Renaissance Novelle

Introduction

It is difficult to come to an exact definition of the Renaissance novella (plural novelle) because of the rapid development of prose fiction in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. The novella is defined as a short prose narrative, usually realistic and often satiric in tone. Novella is an Italian word deriving from the feminine form of the word for “new.” The quality of newness in the novella is, perhaps, best associated with the subject matter of the stories—novelle are based on current local events—with a viewpoint that ranges from amorous to humorous and satirical to political or moral. The characters in a novella are placed in a realistic setting, complete with the rhythms of everyday life and conversation. In counterpoint to medieval romances that present an idealized world peopled with noble characters in grand adventures, novelle narrate common incidents in the lives of ordinary townspeople. These incidents become uncommon as they are flavored with exaggeration and caricature, sometimes stretching the limits of the imagination.

Scholars generally agree that the genre of the novella originated in thirteenth century Italy as a brief, well-structured prose narrative. The genre includes stories of action, experience, brief anecdotes, and accounts of clever sayings with plots of amorous intrigue, clerical corruption, and clever tricks. Novelle were often gathered together in collections, using a frame tale to unify the stories with a common theme. While the teller of a novella may claim a moral intention for the story, the underlying purpose of the Renaissance novella is to entertain. The moral intent claimed by some authors or narrators of Renaissance novelle is most often connected to the frame that encloses the collection of novelle.

Origins of the Novella

Short narratives originated with the beginning of humankind—the impulse to tell a story must be one of the earliest of human impulses. The ancient civilizations of the Middle East and Egypt recorded short narratives, heroic and didactic, in both prose and poetry as early as the second millennium b.c.e. Greek, Roman, Hebrew, and Indian cultures all contributed to the growing body of ancient fictional prose narratives. These usually didactic stories were told to idealize certain behaviors, to teach moral attitudes, and to illustrate the rewards for good choices and the punishments for bad ones.

In the European Middle Ages, short tales came from a variety of sources to fill a growing hunger for enlightenment and entertainment. The sagas of Scandinavia and Iceland recorded the rough founding of a new society in a barren landscape. Celtic tales reveled in the imaginative romance and magic. Moral exempla, in the form of saints’ lives and tales of martyrs, were told to model behavior for uneducated or newly converted Christians. Among the common folk, a new kind of tale arose—one grounded in the incidents of everyday lives, preferring humor and common sense and sensuality to idealism. The fabliau, a short metrical tale, satirized marriage, women, and the clergy. Vivid detail and realistic observation enhanced the plot, usually centered on an adulterous triangle, comic and often bawdy.

The Renaissance novella drew inspiration from all of these sources but was most specifically grounded in two: tales from the Orient and Christian exempla. The Oriental tales had been collected and collated in frame tale collections by Arabic storytellers and diffused in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew translations well known throughout Europe by the twelfth century. Such widely known Oriental texts as the Panchatantra and Alf layla wa-layla (fifteenth century; The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, 1706-1708) offered models for Renaissance authors.

The Panchatantra, a collection of tales that originated in India as early as the second century b.c.e., were translated from Sanskrit into Arabic in the eighth century. The outer frame for the tales probably was crafted in the Middle East and then translated back into Sanskrit (the original Sanskrit versions are lost) and into European languages. It is a simple frame: Three sons of a king refuse to be educated until a wise man comes along and proposes to teach them by telling stories. The princes agree and in a short time learn all the wise man has to offer about statecraft, friendship, war and peace, loss and gain, and impetuous actions. Nearly all of the stories in the Panchatantra emphasize intelligence and clear thinking as the most valuable qualities for survival and leadership. Despite the fact that many of the tales are beast fables, the underlying virtues are human ones—especially the emphasis on friendship, a secular value that idealizes bonds among members of society.

Likewise, in The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, the frame emphasizes the humanizing quality of the storytelling. Scheherazade offers herself as victim-wife to King Shahryar, who has determined to kill each wife after the bridal night in vengeance for his first queen’s betrayal. However, through her storytelling, Scheherazade not only piques the curiosity of the king but also teaches him the virtues of forgiveness and friendship. As Scheherazade is reborn every day in the postponement of her death, so the theme of renewal—the possibility of beginning over and over again—runs through the narrative. The frame, as is typical of Arabic practice, is a loose one—the thousand and one signifies an unlimited number in Arabic—not a finite closure. So as long as the storytelling continues, life goes on.

