely and happily, had so kindly nourished me like a son; and I had called him and still call him my parent. ⁴⁵

In placing himself between the poles of religious mendicants who profess but do not practice poverty and a father who strives for but does not fully achieve wealth, Boccaccio reveals attitudes about himself, his vocation, and his father. He says that he too yearns for wealth to avoid the contempt of society, but that he cherishes his independence too much to beg for it (from patrons). The poet then is akin to a monk in professing an ideal of poverty and in this sense Boccaccio casts literary vocation as a secular counterpart to religious vocation. ⁴⁶ But he has also inherited the values of his father specifically and of merchant Florence generally. He professes his own desire for wealth as one who recognizes that “all shun [the mendico] who has no money” and even more telling, that the “the dearest parent is inimical to him.” ⁴⁷ In all, in this canto he presents a most ambiguous attitude toward his father. On the one hand, he expresses a warm filial debt, and in professing his own desire for wealth he seems to cast himself in the same bourgeois light. ⁴⁸ His statement that “the dearest parent is inimical to [the mendicant]” suggests that he senses his father's disappointment in him. On the other hand, he has cast his father with the avaricious and has done so in a poem composed in Dante's terza rima that recalls the latter's harsh depictions of greedy clergy (Inferno 7), nouveaux riche wealth (Inferno 16), and simoniacal popes (Inferno 19). ⁴⁹ Thus, even with the forgiving tone of this portrait of his father, the moral calculus is there, especially when he says that he too would welcome wealth “if with honor it might ever come to pass.” ⁵⁰ The vocational divide between father and son is evident, as the son renounces the father's quest for gold, just as he claims to renounce the dependence on patrons (for which he will condemn Petrarch). As for recent precedent of poetic complaints about fathers, Cecco Angiolieri (ca. 1260–ca. 1312) might be an influence on Boccaccio. Among Cecco's goliardic themes, Mario Marti suggests that his most original was the “invettiva antipaterna.” ⁵¹ That Boccaccio was familiar with this theme in Cecco's poetry is made clear in Decameron 9.4, where he states that he and another Cecco (Fortarrigo) shared a “hatred of their respective fathers.” ⁵²

Still, the expression of warmth for his father in this work, paired as it is with a censure, shows that Boccaccio harbored conflicting attitudes toward his father and his own debt to him. This sense of conflict can be found as subtext in a chapter “Against Wicked Sons” in his On the Fates of Illustrious Men (De casibus virorum illustrium). This chapter, which follows the story of King Arthur and Mordred, presents a pean to fatherhood and all that sons owe fathers for their love, care, and support from infancy through marriage and inheritance. He then poses what skeptics of this thesis might object to and here perhaps in veiled self-defense reveals a counterargument to filial piety: “they would say that everyone by a certain natural instinct spurns the yoke [of paternal control], seeks freedom, and desires power: all of which the father seizes unless they are thrown aside, banished, or carried off.” ⁵³ He then declares “O detestable opinion of the ignorant,” despite his own experience with such “natural” instincts earlier in his life. Apparently, the guilt of a restive son was also a natural instinct.

Filial Freedom and the Decameron

The culmination of the intersection between Boccaccio's fictive families and his vocational testament came in his famous collection of 100 tales in the Decameron. In 1348, he returned to Florence once again after spending time in Ravenna and Forlì, where he enjoyed the patronage of the lords Ostasio da Polenta and Francesco Ordelaffi, respectively. Upon his return, he witnessed the ravages of the Black Death, which took his step-mother and then his father. ⁵⁴ A decade older from the time of his writing the Filocolo, Boccaccio presents not just a veiled autobiography of his vocational journey but a more explicit defense of his literary mission grounded in the realities of Nature. And in doing so, he expands his sights from the agency of sons to that of daughters.

