The Decameron and Il Libro del Cortegiano: Story of a Conversation

he Cortegiano rejects one major aspect of the Renaissance reinterpretation of Boccaccio’s Decameron. It cannot consider the text as a model for literary Italian in the way that Bembo urged his readers do so in the Prose della volgar lingua. For Castiglione this attempt to make the Decameron a timeless, linguistic archetype was misguided and inappropriate to the needs of contemporary court society. However, Bembo’s almost complete separation of the language question from issues of content serves to make available the Decameron for purposes other than linguistic standardisation.1 It was a model of narrative which dealt with themes that had practical implications for the mental universe of Castiglione’s Renaissance courtiers in his dialogue. Boccaccio’s narrative frame was of particular interest to the writer as it gave him a vernacular model to convey conversation amongst an elite group of men and women. This paper will explore how Castiglione read the Decameron and with what results as far as the Cortegiano is concerned. Although the relationship between the two texts has been the subject of some investigation, the main focus has been on the ways in which the Cortegiano criticizes Bembo’s Decameron as a linguistic model. In this regard, one of Castiglione’s innovations is to reread Boccaccio’s collection directly and critically so that at the same time he is criticizing Bembo’s fundamental choices about both language and literature. Therefore, we have to distinguish between Bembo’s Decameron, characterised by an attempt to demolish the lingua cortigiana, to prescribe a single, written model in its place and Castiglione’s Decameron that critiques Bembo’s prescriptions but shows interest in other aspects: the incorporation of Boccaccian framing devices into the fabric of the text, emended as necessary, and the critical analysis of individual or groups of novelle, especially the beffe or burle.