The Christian exemplum (plural exempla), a didactic tale, presents an example of behavior, which if positive is praised or if evil is criticized. Medieval preachers incorporated these short tales into their sermons to illustrate moral points. Collections of these stories, such as Jacques de Vitry’s Exempla (c. 1200), were gathered and disseminated to assist preachers in composing their sermons. Secular writers, including Geoffrey Chaucer in his “The Pardoner’s Tale,” often used exempla as inspiration for more elaborate tales in verse or prose. The source of these exempla was not strictly of Judeo-Christian origin, however. A famous collection, Johanes de Capua’s Directorium humanae vitae (twelfth century), was developed from the Indic fables of Bidpai via an eighth century Arabic translation and a subsequent Hebrew translation.

Exempla and Oriental frame tales merged in the earliest European collection of framed tales, the twelfth century Disciplina clericalis by Petrus Alfonsi. Alfonsi, born Moses Sefardi, a Jew from Aragon, had been a rabbi, an Islamic scholar, and a physician before he converted to Christianity in 1106. In 1110, he traveled to England to serve as royal physician to King Henry I. After his conversion, he composed the Disciplina clericalis, first in Arabic, and then translated it into Latin. As narrator, Alfonsi claims that he has gathered his material partly from Arab proverbs, fables, and poems and partly from bird and animal tales. His exempla appear within the frame of a dialogue between a dying Arab father and his son; the father desires to impart his wisdom on friendship, conniving women, and death—practical lessons of living in a social world. The influence of the Disciplina clericalis reached through all social classes, and its importance can be gauged by the number of extant Latin manuscripts (more than sixty) and the reappearance of its stories in the Gesta Romanorum, the lais of Marie de France, John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (1386-1390), Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400), Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron: O, Prencipe Galetto (1349-1351; The Decameron, 1620), and the works of such Spaniards as Juan Ruiz and Don Juan Manuel.

Critics generally agree that the transformation of exempla into novelle occurred in Tuscany in the thirteenth century as the exempla were elaborated and fused with existing tales, saints’ lives, verse fabliaux and lais, and regional and classical legends. Composed between 1281 and 1300, the anonymous Il novellino (Il Novellino: The Hundred Old Tales, 1928) is considered to be the first real Italian work of fiction. This collection of novelle exists in two versions: Le cento novelle antiche contains 100 novelle, and Il libro di novelle et di bel parlare gientile, probably a later version, contains 150 novelle. Many of the novelle are extremely short, little more than anecdotes or clever sayings. Stories of action and experience engage such historic and legendary characters as Hercules, Hector, Alexander, Aristotle, David, Solomon, Jesus Christ and his disciples, Seneca, Charlemagne, Arthur, Richard the Lion-Hearted, and Emperor Frederick II—figures from the far and near past—all dressed in contemporary costumes and practicing contemporary customs. Beyond the famous, the novelle are peopled with citizens from all classes: knights and ladies, peasants and townsfolk, clerics and minstrels, professors and students, angels and rascals. While there is a didactic bent in the tales, they also celebrate wit and intellect and are told with a hearty dose of everyday humor and some salaciousness. Il Novellino has no discrete frame to enclose its novelle, but the author’s style of clever and direct storytelling with few embellishments gives the work a unifying element. This collection of novelle with its Oriental, biblical, classical, medieval, and historical sources undoubtedly was the most important piece of inspiration for Boccaccio’s Decameron.

Boccaccio and the Italian Novelle

Born in 1313, Giovanni Boccaccio was brought up in a merchant’s family in Certaldo, near Florence. As a young man, he studied commerce and canon law in Naples, where he began his literary career and fell in love with the woman he would call Fiammetta. He returned to Florence in 1341, held various positions in Ravenna and Forli, and was settled again in Florence by 1348, when the Black Death devastated the city.