Boccaccio frames his tales in terms of the predicament of women, who are unnaturally constricted by family and social convention from pursuing self-expression (of love) or self-preservation (in the face of plague). His “Prologue,” addressed to women, describes the plight of lovelorn women who are “forced to follow the shims, fancies, and dictates of their fathers, mothers, brothers and husbands, so that they spend most of their time cooped up within the narrow confines of their rooms, where they sit in apparent idleness,” succumbing to melancholy. ⁵⁵ And whereas men have the privilege of resolving their gloom with business affairs or other extramural activities (hunting, gambling, etc.), women are imprisoned in their homes. And if those who are unafflicted by love can “make do with their needles, their reels and their spindles,” the lovelorn need consolation and diversion, which his tales are meant to provide. For corroboration that Boccaccio has provided a reasonably accurate picture of contemporary assumptions regarding female domestic life here, we can again turn to the Book of Good Customs. The compiler of these proverbs and counsels on merchant and family life, Paolo da Certaldo, was almost an exact contemporary of Boccaccio (born two years later), held land abutting Boccaccio's in Certaldo, and sold a farm to him in 1360. ⁵⁶ Several of the proverbs included among the 388 entries in Paolo's collection are also to be found in Boccaccio's tales (Dec. 1.4, 3.5, 4.2, 8.10, and 9.9). ⁵⁷ Paolo's advice on the treatment of girls in the home is also quite similar. Unlike boys, who should be given literacy and placed in a craft of their liking (a counsel on filial freedom Paolo repeats three times in his collection), girls should not be accorded literacy unless they want to become a nun, should learn instead to sew, should not go gadding about but remain at home “enclosed and shut in a hidden and proper place.” ⁵⁸ And like Boccaccio he warns of the dangers of idleness: the father should assure that they always have something to do in the home, “because for a woman or man to remain idle is a great danger, but more dangerous in the case of women.” ⁵⁹ For Boccaccio this enforced claustration and idleness is not so much dangerous as psychologically harmful—and to this malady he will offer the remedy of his tales.

Boccaccio's prescription for women (readers) went beyond literary diversion, as he also sanctioned women (characters) to flee the plague. In his famous introduction to Bk. 1, he presents a graphic depiction of the horrors of the plague—both physical and social—and depicts the circumstance of seven young women dutifully wearing their mourning clothes and saying their Paternosters in Santa Maria Novella. The leader of the group, Pampinea, questioning these public obligations, proposes that they follow their natural instinct for self-preservation, argues that “every person born into this world has a natural right to sustain, preserve, and defend his own life to the best of his ability.” ⁶⁰

Variations on the theme of natural instinct intersect in Bk. 4 of the Decameron, where Boccaccio defends his literary vocation and the rights of daughters: in both cases filial freedom of choice is often pitted against patriarchal authority. In the introduction to this book, he offers his most extensive brief for his project, more than once excusing his forsaking the higher regions of the Parnassus Muses for this more popular register. His principal vehicle, not surprisingly, is a story (one which, intruding as author, he hopes will not compete with the tales of his fictive storytellers). It is a father–son story centered on a Filippo Balducci, a figure likely meant to conjure Boccaccio's father in that, like him, members of the Balducci family worked for the Bardi banking concern. ⁶¹ When Balducci, who was married with one son, lost his wife, in his grief he withdrew with his son to a cave, living a life of religious retreat and hoping to shield his son from the temptations of the world. When he decided to make a trip to Florence, he yielded to his eighteen-year-old son's plea that he be allowed to come along. When the son for the first time laid eyes on women he was wonderstruck, asking the father what these beautiful creatures are. Avert your eyes, the father told him: they are called goslings and are evil. The son protested that he would like to take one home and give it something to peck, which led Boccaccio to a lewd joke. But then the story pivoted to make the serious point that the father's efforts “were no match for Nature.” ⁶²

Boccaccio cut the story off here and used the tale to justify his own “natural affection” for women and his own reasonable desire to write for them, as Dante and others had done. To detractors who say he should reside with the Muses of Parnassus, they perhaps have taught him how to write but not why to write (for love of women). And then he makes the convenient observation that the Muses are themselves women: “The Muses are ladies, and although ladies do not rank as highly as Muses, nevertheless they resemble them at first sight, and hence it is natural, if only for that reason that I should be fond of them.” ⁶³ Boccaccio's argument for the naturalness of his vocational leanings and its grounding in the female realm recalls his comments in the Filocolo story about Idalogos's claim that his “bold” determination to pursue love (poetry) came from his royal mother and not from his lowly father. Both of these, in turn, recall the comment from the Genealogy at the opening of this chapter in which Boccaccio attributes his literary vocation to the womb of his mother. Moreover, because the Muses recognize their connection to mortal women, “it is possible that they have been looking over my shoulder several times in the writing of these tales” and thus “I am not straying as far from Mount Parnassus or from the Muses as many people might be led to believe.” ⁶⁴ Maybe, then, he argues the low-brow Decameron might have approval by the female authorities of high-brow Parnassus.

