In Boccaccio We Trust?

In De casibus virorum illustrium (On the Fates of Illustrious Men [ca. 1355-73]), Giovanni Boccaccio presents himself as a trustworthy counselor to those in power and a committed humanist. Focusing on two key chapters in the Book 1 of De casibus (1.10 and 1.11), chapters in which the narrator recounts Theseus' life and criticizes him for excessive credulity, this article demonstrates how the author of De casibus plants indications that we should hesitate to believe any narrator - including one named Boccaccio - too easily. Even when faced with a narrator vested with utmost scholarly and moral authority, readers must not be passive consumers of information. Evidence in De casibus 1.10 and 1.11 suggests that readers must subject the narrator's statements to greater scrutiny, question the narrator's misogyny, and marshal their knowledge of alternate stories about characters such as Theseus. The article thus exhorts readers to see the Boccaccio who writes in Latin as more like the Boccaccio of the earlier vernacular works than scholars have thus far tended to believe.