Abstract
As I write, the world is approaching year three of the COVID-19 pandemic. If 2020 and 2021 brought us quarantines and COVID pods, fourteenth-century plague, as refracted through the pen of Giovanni Boccaccio, introduced early moderns to that courtly group of bubonic escape artists or brigata (a small group of friends) who narrate the hundred tales of love, lust, and loss that comprise the Decameron. Stuck amid a moil of death, disease, and civil disorder in Florence, this group of seven women and three men decide to decamp from the city to the idyllic Tuscan countryside. There they spend two weeks engaged in garden strolls, elegant feasts, merry song and dance, and, of course, storytelling. The brigata’s attempt to build community and wrest order from disorder echoes the modern pandemic experience, and indeed Boccaccio’s masterwork has become newly relevant in recent months. In July 2020, for example, the New York Times Magazine released its own compilation of plague stories under the apposite epithet The Decameron Project; in Italy, universities staged Zoom readings of the Decameron during lockdown, while course catalogues everywhere expanded to include a medley of new classes about the history of disease. The 2021 publication of leading cultural historian Guido Ruggiero’s contribution to Boccaccio studies, Love and Sex in the Time of Plague, then, is timely. Straddling the line between history and literary criticism, Ruggiero’s work takes readers inside the action of the Decameron’s most famous novelle or tales in order to reconstruct the emotional landscape of early modern Florence. Ruggiero frames this retelling as an act of listening or an attempt ‘to imagine how that masterpiece was heard in its day’ (p. 3). In doing so, he reminds us that despite the Black Death’s resonant properties and disease’s intrinsic ability to illuminate emotion and penetrate the fabric of human society to reveal the tensions that lie beneath, the character of those feelings and that of the social institutions that bound them were often ‘imagined in ways…far distant from the modern’ in the fourteenth-century past (p. 29).
At a compact 205 pages before endnotes, Ruggiero’s monograph marshals its enthralling source material and a compelling mix of cogent prose and an approachable style to open the affective topography of the past for exploration. The text consists of five chapters, each of which revolves around laughter, violence, sorrow, transcendence, or power respectively, as well as an introduction and a conclusion. The book’s titular themes, love and sex, reside at the heart of every chapter in line with Ruggiero’s claim that Boccaccio saw these entangled vehicles of human feeling as powerful forces that could alternately civilise contemporary society in the wake of social upheaval or further disrupt it, spawning dark passions, violence, and irrationality in their wake. The Decameron’s storytellers, in their narrative weavings bawdy, tragic, farcical, melodramatic, and romantic alike, underscore these dual prospects and valorise the first. Ruggiero’s introduction recaps this emotive friction and reviews the major historical events that shaded the Black Death’s arrival in Florence. Students and generalists alike will benefit from his discussion of the rapid influx of wealth that permeated premodern Florence thanks to the explosive growth of its mercantile and banking industries; so too his account of the popolo’s (the people’s) unsettling overthrow of the old aristocratic order. Expert readers, meanwhile, will appreciate Ruggiero’s pithy discussion of contemporary theology and the competing apocalyptic and Joachimic lenses through which Boccaccio’s contemporaries viewed speedy social change and the spread of endemic illness. Also welcome is Ruggiero’s explicit discussion of method (an entity too often missing in traditional historical studies), in which he states that the book will eschew post-structural notions of the death of the author to the extent that it will use the Decameron’s plot points and authorial asides to access the ‘shared culture’ of the time if not the innermost workings of Boccaccio’s mind (p. 5).
