Role of Women in Decameron

Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio wrote The Decameron in the century before Geoffrey Chaucer undertook a similar project in Britain, with both The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales involving a number of stories told by members of the group, with the group in each case gathered with a common purpose, and with the stories connected by links which describe the actions of the company (Root 1). Chaucer also took some of the stories for his travelers from versions told by Boccaccio. The two writers come from similar literary traditions, and they also tended to treat women in much the same way. For Boccaccio, social traditions and his own individual view of social conventions interact to cause him to tell his stories in the manner he chooses.

One of the dominant views of the time was of courtly love. The essence of courtly love is detailed in the twelfth-century work by Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love. He addresses the issue of what persons are fit for love, and he describes the type or person to be loved and some of the reasons why they would be worthy of love. He finds that everyone of sound mind and of a certain age -- both not too young and not too old -- is capable of love. One of the elements he notes at this time is particularly interesting: "An excess of passion is a bar to love, because there are men who are slaves to such passionate desire that they cannot be held in the bonds of love -- men who, after they have thought long about some woman or even enjoyed her, when they see another woman straightway desire her embraces, and they forget about the services they have received from their first love and they feel no gratitude for them" (Capellanus 33). The courtly lover is constant, then, and by "passionate" Capellanus appears to refer to changeable lust rather than the depth of love we might consider passionate. Such a view brings together literary traditions of romance and Christian conceptions of what is proper behavior. In Boccaccio, what is proper and what is not are constantly at war, with women the focus of both.

On the one hand, the courtly love tradition places women at the center of male attention and makes them objects of reverence as well as sublimated lust. On the other, as Anna Roberts notes, violence against women is also a feature in much of The Decameron as in other medieval texts. The author refers to what is called Boccaccio's adaptation of the vida of Guillem of Cabestaing in which the woman takes full responsibility for her unfaithfulness, where the possibility of violence against this woman is altered by her own words and her own actions: "Publicly assuming her own choices and decisions, she denies having been the object of her lover's violence and, as a consequence, wants to be considered as the only one to be blamed and to deserve punishment" (Roberts 82).

Many of the stories in Boccaccio are versions of French fabliau, described by E. Jane Burns in terms of imagery, The imagery that Burns finds in the French fabliau she discusses is an imagery that shows the distinction made between men and women:

To "know" women in this standard fabliau paradigm is to define female nature as irrational, pleasure-seeking, and wholly corporeal in opposition to the rationally endowed, thinking male. The fabliau inherits this gendered dichotomy that pits knowledge against pleasure from the Genesis narrative in which the fleshly Eve seduces the first man away from his more rational bond with God (Burns 28).