But this was not Boccaccio's only defense of his vocation in this introduction. He also addresses the attack on poets’ impractical decision to pursue a life that leaves you in poverty, the choice to go “hungry for the sake of producing nonsense of this sort.” Boccaccio argues that “indeed, poets have always found more to sustain them in their songs, than many a rich man found in his treasures.” ⁶⁵ In fact, this pursuit serves one well into old age—a claim, sadly, he would later come to doubt when he tells Petrarch of his plan to abandon poetry and sell his books, for his fear of a religious prophecy. ⁶⁶ But for now, he stakes out his territory with confidence and advises his critics to mind their own affairs. And again, he returns to the power of nature: “henceforth I shall redouble my efforts toward that end [writing for women], secure in the knowledge that no reasonable person will deny that I and other men who love you [ladies] are simply doing what is natural (naturalmente operiamo).” ⁶⁷ Then, perhaps in a rebuke of the fictive father in his tale—and perhaps the actual father of his youth—he adds: “And in order to oppose the laws of Nature, one has to possess exceptional powers, which often turn out to have been used, not only in vain, but to the serious harm of those who employ them.” ⁶⁸

This literary apologia is the most important of the three times that Boccaccio defines or defends his book, the other two coming in his “Prologue” to the ladies and in Epilogue, where he addresses the “raillery” in his tales. ⁶⁹ The Bk. 4 introduction treats several features of his vocational identity at the time of writing the Decameron (1349–51) or by the time of the final revisions (1372). In either case his sensitivity toward the popular vein of the work might reflect an unease piqued by his first encounter with Petrarch in 1350, whom he was right to suspect of sniffing at the work. But he also defends in general the poet's voluntary poverty and his courage in following his natural desires for love and love poetry. The fictional story he embeds thus covers two themes that have a persistent presence in his life. First, the tension between the pious father and the amorous son mirrors the larger conflict between religious piety and secular (especially bawdy) literature. Second, the scenario of the (implicitly merchant) father attempting to steer his teenaged son away from his natural bent surely mirrors the conflict between Boccaccio and his father. In several of the tales that follow in Bk. 4, Boccaccio extended this conflict to the experience of daughters.

The announced theme for tales in Bk. 4 was the fate of those whose love had an unhappy end. Four of the tales concerned the tragedies of daughters who were kept from fulfilling their desires by family members, whether fathers, brothers, or in one case a widow. ⁷⁰ In the fourth tale, the King of Tunis promises his daughter to the King of Granada; in the fifth, the merchant brothers murdered the love of their sister to protect the reputation of the family; in the eighth, the widow of a wealthy merchant discourages her daughter from a lowly match. In only one tale, the sixth, perhaps meant to be the exception that proves the rule, does a father honor his daughter's wishes—though in this case, it was to enter a convent once her lover had died. The link to Boccaccio's tale of his literary vocation in the introduction to the book is clear: both in the theme of “natural” demands of love and in the pursuit of vocation, which in terms of young women generally was confined to decisions about the life-choice of spouse or the convent.

The first tale depicts the conflict between daughter and parent in the most striking detail, and its juxtaposition with the introduction suggests that the link between Boccaccio the poet and the restive daughter is perhaps not accidental. Tancredi, the prince of Salerno, had a daughter whom he first held back from marriage at the usual age, then promised to the Duke of Capua, and then when she returned a widow punished for a secret love. In several ways, this tale is a version of the drama in the Filocolo, only here it is a daughter rather than a son, who has chosen an unsuitable match. ⁷¹ Her lover was “Guiscardo, a youth of exceedingly base condition, whom we took into our court and raised from early childhood mainly out of charity”—the parallel to Biancifiore, taken in by Florio's family, is obvious. ⁷² When Tancredi discovers their illicit affair, he confronts his daughter Ghismonda for the dual transgression of violating chastity and doing so with one of such a lowly station. Her reply, running to more than two pages, is one of the two lengthiest speeches by a woman in the entire Decameron—the other being Pampinea's insistence in the “Introduction” that the women act on their natural right to save themselves by the fleeing plague. ⁷³ As Ghismonda is about to launch her protest, Boccaccio describes her steely determination, as she “allowed no trace of contrition or womanly distress to cloud her features, but addressed her father in a firm, unworried voice, staring him straight in the face without a single tear in her eyes.” She says that she will not appeal for forgiveness or clemency, but rather “on the contrary, I propose to tell you the whole truth, setting forth convincing arguments in defense of my good name, and afterwards I shall act unflinchingly in accordance with the promptings of my noble heart.” ⁷⁴ Her argument is both an assertion of her human nature and a redefinition of conventional views of nobility.

