Boccaccio's Fabliaux: Medieval Short Stories and the Function of Reversal

3. Medieval Story Collections and Framing Devices

3 Medieval Story Collections and Framing Devices Le cose che sono senza modo non possono lungamente durare. [Nothing will last for very long unless it possesses a definite form] Decameron, Introduzione:95 The first and second chapters showed that the fabliaux are distinct from other medieval short stories because of their use of reversals on rhetorical, thematic, and structural levels, while also interconnected with other genres, often as combinations or parodies of them. The reversals in the fabliaux allow these texts simultaneously to converge with and diverge from other types of narratives . In this way, the fabliaux may resemble and adapt to other short stories, whether fables, dits, or even edifying tales and exempla, while still retaining their essential character.1 In this chapter I seek to elaborate the ways in which the transmission of the fabliaux in manuscripts is linked to the practices of story collecting and framing in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. More specifically, this chapter situates the fabliaux as central to Boccaccio’s transformation of received short story collections from both the Eastern and Western traditions. Certainly specific novelle trace their origins to the fabliaux, yet Boccaccio’s treatment of the fabliaux tradition extends beyond the level of the individual story to the very structure of the Decameron.2 As Boccaccio’s models for the novelle in the Decameron and for the work’s overall structure derive from different literary traditions, Boccaccio often brings the divergent material together using the same mechanisms of combination and inversion deployed in the fabliaux. In addition to the genre’s influence on the Decam­ eron, the manuscripts preserving fabliaux reveal similarities to the Decameron that will be explored below. Medieval Story Collections and Framing Devices 85 Pinpointing the particular contributions of the manuscript collections of fabliaux to the overall structure of the Decameron depends in part on understanding the relationship of these anthologies to contemporaneous collections of short stories, as well as to intermediate collections: those produced in the time between the composition of the fabliaux beginning in the late twelfth century and the appearance of the Decameron in the mid-fourteenth century. The question arises: Why give so much credit to anthologies of fabliaux for influencing and even shaping the Decameron when there are other collections of stories that seem to have more in common with Boccaccio’s work? After all, these are collections that Boccaccio may have known more intimately, and that, in some instances, demonstrate similar principles of generic variegation to the “fabliaux codices.” As more carefully arranged compilations of works, especially short works, were common practice in this period and did not always involve fabliaux, why give primacy to those codices with fabliaux? Scholars have already analyzed the significant influence of the exemplum on the Decameron, and Vittore Branca with Chiara Degani proposed exempla anthologies as models for Boccaccio.3 How do collections of exempla differ from collections of fabliaux? Proceeding in chronological order, this chapter will examine the types of story collections that were most likely available to Boccaccio before exploring the structure and framing of the Decameron. This order of examination will highlight Boccaccio’s innovations in relation to previous collections, while also underscoring similarities to anthologies in which fabliaux abound. The first distinction concerning story collections available to Boccaccio as models for the Decameron involves geographic origin: the difference between collections from the East and those from the West. The Eastern collections are more properly speaking Middle Eastern, primarily of Arabic and Persian provenance, but other collections such as the Panchatantra can be traced back to India.4 Of course, Boccaccio could only have known these collections through Latin or vernacular translations, and not in their “original” Eastern forms. Similarly, some Eastern works had been transmitted to Europe and Latinized (or Christianized) centuries before the writing of the Decameron, including the tradition of Aesop’s fables and the story of Barlaam et Josaphat. For these collections, their Eastern connections are more remote than those collections translated during the same period in which the fabliaux flourished. In the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, the influx of works of Eastern origin coincided with the trend of encyclopedism and the increased dissemination of Western short stories in collections; the two types of corpora overlapped and arguably influenced each other. This overlap obscures Boccaccio’s Fabliaux 86 the direction of influence and renders some distinctions between Eastern and Western works a bit unclear. In spite...