Although deeply inspired by the work of Dante and influenced by his elder contemporary and friend, Petrarch, Boccaccio’s literary output throughout his life was highly versatile and original. He composed the first Italian hunting poem (La caccia di Diana, c. 1334), the first Italian prose romance (Il filocolo, c. 1336; Labor of Love, 1566), the first Tuscan epic (Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia, 1340-1341; The Book of Theseus, 1974), the first Italian prose romance with pastoral elements (Il ninfale d’Ameto, 1341-1342), the first Italian psychological romance (Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, 1343-1344; Amorous Fiammetta, 1587, better known as The Elegy of Lady Fiammetta), the first Italian idyll (Il ninfale fiesolano, 1344-1346; The Nymph of Fiesole, 1597), allegories, lyric poetry, and The Decameron.

TheDecameron is a bit of an anomaly among Boccaccio’s other works, which tend, on one hand, to be romantic and adventurous tales told for the aristocratic class and, on the other hand, to be sober, learned works for the scholars. The Decameron is at once a collection of diverting novelle for a wide, newly literate bourgeois audience and a glimpse into the increasingly realistic and observational art of the Renaissance. The setting for the frame of The Decameron is contemporary Florence, a city in the midst of the Black Plague. The framing tale is a remarkable piece of writing that heralds much of the Renaissance spirit to come. It is, undoubtedly, a grim introduction to the lighthearted tales to follow, but the circumstances of the Florentine plague allow for the extraordinary gathering of the young tale-tellers in a suburban villa.

Boccaccio’s description of plague-stricken Florence is one of the earliest European eyewitness accounts of a disaster that neither exaggerates nor allegorizes the events. His descriptions of the physical symptoms of the disease are scientific: “The said deadly buboes began to spread indiscriminately over every part of the body; and after this, the symptoms changed to black or livid spots appearing on the arms and thighs, and on every part of the body, some large ones and sometimes many little ones scattered all around. . . . a very certain indication of impending death.” Likewise, his analysis of the effect of the plague on the citizenry of Florence has an almost sociological ring. He observes that because of the high death rate, such customs as female modesty before doctors and elaborate funeral rites, which had been commonplace, were abandoned out of necessity. Women stricken with the disease were grateful for the attention of any manservant, and dead family members were interred in mass burials. He notes that citizens resorted to a variety of means to ensure their survival—some fled the city, others practiced asceticism in the hope of warding off the deadly fumes, while still others abandoned themselves to the carpe diem pleasures of drinking and carousing away their last days. Anarchy reigned, for “like other men, the ministers and executors of the laws were either dead or sick or so short of help that it was impossible for them to fulfill their duties; as a result, everybody was free to do as he pleased.” In this framing, Boccaccio depends neither upon authority nor on any other account than his own eyewitness evidence of the material facts; here is a factual rendering of contemporary events that sets the tone for the subsequent outpouring of the one hundred novelle of The Decameron.

Boccaccio gathers his seven young women together in a church; each has been, the narrator hastens to report, a faithful attendant to family members now deceased. They decide that the wisest course for them to follow is to leave Florence and seek refuge in the countryside. Feeling the need for male protection, they invite three young men to accompany them. The ten young people, all well-born, intelligent, charming, and ranging in age from seventeen to twenty-seven, pack up their belongings and servants and retreat to first one and then another suburban villa for two weeks. To provide some order for their days and amusements, a schedule of wandering in the gardens, picnicking, singing, dancing, and late afternoon storytelling is instituted. On each of ten days, each of the companions tells a story, following a theme set by the one chosen as king or queen for the day. Although the companions have their own individual traits and quirks, they are not highly individuated. Conversations and commentary go on between the stories, but Boccaccio, unlike Geoffrey Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales, does not connect the character of his narrators with the tales they are telling. He is less interested in the dynamics among the characters than in the stories themselves.

