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13 2 Giovanni Boccaccio, The Genealogy of the Pagan Gods (begun circa 1350) Europe’s first fairy tales emerged in the shadow of Italy’s stylistic arbiter, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375). Although collections of prose tales such as the thirteenth-century Novellino existed before the Decameron, Boccaccio founded the Italian novella tradition with his collection of one hundred tales enclosed within a narrative frame tale. During the sixteenth century, Boccaccio ’s tales assumed a new importance when Pietro Bembo argued that all authors who wished to write in Italian should imitate Petrarch when writing poetry and Boccaccio when writing prose. Boccaccio’s collection became the model par excellence for all subsequent novellieri (tale writers). In the earliest fairy-tale compositions, both Giovan Francesco Straparola and Giambattista Basile adhered structurally to the Decameron’s frame tale convention. Straparola idealized his narrators as Boccaccio had done and frequently wove phrases and sentences from the Decameron covertly in his Pleasant Nights (1551, 1553). Basile, on the other hand, consciously inverted the Decameron both in his style and in his characterizations of the streetwise crones he created as anti-ideal narrators. As a consequence, Europe’s emerging fairy-tale tradition was embedded in a classic literary tradition of which their authors were evidently conscious, but that has seldom been treated in the history of European fairy tales. In terms of the oral nature of tales included in a collection of tales, Boccaccio established a pattern that would be long lasting in the history of western European literature when he claimed that his stories were not part of a written literary tradition but were stories that he had captured from oral tellings. In his conclusion to the Decameron, Boccaccio wrote: There will likewise be those among you who will say that some of the stories included here would far better have been omitted. That is as may be: but I could only transcribe the stories as they were actually told, which means that if the ladies who told them had told them better, I should have written them better. 14 / Fairy Tales Framed But even if one could assume that I was the inventor as well as the scribe of these stories (which was not the case), I still insist that I would not feel ashamed if some fell short of perfection, for there is no craftsman other than God whose work is whole and faultless in every respect.1 Of course, despite this declaration, no one asserts that Boccaccio’s tales are simply transcriptions of oral tales. While today Boccaccio is remembered for the Decameron, he was, along with his friend the poet Petrarch, an early humanist and one of the first in Italy to study ancient Greek. His keen interest in the classical world is readily apparent in The Genealogy of the Pagan Gods (Genealogia deorum gentilium), an encyclopedia of mythology in which he unites what were then disparate tales of ancient deities and heroes in order to form a cohesive narrative and family trees that reveal the complex network of relationships binding these figures to each other. The genealogy occupies the first thirteen books of the text; the last two books (XIV and XV) serve as a humanist defense of the study of the classics, poetry, and more broadly all fiction. Inasmuch as he was an accomplished poet as well as a celebrated author of prose fiction,2 Boccaccio is defending his own texts, although he modestly refrains from openly praising his own writing in Book XIV, Chapter 10. In Book XIV, Boccaccio works out a four-part typology for fictions, depending on their degree of truth: 1) outwardly untrue, but true in their core, such as fables; 2) outwardly untrue, but symbolically true, such as divinely driven metamorphoses ; 3) actually untrue but possibly true, such as invented tales that could have happened, even if they didn’t (verisimilitude); and 4) completely untrue stories of ogres, fairies, and witches, such as the favole narrated by old crones around the hearth. In Book XIV, Chapter 9 of the The Genealogy he dismissed this form of fiction as something that had nothing to do with poets; but in Chapter 10 he argued that the classical poets hid a truth (verità) in favole, that is, tales that incorporate the marvelous, and that such literature was valuable for its allegorical value. Even though favole are in Boccaccio’s words the inventions of crazy old women (inventione delle pazze vecchierelle), their fictions about fairies, ogres, and witches...

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