As regards herself, she reminds her father that she, like him, is made of flesh and blood and “although you are now an old man, you should have remembered, indeed you should still remember, the nature and power of the laws of youth (le leggi della giovanezza).” ⁷⁵ She is still a young woman, whose earlier marriage whetted her amorous desires, and thus “as I was incapable of resisting these forces, I made up my mind, being a woman in the prime of life, to follow the path along which they were leading, and I fell in love…prepared to commit a natural sin (natural peccato)” ⁷⁶ Like the Boccaccio of Bk. 4's introduction, hers is a natural instinct akin to the young man taken with the goslings in Florence and akin to a poet naturally inclined to love and love poetry. ⁷⁷ She then asserts her choice of Guiscardo as one rooted in deliberation and “careful reflection.” Not simply a lovesick girl, she describes herself as a rational woman, who has chosen not a lowly man but one whose qualities truly define him as noble. Conventional standards of inherited nobility have long abandoned the true criterion, which is merit alone, whose force “nature and good manners ensure…still remains unimpaired.” ⁷⁸ She challenges Tancredi to compare him honestly to the nobles in his court and discounts his poverty as irrelevant to true nobility. In this substantive argument on nobility, perhaps inspired by Dante's Convivio Bk.4, Boccaccio puts into the mouth of Ghismonda a topic that will later be much discussed by humanists such as Poggio Bracciolini and Cristoforo Landino. ⁷⁹ Her closing is especially harsh. Tancredi had decided to execute Guiscardo and when he confronted Ghismonda he was weeping over what to do with her. She challenges him to inflict the same punishment on her or she will see to it herself. Then, she taunts Tancredi as the “woman” in their exchange: “now get you hence to shed your tears among the women.” ⁸⁰ She is as good as her word. When Guiscardo's murderers present her with his heart in a chalice, she poisons herself.

This, the most extended father–daughter conflict in the Decameron, turns the father–son conflicts in the Bk. 4 introduction and in the Filocolo to female ends. Besides identifying himself with the life-choice conflicts that women face in the presence of overbearing patriarchy, Boccaccio also opens up new avenue for reconsidering the treatment of daughters in the family. He not only depicted this crisis in the fictive families of the Decameron, but also even raised it later in his Latin On Famous Women of 1361–62. In his biography of the Vestal Virgin, Rhea Ilia, Boccaccio digressed to condemn the practice of the forced monachization of daughters. Rhea, the daughter of Numitor, was forced to enter the company of the Vestal Virgins by her uncle, Amulius, who wanted to ensure no further claimants to the throne after he banished his brother and killed his nephew, Rhea's brother. Despite her status—or Boccaccio implies, because of it—she violated her vows of celibacy and became pregnant with Romulus and Remus. Then and now, he argues, the fault lies with ruthless parents rather than scandalous daughters:

When I reflect upon the case of this woman and see the holy vestments and veils of nuns hiding furtive love, I cannot help laughing at the madness of some people. There are certain individuals who are greedy enough to take away from their daughters their pittance of a dowry. Under the pretext of religion they confine—or should I say condemn?—these girls to nuns’ cells, sometimes when they are still very young, sometimes when almost mature, but always under force. ⁸¹

The Humanist Scholar and Secular Vocation

After his writing of the Decameron, Boccaccio turned his attention increasingly to classical scholarship and Latin works. This turn no doubt was partly due to his finally meeting Petrarch—who in 1350 on his way to Rome for the Jubilee stopped off in Florence—but the classical interest had been long in the making, as Boccaccio's early vernacular works in Naples showed considerable classical knowledge. His familiarity with some of Petrarch's works dated to this period, and his admiration was such that he wrote a biography of Petrarch in the late 1340s. ⁸² Over the next twenty years or more, he wrote Latin biographies of famous men and women, a geographical encyclopedia, and most notably his compendium on the classical gods, the Genealogy. In this last work, he presented his most sustained discussion of his own vocational journey, finally dropping the fictional masks, and offering a theory of vocational choice in general as well as the first systematic defense of literary studies in the early Renaissance. And his father was still present.