Critics agree that the novelle in The Decameron are skillfully constructed, filled with clearly visualized settings, well-developed characterizations, good dialogue, and well-directed narratives that arouse suspense and curiosity. The stories are peopled with the entire range of contemporary Italian humanity, motivated by a desire for pleasure, self-interest, and an understanding of both the forces of nature and society. Although the frame lays out a different theme for each day’s storytelling, the tales actually fall into five broad categories: stories of trickery, stories of adventure, stories of verbal wit, stories of tragedy, and stories of generosity. The changes in mood are swift and frequent, and despite the pervasive atmosphere of humor, there are moments of intense seriousness and even pathos. The humor ranges from gentle amusement to bawdy guffaws; there is no room for prudery in the world of The Decameron.

In the epilogue, Boccaccio claims that the audience of The Decameron might learn from his stories:

If anyone should study them usefulness and profit they may bring him, he will not be disappointed. Nor will they ever be thought of or described as anything but useful and seemly, if they are read at the proper time by the people for whom they are written.

However, his intent was hardly didactic. In the proemio (prologue), he declares that the book was written to distract those—especially ladies—in torment, whether from disappointed love or other circumstances. He apologizes for the unpleasantness of the introductory description of the plague but maintains it a necessary prelude to the gathering of his storytellers. Indeed, it is their desire for diversion that occasions the tales. Boccaccio’s novelle reveal a secular world coming to an appraisal of its humanity, not through divine revelation, but with an understanding of the importance of wit, intelligence, and, most of all, compassion.

The influence of The Decameron was far-reaching. It was the model for story collections not only in Italy but also in Spain, Germany, and France. During the fifteenth century, translations of the entire work appeared in Catalan, French, Castilian, and German. Translations and adaptations of individual stories spread even more quickly and widely. Among the most well known of the novelle are “The Three Rings,” “Isabella and the Pot of Basil,” “Federigo and the Falcon,” “A Garden in January,” and “The Patient Griselda.” A few of the English writers who used stories from The Decameron include Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John Keats, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Ernest Hatch Wilkins describes The Decameron as “the central point of an hourglass through which, converging from many sources, the sands of narrative pass, to be dispersed into the vast field of later fiction.”

The Decameron directly inspired Italian writers for three hundred years. Among such derivative works are the Trecentonovelle by Franco Sacchetti, an untitled collection by Giovanni Sercambi, Il pecorone (“the numbskull,” c. 1378-1385; The Pecorone of Ser Giovanni, 1901) by Ser Giovanni, Il novellino (1475; The Novellino, 1895) by Masuccio Salernitano, Novelle (1554-1573; The Novels of Matteo Bandello, 1895) by Matteo Bandello, Le piacevoli notti (1550-1553; The Facetious Nights of Straparola, 1901) by Gianfrancesco Straparola, and Gli ecatommiti (The Hundred Stories, 1565) by Cinthio Giambattista Giraldi. Bandello’s Novelle, 214 stories published in four volumes, is particularly interesting for the number of tales borrowed from it by both Italian and Elizabethan dramatists. Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (pr. c. 1598-1599, pb. 1600), Romeo and Juliet (pr. c. 1595-1596, pb. 1597), and Twelfth Night: Or, What You Will (pr. c. 1600-1602, pb. 1623), Philip Massinger’s The Picture (pr. 1629, pb. 1630), John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (pr. 1614, pb. 1623), and William Rowley and John Fletcher’s The Maid in the Mill (pr. 1623, pb. 1647) all borrowed plots or themes from translations of Bandello’s collection.

Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales

Although Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales has many resemblances to The Decameron, most critics are unwilling to admit that Chaucer was familiar with Boccaccio’s book. The connections between Chaucer’s book and Boccaccio’s are stylistic and thematic, not directly verbal. Although “The Clerk’s Tale,” the story of patient Griselda, is derived from The Decameron, Chaucer used Petrarch’s retelling of the tale as his model. Both Chaucer and Boccaccio present a variety of tales from the perspectives of different narrators; both use frame tales to set up a situation in which tales will be told to divert and entertain the company; and both authors have an enigmatic attitude toward the nature of language and reality. Chaucer’s frame, however, is more intricately and dramatically developed than Boccaccio’s.

