The Renaissance 'Decameron'

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) is widely acknowledged as a major figure in world literature, and his 'Decameron' continues to have an international impact on culture today, influencing works such as Fay Weldon's 2007 novel 'The Spa Decameron' and Woody Allen's 2012 film 'To Rome with Love'. The 'Decameron' is best known today for its sexual licence and Boccaccio is most frequently viewed as a risque storyteller, contrasted with his more serious intellectual literary cousins, Petrarch and Dante. The roots of the 'Decameron''s success as both a structurally innovative literary work and entertaining narrative stretch back to the Renaissance. Yet it is astonishing that the editions which were printed in vast quantities during the sixteenth-century remain largely unexplored. This is the period in which the 'Decameron' came to prominence: the influence it exercised over the development of a national literary language, combined with its international impact on the structure and style of storytelling, without doubt rivals the European dimensions of 'Petrarchism', but a similar term has never been coined for Boccaccio. My study will transform the way we think about Boccaccio by re-situating him as a primary cultural figure in the Renaissance, of equal stature to Dante and Petrarch.

Historians of the Italian language acknowledge the general outlines of the role played by the 'Decameron' as a model for vernacular prose writing in Italian, but my project will be the first comprehensive study of this relationship which is rooted in print culture. My methodology is innovative because it involves analysing bibliographic data relating to sixteenth-century editions. I will be able to focus on the precise material and paratextual mechanisms by which the 'Decameron' functioned as a linguistic exemplar. For example, I will consider the format of the edition, the mise-en-page of the text and its decorative features, as well written material added by printers and editors such as letters and biographies of the author. I will analyse the extent to which explicitly linguistic paratexts, such as lists of vocabulary and epithets, relate to dictionaries and grammars from the same period, as well as consider the ways in which more generic paratexts commonly found in Renaissance editions, such as editorial prefaces and dedications, also contributed to developments in literary debates.

This new methodology will allow me to challenge the image of Boccaccio presented by a small but powerful cultural elite, whose writings form the basis of our current understanding of the period, to build a more complex picture of the wide range of reading publics who had access to Boccaccio across the century. I will show how diverse trends in editorial style and printing practice witnessed by 'Decameron' editions correspond to the demands of complementary reading publics, not all of whom were reading Boccaccio in order to improve their personal writing style. These largely unexplored 'non-linguistic' reading publics anticipate, I will argue, the work's continued popularity into the twenty-first century, among non-academic audiences as well as academic ones.

I have already captured much of the primary bibliographic data. During the Fellowship I will analyse this and write up the results in a monograph, as well as make short trips to libraries in the UK and Italy in order to confirm the data and research findings. I will broaden my understanding of the context for this study and develop my academic leadership skills by establishing an international network of scholars working on the early modern book. My data will be made publicly available through a website, which I aim to develop as a key international digital resource for the study of the history of the book and Boccaccio. I will also develop a network among non-academic businesses (e.g. bookshops) and the creative community through a public lecture series, which will enable future collaborative possibilities.

This project aims to deepen understanding of the 'Decameron' during a key stage of its reception history and at the same time to develop knowledge of key issues and methodologies relating to early modern book culture. There will be a range of different non-academic beneficiaries who will gain cultural enrichment and commercial benefit from these outputs.

1) Professional library staff such as curators and conservators working within major research collections will have the opportunity to use the bibliographic dataset created by my research. This has the potential to change the way in which they think about a specific area of their collections by giving it greater prominence and offering access to a broad spectrum of statistical data which contextualizes individual books. This data could be used to change the way in which the library's holdings are presented to its public and academic user groups, in printed or digital cataloguing material, which in turn has the potential to influence visitor figures and the ways in which library users access the holdings.

2) Producers of digital media who are interested in exploring new book forms and reading experiences for commercial or cultural applications will also be able to use my dataset. Presenting the data in an open-form digital resource will facilitate the development of commercially viable products such as smartphone apps, as well as pedagogical tools, or creative ways of thinking about narrative which are culturally enriching.

3) Auction houses, such as Christie's and Sotheby's, and businesses and members of the public who collect rare books, will be approached to gauge their interest in an online interactive tutorial which identifies and explains the construction of the early modern printed book, in order to increase knowledge of early printed books. This has the potential to influence purchasing and sales decisions.

4) The project will also facilitate two-way knowledge exchange between galleries and shops who exhibit and sell fine printing and letterpress editions, artists' books, and graphic novels, and members of the public and collectors who buy from them, as well as book artists and book makers, to explore broadly different forms and uses for book-objects, with the aim of developing further projects which will be culturally enriching, and in some cases, also commercially viable.