Boccaccio devotes the last two books of the Genealogy to a definition of poetry and a defense of literary studies. He defends this new vocational path against various levels of society: the popular folk (which oddly would probably include some of the readers of the Decameron), the scholastic philosophers and theologians, and the jurists, who earn the lengthiest rebuttal. ⁸³ No doubt, this attack on the lawyers (civil and canon) reflects his own unhappy stint in canon-law studies at the behest of his father. ⁸⁴ Most important in regard to his personal story is the tenth chapter of Bk. XV, entitled “We Cultivate Most Those Studies For Which We Have the Strongest Natural Bent,” which I cited in my opening. In a remarkable article, Richard Douglas discussed this chapter chiefly in regard to the central issue of “genius” or natural inclination, but I want to examine it more closely in terms of his comments on his father and mother, as well as the forces of wealth, nature, and God. ⁸⁵ In fact, Boccaccio embeds his vocational narrative within a wide range of familial, spiritual, social, and natural pressures—and in this sense offers in compressed form the fullest testament of vocational choice in early humanism. Against the competing demands of wealth and piety, Boccaccio argues that Nature will have its (her) way. “Natura parens” (and here probably indeed “Mother Nature”) has so ordered the individual natures of humans that they are diversely suited to be carpenters, sailors, merchants, poets, priests, lawyers, etc. To squander time in the wrong pursuit—would be to vitiate the only chance to realize one's natural gifts. ⁸⁶ At this point, Boccaccio turns to his own case with regard to the natural attributes from his (unknown) mother and the misguided directions from his father: “In truth to whatever pursuits nature led others, experience indeed testifies that from my mother's womb it bred me to poetic studies, and in my judgment for that I was born. I well remember how my father even in my boyhood directed all my endeavors toward business and even before I entered adolescence he put me in the charge of a great business man for instruction in arithmetic” and so on as cited previously.

The contest between the influence of his mother and father is evident. First, comments on his mother's womb take on greater meaning in light of the earlier comments on “natura parens,” suggesting a connection between an ineffable talent inborn from his mother and from Mother Nature. The agon between mother and father was broached in the story of Idalogos in the Filocolo, when he explains his abandoning his father's fields and embracing love and poetry. As he put it there: “the nobility of my heart, derived not from my shepherd father but from my royal mother, made me bold.” The mystery of Boccaccio's mother, whom he never met, may have been a powerful sanctuary for his defense of himself in his own mind and in the mind of others, including his father. Her potential nature may be the explanation for his own potential nature as a poet. Idalogos's story also told of a father who victimized his mother by abandoning her for another, which was the case of Boccaccio's father who did the same. Both Boccaccio and his mother thus perhaps had a noble innocence violated or unrecognized by his father.

The account of his father in this section is equally damning, though a bit more nuanced, than that found in Petrarch. Whereas Petrarch's father burned his literary books and sought eventually to douse his literary desire, Boccaccio's father acknowledged his dislike of banking in his youth and recognizing him to be “more suited to literary studies” (aptiorem fore literarum studiis), shifted him canon law (albeit with the idea that it was a lucrative profession). Despite acknowledging this partial concession to his literary bent, Boccaccio says that once he embarked on his legal studies he could not abandon his true affection for poetic study, despite the pressure from his teacher, his friends or the “authority of this father, by which I was continuously tormented with new commands.” ⁸⁷ He then explains this tenacity as one that had long been with him. Perhaps reinforcing the point that his poetic nature was inborn, he casts back to early childhood: “I remember perfectly that before I reached my seventh year, or had ever seen a story, or heard a teacher speak, or scarce knew my letters, a natural impulse to composition seized me.” He describes his early efforts and pursuit of poetry “with the utmost zeal.” But even in these early years his father tried to deter him: “This [pursuit of poetry] took place without a word of advice or instruction from anyone, while my father continually resisted and condemned such a pursuit.” Soon others were calling him a poet and

if my father had only been favorable to such a course at a time of life when I was more adaptable, I do not doubt that I should have taken my place among poets of fame. But while he tried to bend my mind first into business and next into a lucrative profession, it came to pass that I turned out neither a businessman, nor a canon-lawyer, and missed being a good poet besides. ⁸⁸