Bound for a pilgrimage to the Canterbury shrine of Thomas à Becket, a group of about thirty citizens, including a knight, a variety of religious figures, guildspeople, country folk, and Geoffrey, Chaucer’s affable and naïve avatar, gather at the Tabard Inn across the Thames from London. Encouraged by Harry Bailly, the host of the inn, the pilgrims agree to a storytelling contest on their journey. In the prologue Geoffrey introduces each of the pilgrims in a vivid and character-revealing sketch, and interspersed between the twenty-four tales are lively dramatic scenes involving the host and one or more of the pilgrims. The character of each of the pilgrims and the dynamics that evolve from their relationships with one another have a direct effect on the impact of each tale. Although each story can stand on its own as a narrative, the overall impression of the whole of The Canterbury Tales is theatrical.

Unlike The Decameron, Chaucer’s work did not result in the development of a strong tradition of short fiction in England. Arguably, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales may not be considered novelle at all since all but two of the tales are written in verse rather than prose. Certainly the tales resemble novelle as psychologically subtle and tightly structured short stories gathered together in a collection, but Chaucer’s inclusion of such genres as the lai, the courtly romance, the saint’s life, the allegorical tale, and the sermon anchor The Canterbury Tales in the Middle Ages rather than the Renaissance. The dramatic and realistic interplay of the pilgrims, on the other hand, hints at the outpouring of dramatic activity that was to come in sixteenth century Renaissance England.

French Nouvelles and Marguerite of Navarre

Throughout the Middle Ages, French writers from Chrétien de Troyes and Marie de France to the Chevalier de La Tour Landry and Christine de Pizan to countless anonymous authors of romances, exempla, and fabliaux exhibited skill and mastery in short fictional forms, both in verse and prose. At the end of the fourteenth century, the first vernacular collection of exempla, the Les Contes moralisés, compiled by Nicole Bozon, appeared in France. Nevertheless, it was the circulation of Italian novelle that provided a model for the development of French nouvelles in the fifteenth century.

The appearance of Les Cent Nouvelles nouvelles (1456-1461; One Hundred Merrie and Delightsome Stories, 1899), whose anonymous author declares that he consciously penned his work in imitation of The Decameron, occasions the first French collection of stories with no didactic overtones. However, it is the form of Boccaccio’s collection, not the stories, that are imitated. The frame for the tales is lightly developed; the storytellers are named, but there is little interaction or characterization. Some of the tales have analogues in Italian collections, but most are retold with original twists, and all have French settings. Oral sources probably supplied much of the material, as the author claims they are of fresche memoir.

The novella in France reached its peak in the sixteenth century in response to the growing bourgeois audience’s demand for an art based not on aristocratic fancies but on everyday life. The basic narrative technique depended upon a brief exposition, a humorous denouement dependent on a twist ending or trick, and a swift conclusion. The clear connection between the audience and the narrator and the dependence on oral sources is revealed in the use of repetitive devices, stereotyped reactions to events, and the use of verbal irony and understatement. A rather static and cynical view of human nature with a tendency to divide people into stereotypical categories leads to an emphasis on action over character or thought.

Nevertheless, the settings of the nouvelle are highly realistic: The audience demanded vérité—truthfulness—and the authors responded by asserting that their stories really happened and by providing such specificity of everyday life that the nouvelle remains one of the most reliable sources about how people actually lived in fifteenth and sixteenth century France. There is practically no use of the marvelous, miraculous, supernatural, or exotic—the authors are self-consciously and patriotically French. Dialogue reflects accurate patterns of speech with dialectical and regional variations.

The world of the nouvelle is highly materialistic yet informed by a psychological awareness of human machinations, especially regarding the powers of manipulation. Adultery, corruption of clergy, and the bon tour—the good trick—are the major themes. The stories of adultery usually focus on unfaithful wives, reflecting the pervasive misogyny of the times, but the tales also reflect a growing dissatisfaction with social mores that decreed arranged marriages, often between young girls and much older husbands. Likewise, the stories of corrupt clergy are implicit criticisms of a system in which younger sons were often forced into a religious life with no vocation. The stories of good tricks often have as protagonist a wise fool—an individual who survives and succeeds because of his own ingenuity.

