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Abstract
My project attempts to define Boccaccio's literary and philosophical debts to Apuleius of Madauros, one of the most influential Latin classics of the silver age as well as one of Boccaccio's dearest authors since his early education. In his Boccaccio medievale Vittore Branca, the foremost Boccaccio scholar of the past century, points out that just two tales in the whole Decameron, V, 10 (Pietro di Vinciolo) and VII, 2 (Peronella), can claim antecedents in ancient literature, and this is the case of two tales told in Apuleius' Metamorphoses. For almost fifty years Branca's view has been an admired standby, but for various reasons it needs revision and the history of Apuleius' radical influence on Boccaccio is yet to be written.
At the center of my research lies a set of problems in the Decameron , on which I have published two articles (in Filologia e critica and Studi sul Boccaccio). There I demonstrated that the fable of Eros and Psyche is the most important source of the Griselda tale (Dec. X, 10), a tale that enjoyed wide circulation from Petrarch's translation into Latin and Chaucer's adaptation in his Clerk's Tale as well as throughout medieval and Renaissance Europe. But the case of Apuleianism in Dec. X 10 is unique and striking, though it is not isolated within Boccaccio's oeuvre . The use of Apuleian language in various works (from early Latin letters to later novels and treatises) represented an important point of departure. Through careful study I have become convinced that Boccaccio's classicism, and especially his reliance on Apuleius, needed to be rethought; moreover, this rethinking must reach out into different disciplines, including paleography and philosophy. Boccaccio was an avid student of Apuleius not only as a source of myths, but also as a source for Neoplatonic philosophy. For Boccaccio, in fact, as for many medieval intellectuals who did not have any Greek (John of Salisbury, for example), Apuleius' De deo Socratis and De dogmate Platonis were the only available introduction to Plato's philosophy.
At this point in my research, I need to continue working on some primary sources in Florence and Assisi (MSS Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana , Plut. 68.2.; Plut. 29.2; Plut. 54.32, and MS. Assisi, Biblioteca Comunale di Assisi, Lat. 706). My book will also provide a complete transcription of all the marginalia of these mss in order to show how Boccaccio worked on his Latin sources, how, in practice, Boccaccio read and interpreted his texts. Highlighted portions of Latin text that drew Boccaccio's attention will serve as signposts. These signposts reveal how Boccaccio transformed the ancient myth and philosophy that he found in his ancient sources into the vernacular work for which he is so well known; and they also allow better understanding of his Latin work, which served as the (sometimes understudied) complement to the vernacular. By using palaeographic, philological, and hermeneutical instruments and methods, this research project aims to provide the first comprehensive study on Boccaccio as reader, glossator, and imitator of Apuleius, as well as a new thought-provoking contribution on his still underestimated humanism.