Exactly how much Boccaccio was shaped by his knowledge of Petrarch's experience is difficult to determine. He worked on revisions of Bks. 14 and 15 of the Genealogy from 1372 to 1375, the year of his death. ⁸⁹ He lists many of Petrarch's works in Bk. 15, including the letter collections, and thus by the times he wrote this account he could have known various of Petrarch's comments about his own father in, for instance, Fam. 20. 4, Sen. 16. 1, and the letter “To Posterity” (Sen. 18.1). ⁹⁰ Much earlier he revealed some knowledge of Petrarch's paternal problems in the biography of Petrarch, which he wrote in the 1340s, but at that point there may have been only oral lore of Petrarch's story. And in fact, when he alludes to it in the biography, as Victoria Kirkham points out, he imports a locus from Ovid's Tristia 4.10.21–27 in which poet describes his father's rebuke of his literary studies. ⁹¹ Even if the “genre” of the paternal agon was given shape by Petrarch (and Ovid), Boccaccio's earlier fictive accounts of family struggle show how it was part of his autobiographical script.

At the end of Chapter 10 of Bk. 15, he returns to the resolution of his vocational journey.

A bit defensively he explains that he did consider the study of sacred texts (sacra volumina) but decided against it because it would have been a fruitless endeavor given his advancing years and intellect—whether this was a sincere or contrived statement is unclear. Regardless—and here the juxtaposition of theology and poetry is probably telling—he christens his embrace of literary studies with the authority of God. The statement may be one of the most consequential in the emergence of a concept of secular vocation:

Wherefore, since I believe that I am called to this profession by God's will (cum existimem dei beneplacito me in hac vocatione vocatum), it is my purpose to stand fast in the same. These present studies show what I have done in it, and others may praise them as seems best. Then let those who allow the cobbler his awl and bristles, the wool-raiser his flock, the sculptor his statues, in all patience give me the leave to cultivate the poets. ⁹²

In developing the theme of the restive youth, Boccaccio was influenced by Petrarch to shape a Renaissance trope regarding filial freedom. In his biography On the Life and Character of Francesco Petracco (De vita e moribus Domini Francisci Petracchi, oddly citing Petrarch's natal rather than his new name), Boccaccio spends considerable time on the father–son conflict. ⁹⁶ Boccaccio wrote the work after Petrarch's crowning, probably in the late 1340s, prior to his first meeting with Petrarch in 1350, and yet he seems to know a good deal about his conflict with the father. He spends considerable time describing the rancorous father–son struggle, detailing how the father angrily called Petrarch home from his first round of legal studies and stubbornly sent him out again to his second. Tormenting him with “various reproaches” and “burdening him with his authority.” ⁹⁷ This trope became a staple in Petrarch biographies later in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—and was also carried into biographies of Boccaccio. ⁹⁸ In sum, in his life of Petrarch, Boccaccio had thus created a literary shift, moving the trope of parental struggle regarding vocation from the autobiographical to the biographical genre.

Filial Freedom: From Young Men to Young Women

Boccaccio's second contribution to the literary history of filial freedom came in his extension of this issue to women. The Decameron Day 4 is the inflection point in this transition, as the introduction to this day depicts a story illustrating Boccaccio's own bow to Nature (in regard to vocation) and the first story a narrative of a young woman doing the same (in regard to love). As evident here as in the Filocolo and Famous Women, Chapter 45, the natural right to choose freely a lover or a vocation is one that can be pressed against patriarchy by both young men and young women. Second, and this is more complex, Boccaccio invoked the “feminine” in his claim that his natural inclination to be a poet was born “from the womb of his mother.” In both the Genealogy 15.10 and in the story of Idalogos in the Filocolo, he assigned to the female realm a certain power to counteract the oppressive forces of the male realm.

If the implication here is that Boccaccio was something of a proto-feminist, there is also much elsewhere in the record that suggests just the opposite. His chapter “Against Women” in the Fates of Illustrious Men is a typical misogynistic screed that is a short version of the full-blown assault on women in the fictional Corbaccio, in which the spirit of a deceased husband regales a suitor as to “how greedy, reluctant, ambitious, envious, slothful, and raving this perverse multitude is.” ⁹⁹ And yet this is the same author who assigned women considerable female agency in the Decameron, beginning with the decision, led by Pampinea, to break off their mourning and respond to their “natural feelings” of self-preservation by leaving plague-ridden Florence. Even more noteworthy in this regard was his collection of biographies on Famous Women–begun in 1361, and thus after the Fates of Illustrious Men, and, probably, the Corbaccio as well—some of whose stories made their way into Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies (Le livre de la Cité des Dames, 1405) and many other catalogs of illustrious women. ¹⁰⁰ And while some scholars argue that Boccaccio's portraits at times only reinforced patriarchal assumptions of proper female behavior, the glass should perhaps be seen as half full or, as Virginia Brown notes in the introduction to her splendid translation of the work: “In general, he is much more expansive than his sources in praising women's intellectual powers or their literary accomplishments or their moral virtues or their artistic creations.” ¹⁰¹