The stories in Philippe de Vigneulles’s Les Cent Nouvelles nouvelles, unpublished during his lifetime, are told by a group of gentlemen spending time in a garrison during a truce. Although the stories reflect a high degree of familiarity with Italian originals, they are reset in a French town and reflect the local color. Le Grand Parangon des nouvelles nouvelles (1535-1557), by Nicolas de Troyes, a harnessmaker, presents a realistic depiction of French peasantry and dialogue with good character delineations and clear prose. His nouvelle contains a genuine concern for the poor and desire for social justice. In the Baliverneries (1548), Noël Du Fail entangles the frame and narrative. The three protagonists are more interested in discussing their own experiences and commenting on others’ experiences than actually telling stories, which are little more than anecdotes or examples; the storytelling is beginning to be replaced by conversation. The reputation of Bonaventure Des Périers, a serious Renaissance humanist in the service of Marguerite de Navarre, was preserved by the posthumous publication of Les Nouvelles Récréations et joyeux devis (1558; The Mirrour of Mirth and Pleasant Conceits, 1583). His literate and witty stories depend on less rigid forms than those of his predecessors; some even start in medias res. He is more interested in human eccentricities than plot devices, and his lighthearted tone is enhanced by Rabelaisian verbal wit.

The most important and influential sixteenth century French collection of nouvelles is L’Heptaméron (1559; The Heptameron, 1597) by Marguerite de Navarre. Marguerite de Valois, sister to King François I of France, duchess of Alençon (married in 1509 to Charles, duc d’Alençon), and queen of Navarre (married in 1526 to King Henri II of Navarre), was at the center of the brilliant French court, introducing refinements which would lead to the literary salon society of the seventeenth century. As patron of such literati as François Rabelais and Bonaventure Des Périers and protector of religious reformers, she participated in the major intellectual movements of her time. Marguerite commissioned the first French translation of The Decameron by Antoine Le Maçon in 1545. The French court and Marguerite herself had long considered a French version of Boccaccio’s masterpiece. After her brother died, Marguerite spent more time at her husband’s estates and began to put together the work that would become The Heptameron, a collection of seventy-two stories told by ten aristocratic dévisants, or storytellers. Like Boccaccio’s collection, Marguerite’s is occasioned by a natural disaster, in this case a flood. While they await the building of a bridge replacement, her travelers decide to tell stories to pass the time—but restrictions are put on the tales: Each must be a tale of something the narrator either witnessed or heard from a reliable source, and the stories must be told without literary rhetorical devices. Marguerite’s storytellers are all based on members of her circle, including herself and her husband, and the discussions that ensue reflect a variety of philosophical and moral positions. Unlike most of her contemporaries, Marguerite took the institution of marriage seriously, and she understood the complexity of the human condition. The theme of love is intertwined with social and religious concerns, not simply an occasion for bawdy laughter. Indeed, love, marriage, and the relationship between the sexes are more often problematic than pleasurable in The Heptameron. Marguerite’s influence was central in fostering French humanism, and The Heptameron served as a stylistic, if not thematic, model for such seventeenth century collectors of tales as Charles Perrault and Jean de La Fontaine.

Cervantes and the Spanish Novelle

The earliest influence on the development of the prose tale in Spain was, undoubtedly, Arabic. The eight hundred years of Moorish presence in Spain fostered the diffusion of Arabic learning and culture. When the Spaniards recaptured Toledo, it became a center for translation from Oriental sources. In the thirteenth century, Kalilah wa dimnah, the translation of an Arabic beast fable, and Sendebar, an adaptation of the Oriental Seven Sages tales, were the first examples of storytelling in Spanish. Translations of other collections of Eastern stories found their bridge into Europe through Spain. Don Juan Manuel’s Libro de los enxiemplos del conde Lucanor et de Patronio (1328-1335; Count Lucanor: Or, The Fifty Pleasant Stories of Patronio), a collection of exempla, draws on Arabic sources but exhibits an originality that marks it as an important harbinger of Spanish fiction.