Chapter 1, entitled ‘Laughter: Imagining Love, Lust, and Virtù in the Rinascimento’, revolves around comedic tales of love and desire. Here Ruggiero embarks on his performative project of retelling or listening to the Decameron, employing simple and accessible language to recount the romantic adventures of such Boccaccian characters as the fool Calandrino (Decameron 9.5), the simpleton-turned-lover Cimone (5.1), and the randy Friar Alberto who notably masquerades as the angel Gabriel to get in bed with a beautiful Venetian noblewoman in novella 4.2. According to Ruggiero, these stories functioned as entertainment while also proffering important lessons on life, love, and that quintessential Renaissance quality, virtù. This term defies easy translation, but can roughly be understood as reasonableness or even cunning combined with self-control. In the Decameron, Ruggiero informs us, love, and its fleshy imitator, desire, often confuse and distort the characters’ thoughts; where virtù is added to the mix, however, its possessors are ennobled and often able to love and live rationally. Where virtù is absent, amorous plots lead to comedic degradation (at best) and violence (at worst). The latter is the subject of Chapter 2, which demonstrates ‘the way violence and love and its concomitant sexual desires went hand in hand in the Rinascimento’ (p. 63). Passion’s violent effects could and do take physical form in the Decameron, but Ruggiero convincingly argues that Boccaccio’s tale treats the metaphysical violence or shredding of the self that love gone wrong engenders as the greater threat. This premodern mentality is manifest in novelle that deal with betrayal and cruel lovers/love objects like the story of Nastagio degli Onesti (5.8). Ruggiero draws on his previously established theory of ‘consensus realities’ (see Machiavelli in Love, 2007) to interrogate the story of Onesti’s failed courtship of a Ravanesse aristocrat whose rejection muddies both his interior sense of self and his physical ties to the local community. Ruggiero’s analysis successfully lays bare the alterity of premodern modes of being; like Boccaccio before him, however, Ruggiero focuses his attention on Onesti to the exclusion of the nameless lady who prompted this crisis of self, missing a small but meaningful opportunity to scrutinise the strange and potent power this feminine capacity to disrupt identity seems to confer upon the ‘other’ sex.
In Chapters 3 and 4, novelle that feature women take centre stage. These include but are not limited to the tales of the perennially-weeping Lisabetta with her pot of basil plants and the cranial remains of her lover (4.5), Ghismonda, princess of Salerno (4.1), and the confoundingly naïve Alibech, tricked by a hermit into ‘worshipping’ God through sex (3.10). Ruggiero’s investigation of the Ghismonda tale is particularly effective. The character is one of the Decameron’s heroines and a touchstone for Boccaccian commentary on marriage. Her story begins with the stifling love of a louche and overly possessive father who denies her access to marriage (and thus to the only legitimate contemporary outlet for sex) to ensure her presence by his side. In response, Ghismonda claims a lover, and in short order and true decameronian fashion, her father has the man killed and his heart served to Ghismonda in a golden cup. Determined not to live without her lost love, Ghismonda kills herself. Interestingly, Boccaccio and his brigata treat this character as a sympathetic heroine rather than an exemplar of female immorality, a decision Ruggiero interprets as an indicator of the Decameron’s larger function as a literary crucible of a society in flux. Ruggiero contends that Ghismonda’s tale encapsulates the active reshuffling of social values that occurred in premodern Florence as the state reacted to plague and the ongoing transition from an aristocratic rule legitimated by Christian morality to that of the popolo and the cultural regime of virtù. Social metamorphosis remains an important topic in Chapter 5, where Ruggiero analyses the abuse that the virtù-ous peasant Griselda suffers following her marriage to the Marquis of Saluzzo, a virtù-less man much obsessed with his honour and pleasures. Ruggiero’s most provocative interpretations of the Decameron appear in these later chapters; readers may or may not buy, for example, his claim that the Marquis (who does, eventually, reform) can be read as a cipher for contemporary trinitarian dogma that read plague and Florentine social disorder more generally as signs of the end times or the passing of one age of the world into the next. The same goes for Ruggiero’s concomitant Foucauldian suggestion that Alibech’s sexscapades in turn symbolise the arrival of the age to come, one characterised by ‘a new dispensation of loving direct spiritual pleasure’ (p. 205). Still, as Ruggiero himself points out, these extravagant claims are fun to think about.
All told, Love and Sex in the Time of Plague makes for a diverting and intellectually stimulating read, one that opens a window onto the intricate cultural world of the premodern past for readers, shining a light into the affective breach that separates the emotional landscape of that time from our own. Ruggiero’s imaginative retelling of Decameron novelle makes Boccaccio’s masterwork newly accessible to modern audiences and Ruggiero’s monograph a great pedagogical addition to the Renaissance history classroom as well as a welcome addition to the field.