However one wishes to weigh the balance of Boccaccio's misogynist and feminist views, his brief for young women's right to choose a spouse (in Decameron Day 4) and to be free from involuntary enclosure in a convent (Famous Women, 45) are both signal statements on female life-choice. Indeed, in her City of the Ladies, Christine includes two of the tales from Day 4, including the opening tale regarding Ghismonda, in her catalogue of determined and virtuous women. ¹⁰² His joining his own right to vocational choice in the introduction to Day 4 to women's right of spousal choice in Day 4 constituted a notable conjunction of male and female interests that itself bespoke a radical statement of female equality. And for both men and women, he argued that the power of Nature should trump the power of patriarchy.

About three centuries later, the culmination of the vocal female revolt against patriarchal control in Italy came in Archangela Tarabotti's treatise Paternal Tyranny (ca. 1642), a work that reveals the influence of Boccaccio's Famous Women in more than one way. Enrolled by her father in a Venetian convent at the age of 11—because he thought her lameness made her unfit for marriage—Tarabotti took her vows at 16 and remained a nun her whole life. She sought to soften the original title, Tirannia paterna, to La simplicità ingannata (Innocence Betrayed), and it was under that title that the work was published posthumously under a pseudonym in 1654. ¹⁰³ But the original title bespeaks the true tenor of the work, which is a relentless attack on the selfishness of fathers who force their daughters into convents to save money on dowries, or for convenience, or under the fiction of preserving their chastity. Such fathers are “tyrants for Hell, monsters of nature,” incarcerating their daughters against their will and displaying the worst form of hypocrisy by “offer[ing] up young creatures to God in unlawful sacrifice for the sake of preserving their own advantages.” ¹⁰⁴ Time and again, the treatise shows itself to be a manifesto of liberty (citing Cato's example three times), even chastising the Venetian state (so-called home of political freedom) as ironically harboring paternal tyranny. ¹⁰⁵ As Letizia Panizza has pointed out in her translation of the work, Tarabotti has drawn examples of notable women and arguments from Boccaccio's Famous Women—which had been translated into Italian and published in numerous editions in the sixteenth century—most likely using that of Giuseppe Betussi, who added his own modern examples to his edition. ¹⁰⁶ And while Tarabotti does not obviously borrow from Boccaccio's condemnation of the forced monachization of contemporary daughters in his chapter on the Vestal Virgil, Ilia Rhea—surely the lengthiest modern aside in his book—it is difficult to imagine that she did not find tinder there for her own fiery diatribe. ¹⁰⁷ Finally, like Boccaccio, she argued that fathers should recognize and honor the natural inclinations of their children—in this case daughters—not forcing the unwilling into nunneries, but also not restraining those who want such a life even praising those holy women—Saints Claire, Euphrosina, and Catherine of Siena—who chose that life in defiance of parental wishes. ¹⁰⁸

Vocation and the History of the Family

That the first secular narratives against parental control in Renaissance Italy came in the context of literary vocation is perhaps no accident. Especially in regard to their study of classical literature, Petrarch and Boccaccio were keenly aware that this cultural agenda was new and needed both definition and defense: Petrarch in his Coronation Oration and Life of Solitude, Boccaccio in the Genealogy Bks. 14–15. ¹⁰⁹ But their departure was not merely a theoretical one defended against traditional scholastic learning or conservative piety, but a personal one waged against the expectations of family. In the Life of Solitude, Petrarch condemns parents who send their children for an education aimed at gaining wealth, saying that “children are sent by their parents not as to a liberal [arts] academy but as to a market-place, at great expense of the family but with the hope of a much greater financial return.” ¹¹⁰ Petrarch's father hoped for a lawyer in his son, Boccaccio's for a banker or canon lawyer. Their sons’ vocational apostasy was possible because fortified with a moral and psychological urgency that had the coloration of a true calling. There of course were precedents and parallels for this in the religious world: Augustine eventually renounced his deputed secular career in rhetoric following his conversion. ¹¹¹ Saint Francis repudiated his father's wealth and stood naked before the bishop choosing his eternal father over his earthly one. ¹¹² And later Luther—whose father had given him a copy of the Body of Civil Law to launch him on a career in the law—chose the monastery without permission provoking his father to ask “have you not read in the scriptures that one should honor father and mother.” ¹¹³ Boccaccio turned this religious model to secular ends: joining a nature infused ab utero and “called in this vocation” by God, Boccaccio announced his own allegiance to higher powers, as he explained his own renunciation of his father's plans for him.