Miguel de Cervantes’s claim that he wrote the first collection of novellas in Castilian is probably justified. His Novelas ejemplares (1613; Exemplary Novels, 1846), composed after El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615, The History of the Valorous and Wittie Knight-Errant, Don Quixote of the Mancha, 1612-1620; better known as Don Quixote de la Mancha), contains twelve tales that vary in style and tone but mainly fall into the two categories of romance-based stories and realistic stories. The focus of the tales is neither didactic nor simply entertaining; Cervantes here, as in Don Quixote, is interested in the nature of man’s existence in the world. Cervantes dispensed with the frame tale as did most of the Spanish novella writers of the 1620’s and 1630’s.

One notable exception is María de Zayas y Sotomayor, who wrote two collections of novellas set in the same frame: Novelas amorosas y exemplares (1637) and Desengaños amorosos (1647). In both collections, Lisis, a young noblewoman, is suffering from mal de amor (the malady of love), and her female friends gather around to tell tales about love, desire, and male treachery. All the tales are told by women for women, and the tone is cautionary; in a patriarchal, macho society women are often at the mercy of male treachery. Popular in her own day, Zayas’s frankness and openness about sexuality relegated her to the ranks of scandalous writers in the views of later literary critics. In the last half of the twentieth century, however, her works were discovered and garnered a canonical status in the literature of the Spanish Golden Age.

Influence of the Renaissance Novella

The emergence of the novel in the seventeenth century, the resurgent popularity of drama and poetry, and a preference for journalistic sketches and travel literature led to a decline of short fiction for about two hundred years. Nevertheless, Renaissance drama, especially in England, was highly indebted to novella collections for plots. It was the realism introduced by the Renaissance novella, along with the keen psychological insights about human behavior, that fostered the techniques that led to the development of the novel. The audience of female readers courted by novella writers was the same audience that writers of novels would tap to ensure the success of their endeavors. As the short story emerged in Europe and America at the turn of the nineteenth century, such pioneers of the realistic story as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schlegel acknowledged the debt to Boccaccio. The novella, with its fusion of Eastern and Western elements, is a cornerstone in the development of modern literature.

Bibliography

Bergin, Thomas G. Boccaccio. New York: Viking Press, 1981. An approachable and comprehensive study of Boccaccio’s life and works.

Caporello-Szykman, Corradina. The Boccaccian Novella: The Creation and Waning of a Genre. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. Caporella-Szykman argues that the true novella genre existed only between the publication of Boccaccio’s Decameron in 1349-1951 and Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares in 1613.

Cholakian, Patricia, and Rouben Cholakian. The Early French Novella: An Anthology of Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century French Tales. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1972. A collection of French Renaissance nouvelles with an introduction discussing the history, themes, characters, and realism of the genre.

Clements, Robert J., and Joseph Gibaldi. Anatomy of the Novella: The European Tale Collection from Boccaccio and Chaucer to Cervantes. New York: New York University Press, 1977. Examines European Renaissance story-collections, including analysis of various frame devices used by authors of the period.

Forni, Pier Massimo. Adventures in Speech: Rhetoric and Narration in Boccaccio’s “Decameron.” Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. A study of rhetorical tools used by Boccaccio in his development of vernacular realism.

Gittes, Katherine S. Framing the “Canterbury Tales”: Chaucer and the Medieval Frame Narrative Tradition. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991. Discusses the Eastern and Western traditions of the frame narrative from the eighth to the fourteenth century that illuminate the methodology of The Canterbury Tales.

Greer, Margaret Rich. Desiring Readers: Maria de Zayas Tells Baroque Tales of Love and the Cruelty of Men. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. A comprehensive study of Zayas’s prose that explores the relationship between narration and desire—the desire for readers and the sexual desire that drives the telling of the novellas.

Menocal, Maria Rosa. The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987. A discussion of the influence of Arabic culture and literature on medieval and Renaissance literature.

Thompson, Nigel S. Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the Debate of Love: A Comparative Study of the “Decameron” and the “Canterbury Tales.” Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1996. Thompson uses connections between the two works to argue that Chaucer was familiar with The Decameron.

Wilkins, Ernest Hatch. A History of Italian Literature. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974. A chronological history of Italian literature from the thirteenth century to the twentieth with chapters on Boccaccio and his contemporaries.