Giovanni Boccaccio and the Origins of the Novella: The Decameron in Medieval and Renaissance Context

 

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) occupies a pivotal position in European literary history. Alongside Dante and Petrarch, he belongs to the so-called tre corone fiorentine — the “three crowns” of Florence — who shaped Italian literature and helped carry it from the medieval world into the beginnings of the Renaissance. Best known as the author of the Decameron (c. 1350), Boccaccio transformed inherited narrative traditions, reorganised them into innovative structures, and in doing so, created a new model for prose fiction in Europe.

Life and Background

Born the son of a Florentine merchant, Boccaccio spent much of his youth in Naples, where he trained in commerce and banking — his father’s intended career path for him. Yet his real passion lay in literature. Essentially self-taught, he absorbed the learning of his time, when poetry, philosophy, and education were intertwined rather than distinct disciplines. He became a friend of Petrarch, a devoted admirer of Dante (even delivering public lectures on the Divina Commedia), and an early humanist with a particular interest in Greek texts. His formative years in a cosmopolitan, mercantile environment — steeped in the early capitalist trade and banking networks of the Italian city-states — shaped both the content and tone of his storytelling.

The Decameron and Its Framework

The Decameron comprises 100 novellas framed by a larger narrative. The setting is Florence during the Black Death of 1348. With society collapsing under the weight of disease, ten young people (seven women, three men) flee to a villa in the countryside. Over two weeks, they spend their days in leisure — singing, dancing, and, above all, telling stories: ten per day for ten days.

The frame narrative serves both an organising and a thematic function. Medieval audiences were familiar with frame tales from works such as the Novellino and from oriental sources like One Thousand and One Nights. In the Decameron, the frame imposes coherence on a collection of disparate, heterogeneous stories — tales set in different times, places, and social strata — and turns them into a purposeful whole. This narrative order, however, emerges in a moment when the theological and analogical worldview of the Middle Ages was beginning to erode.

From Exemplum to Novella

In the medieval period, short prose narratives were often exempla — moralised stories used to illustrate religious or ethical principles. They reflected the “analogical thinking” that dominated medieval cosmology: the world was seen as an ordered reflection of divine perfection, and literature mirrored this order by presenting typical, repeatable moral patterns. Thomas Aquinas described the cosmos as an imprint of God’s seal, a hierarchy of likeness that descended from the divine to the earthly.

By the late 13th century, this system began to crack. The 1277 condemnation by Bishop Étienne Tempier in Paris, which emphasised God’s absolute omnipotence, inadvertently undermined the belief that the created world could be the only possible world. If God could have created differently, then the existing order was not the inevitable reflection of divine perfection. In literature, this meant that stories no longer had to serve as universal moral examples; they could be singular, unprecedented “new things” — novelle in the literal sense.

Boccaccio’s narratives embody this shift. They often use familiar plots from older sources, such as the Novellino, but retell them with greater complexity, irony, and psychological realism. The famous Ring Tale, for example, recycles a medieval anecdote about religious tolerance: a father leaves three identical rings to his sons, so no one can tell which is genuine. Boccaccio enriches the story with a layered structure, character dynamics, and a self-aware reflection on storytelling itself.

Fortuna, Agency, and Authorial Intent

A central tension in the Decameron lies in its treatment of Fortuna — the medieval image of blind fate, often depicted as the turning wheel of fortune. Traditionally, human beings were helpless before Fortuna’s whims. Boccaccio, however, claims in his Proemio that he wishes to “correct” Fortune, especially by offering comfort to women constrained by domestic life. By narrating diverse fates — happy and tragic, ancient and modern — he not only entertains but also asserts a human capacity to interpret, reshape, and perhaps resist the randomness of life.

This claim was bold, even subversive. In the medieval worldview, the cosmic order was divinely given; to suggest that a writer could intervene in it, even symbolically, was to challenge the theological status quo.

Narrative Levels and Reflexivity

The Decameron operates on multiple narrative levels:

1. The frame narrator in the Proemio (first-degree narration).

2. The Brigata, the group of ten storytellers (second-degree narration).

3. Occasional narrators within the novellas themselves (third-degree narration).

This nested structure allows Boccaccio to stage the act of storytelling itself as an object of reflection. The Decameron does not merely use a frame; it invites readers to think about why and how stories are told.

Reception, Morality, and Reader Responsibility

Boccaccio was aware that some might find his work indecorous. In his defence, he insists that meaning lies not solely in the text but in the reader’s interpretation. Even the Holy Scriptures, he notes, can be misread by corrupt minds. This decentralises the authority of the author and undermines the medieval ideal of a single, objective, divinely sanctioned truth. In modern terms, Boccaccio moves towards a perspectival view of reality: there are no absolute truths, only interpretations.

The Griselda Tale

The final novella, the story of Griselda, encapsulates the Decameron’s openness to interpretation. A marquis marries a poor but virtuous woman, then subjects her to cruel tests to prove her obedience. She endures all without complaint. While Petrarch later moralised the tale as an allegory of the soul’s submission to God, Boccaccio’s own narrator condemns the marquis’s “beastly stupidity” and leaves the moral meaning ambiguous, challenging the reader to decide.

Conclusion

In the Decameron, Boccaccio stands at the hinge between two worldviews: the medieval order of analogical exempla and the emerging Renaissance attention to individual experience, psychological realism, and human agency. His novellas inherit the structures of earlier collections but infuse them with new complexity, reflexivity, and secular scope. In doing so, Boccaccio not only redefined the short prose narrative but also mirrored — and contributed to — the intellectual shift from a divinely fixed cosmos to a world in which human beings, and their stories, could shape their own meaning.