In framing his vocational narrative as an appeal to a divine mandate, he created a nexus between the humanism and the history of the family: one that reified humanism's role in the emergence of notions of secular vocation, while at the same time pointing to its unrecognized role in the history of the family. As for the first of these, Jean-Louise Flandrin, in his history of the family in early modern France, made this observation:

In the sixteenth century, the only recognized vocation had been the religious one; apart from that, parents were left free to choose the occupation of their children. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, every estate had become a “profession” and required a “vocation,” which parents were forbidden to thwart. ¹¹⁴

Secondly, because his statement came at the end of a varied set of writings about his own and others’ restive complaints about the lack of filial freedom, Boccaccio articulated a literature of the unemancipated child, both male and female—one that he read back into the life of Petrarch and the Vestal Virgins, and forward into the imagined lives of young people who wanted their own choices about life and love. His complaints about paternal control crept into numerous genres: the novel (Filocolo), the pastoral romantic (Ameto), the verse dreamscape (Amorosa visione), biography (Life and Character of Petrarch, Famous Women, and Fates of Illustrious Men), humanist scholarship (Genealogy), and vernacular tales (Decameron). The persistence of the theme—even when minimal or veiled—reveals a preoccupation with addressing his experience as a young man seeking autonomy. But it is in the last setting, in the structure of Decameron Bk.4, that he signals a connection between the vocational freedom of a young man and the marital freedom of young women. This unexpected link between cultural history and social history might be one of the most significant features of Boccaccio's narratives of familial conflict—one that opens up the debate on the plight of girls in a popular genre.

Taken together, Boccaccio's briefs for young men and women add another dimension to the history of early modern youth: one that considers restive young people in context of family only, rather than youth group. Scholars have studied the important role that youth groups played in offering young men an associative outlet. In Natalie Zemon Davis's study of the “Abbeys of Misrule” in late medieval and early France, the youth groups served to channel critiques of conventional society; in Richard Trexler's and Konrad Eisenbichler's studies of youth clubs that began to remerge in Florence in the early fifteenth century, they offered young men a ritual and festive identity in the period between boyhood and marital and political life that came only in the late 20s or early 30s. ¹¹⁵ In the sixteenth century, academies began to emerge in Italy that offered young men a cultural and often ludic respite before harsh realities of preordained, traditional careers. In his Dialogue on the Games that are Customarily Played at Sienese Parties (Dialogo de’ giuochi che nelle vegghie sanesi si usano di fare, ca. 1563–64) Girolamo Bargagli defended his own such academy in Siena, the Intronati, against the charge that such academies divert young men in their “green years” from embarking on their serious careers. ¹¹⁶ Himself pressured by his parents to pursue the law, he argued that the real problem lay with fathers who forced their sons into professions “contrary to their instincts” and suggested that society has benefited when figures followed their true “vocazione” rather than settling for a life of mediocrity mandated by others, citing Petrarch's abandonment of the law for letters as a prime example. ¹¹⁷ And as for the corrupting force of the new academies, he cites Boccaccio as one who turned to letters without the influence of an academy.

In fact, as Trexler notes, in a tale in Decameron Bk. 6.9, Boccaccio lamented that such associative groups of festive young gentlemen, which had flourished in Florence beginning in the thirteenth century, had in his day disappeared. Indeed, like Petrarch before him, it was as an individual—rather than as part of a group—that Boccaccio struggled to find a cultural space during his young adulthood. His vocational narratives regarding his early years, so much more pervasive than those of Petrarch, offer us a glimpse of this liminal period of adolescence and young adulthood in the early modern era. The resentments he harbored and the truths he proclaimed would become a manifesto of filial autonomy that pertained not only to young male poets and scholars but also to young women who equally had a claim to freedom regarding their loves and life-choices.