Filippo Andrei.
Boccaccio the Philosopher: An Epistemology of the Decameron.
Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. XI + 259 pp. $99.
In Italian literary tradition, there are many authors whose contribution to philosophical thought has not been fully appreciated. Giovanni Boccaccio is certainly one of these. Although writing across an impressive variety of different genres and topics, including history, mythology, and moral psychology, Boccaccio’s legacy as an author seems to be especially tied to his purely literary works. For most scholars, as well as for a more general public, Boccaccio is, first and foremost, the witty and colorful author of the Decameron.
While the Decameron’s role in the development of Italian literature cannot be underestimated, this view runs the risk of overshadowing a large and significant part of his production. By rejecting the idea that Boccaccio was purely and simply a narrator (indeed, an exceptionally gifted one), Filippo Andrei’s book provides a refreshing insight into Boccaccio’s interests in philosophy. Boccaccio the Philosopher does a good service to scholars not only because it offers a clear and convincing account of what is not immediately graspable in Boccaccio’s works, but also because its analysis focuses primarily on Boccaccio’s literary masterpiece par excellence: the Decameron.
Boccaccio, Andrei argues, was not a philosopher in the same sense Plato or Aristotle were; i.e., he did not build a comprehensive system encompassing all branches of philosophical inquiry. This does not mean, however, that he did not contribute at all to the investigation of topics that have some relevance for philosophy.
Andrei convincingly shows that the Decameron presents an “undercurrent philosophical discourse” (p. 3), a discourse that runs through all the tales of the collection and outlines a coherent theoretical parabola. The main components of this discourse are epistemology (namely, the analysis of the processes and dynamics of knowledge) and practical wisdom. Along with the many stories it presents, Andrei claims, the Decameron carries out an investigation into human knowledge and theory of action.
Composed of five chapters, Andrei’s book may be divided into three main sections. The first one, corresponding to chapter 1, explores Boccaccio’s training in ancient and medieval thought as well as his philosophical terminology presented in the Decameron. The second section, unfolded in chapters 2 through 4, examines Boccaccio’s theory of knowledge emerging from three main issues within the Decameron: these are the epistemic nature of the fabula, the notion of the journey as a process of knowledge acquisition, and Boccaccio’s recourse to the enigmatic device of the motto as a means to illustrate the functioning of the human mind. Boccaccio’s rhetorical use of mottos serves as transition towards the last section of the book, presented in chapter 5 and devoted to practical philosophy and theory of action. In this chapter, Andrei presents an analysis of “the moral discourse of the Decameron” (p. 184), a discourse making its way from the very prologue of the work which, by identifying its raison d’être in the “clear recollection of the kindnesses received” (“la memoria de’ benefici già ricevuti”), provides the composition of the whole Decameron with a clear moral basis – i.e. the return of a beneficium, following a tradition that can be traced back most notably to Seneca.
Seneca is, unsurprisingly, one of the philosophical sources Boccaccio was certainly familiar with. One of the aspects making Andrei’s book most convincing is that it grounds all its arguments on historical and material evidence. In chapter 1, for instance, Andrei provides a detailed account of Boccaccio’s “philosophical library.” From the perspective of a modern reader, it is interesting to observe how conspicuous the philosophical readings were of a person who never styled himself as a philosopher. In fact, Andrei’s list features a wide variety of thinkers, from Greco-Roman antiquity to the Islamic world, to the Latin Middle Ages: Plato, Aristotle, al-Ghazālī, Seneca, Horace, Cicero, Macrobius, Augustine of Hippo, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Hermes Trismegistus, William of Auxerre, Thomas Aquinas, to mention only a few (p. 7). While still young, Boccaccio transcribed entire sections from some of these authors’ writings in his famous Zibaldoni, now preserved in the Biblioteca Laurenziana and Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence.
The Zibaldoni thus testify for Boccaccio’s early interests in philosophy, and they offer a very concrete example inviting us to reconsider some of the trajectories undertaken by Boccaccio’s intellectual activity. Among the many philosophical items copied by Boccaccio in his Zibaldoni, Andrei might have mentioned a few more as significant for the shaping of Boccaccio’s philosophical views. One of these is the famous Carmen on fortune, which Boccaccio transcribes in ms. BLaur., Plut. 33.31, f. 33v. The Carmen is a well-known Latin composition that describes fortune by appealing to all the topoi traditionally associated with this notion (fortune’s inconsistency and unpredictability, its being fickle and capable of overturning people’s destiny). All these motives will be drawn upon by Boccaccio in the many passages of his works dealing with fortune—a concept which, by combining epistemological and practical aspects (one needs to know how natural causality actually works in order to foresee and address unexpected events), presents important philosophical implications.
Boccaccio the Philosopher is a beneficial contribution to the scholarship on this essential author. It provides a sensitive and unprecedented reading of Boccaccio’s philosophical preoccupations and sources. In doing so, Andrei reminds us that many different layers coexist in Boccaccio’s writings and that it is not possible to separate, as Charles Osgood famously put it, “Boccaccio the poet” from “Boccaccio the scholar.”
Tommaso De Robertis, University of Pennsylvania