Introduction

Many studies of the Decameron quite rightly assume its status as a major literary text—an assumption which would have surprised Boccaccio's contemporaries but not the author himself. The very ease with which the text lent itself to performance blinded readers to its literariness. What follows is an attempt to situate the Decameron in relation to oral performance and textual production. Evidence is drawn from the book itself, which purports to record a ten-day-long oral performance, as well as from what we know of oral performance and manuscript production in medieval Italy. In Boccaccio's world silent reading was gradually assuming greater importance even while traditions of oral performance remained vigorous at all levels of society. After an overview of the inter-relations of reading and performance and Boccaccio's relation to them, I turn to the key role which Dioneo plays both in the Decameron's unfolding performance and also in the articulation of the Decameron as a literary text.

Texts and performance 1220–1350

The vitality of public speech and its conventions in the communes of northern and central Italy astounded outsiders. Salimbene relates Frederick II's sarcastic observations on long-winded Roman ambassadors. Local elites of Latin literates derided the speech of the illiterate. The jurist Odofredo (active 1228–65) mocked the gesticulating eloquence and the written laws of the “plebei” [common people], whom he likened to jack asses. Boncompagno da Signa (c.1235) observed that “plebeian erudition” (plebeia doctrina) should be left to uneducated Italians (laicis Italiae) who learn not through writing but through custom (consuetudo) alone. “Consuetudo” denotes the practices of public verbal performance familiar to all citizens. It corresponds to what Brunetto Latini (c.1260–65) termed “les us as ytaliens” [the customs of the Italians].

Beginning in the early thirteenth century, literati mediated the wealth of Latin written traditions to an unschooled public. “Simplicitas est amica laicis rudibus et modice litteratis” [Simplicity is a friend to rude lay people and the moderately lettered], said the author of the Oculus Pastoralis. Albertano of Brescia (1243) declared that notaries and the writing class are the salt of the earth without whom laici “can do nothing.”