The English Boccaccio: A History in Books by Guyda Armstrong (review)

Herbert Wright traced the influence of the Italian humanist Boccaccio on canonical English writers in his 1957 work Boccaccio in England from Chaucer to Tennyson. Guyda Armstrong’s new book is as sweeping as Wright’s, but her approach could not be more different. She reads 500 years of Boccaccio’s reception through the material forms of his English translations. Drawing heavily on translation theory and influenced by French thinker Pierre Bourdieu, Armstrong refuses to distinguish between new and previously published translations or to make value judgments regarding the authority of massive Tudor versions of Boccaccio or early twentieth-century book-club editions of The Decameron. Her aim is to “view each book consciously as an object in time and space,” creating, in the end, a “sociology of the book.” To this end, Armstrong provides detailed physical descriptions of the “book objects,” their immediate cultural context, and the conditions of their production. She pays special attention to the framing devices of the translations’ many and varied paratexts. As she explains, “translations are not neutral entities, but are instead expressive of their contexts and the ideologies of the agents involved in their production.”

The result is a far-reaching and detailed book that is loosely chronological, moving from manuscript to print, from Latin to the vernacular, over six chapters. Armstrong examines more than ninety books, every translation of Boccaccio that appeared in English between 1430 and 1931. She stops at the year 1930 because of the quantity of translations published from that date onward and the worry that she is too close to later twentieth-century translations to see the “broader picture of their creation.” Boccaccio’s major works – the De casibus virorum illustrium, the De mulieribus Claris, and the Decameron – get their own chapters, while smaller works such as Amorous Fiammetta are parts of chapters that discuss the circulation and, in some cases, recovery of those texts from the sixteenth century on. The Decameron, perhaps not surprisingly, receives the most attention, and the strategies used by translators and publishers to deal with its more salacious passages form a miniature history of sexual censorship.

What emerges from this ambitious work, aside from admiration for Armstrong’s scholarship and translation skills, is a new vision of Boccaccio’s relation to English literature, perhaps especially early modern literature. The evolutionary model implicit in Wright’s pioneering study is replaced with something more complex and contingent: Armstrong demonstrates that translations of Boccaccio, in a surprising number of forms, appeared at specific junctures in English under varying circumstances for a myriad of reasons. There was no march forward in quality or even authority; rather, there were instances, sometimes isolated and ephemeral, of literary contact between two cultures through specific translations, publication events, and the objects they produced. Armstrong demonstrates the “complexity, multiplicity, and downright disorderliness of these textual productions in their entirety.” She concludes the book with the wish that someone will take up the study from 1930 onward. Her readers might also wish that other scholars take up her approach to translation studies.