Unit 13

English 201:    Masterpieces of Western Literature

Background:

Bawdiness: In the general introduction to the medieval period, our text says:
1170     The importance of the oral folk tradition lies less in directly surviving texts than in
            the pervasive influence it exerted upon written literature--as sources, for example,
            of the stories in the Decameron & the Canterbury Tales.

What does this mean?  & who can blame you for sometimes thinking professors can't or won't simply say what they mean.  Our editor is trying to explain why Boccaccio & Chaucer's work is so bawdy.  His explanation is that their work sought to realistically illustrate the lives of common people.  Common people are not saints.  They gossip about sex & tell dirty jokes.  Our editor explains that this level of oral "literature" was not historically recorded, but that Boccaccio & Chaucer, in effect, told such jokes & used such gossip to create their characters.

Realism: In the introduction to Boccaccio, our text says:
1775     with its almost exclusive emphasis on human ingenuity & resourcefulness, [Boccaccio
            offers] something genuinely new.  Heaven & divine grace play almost no role in The Decameron.

Women: The horns of a dilemma are these.  If women are plaster cast copies of the Virgin Mary, they are worthy of much more than respect.  They are worthy of adoration.  But, as Courtly Love argued, what one adores, one cannot touch.  Women were revered as an ideal but ignored or marginalized in the day-to-day men's world.  On the other hand, if women are rendered as human beings, no better & no worse than men, what magic & charm & beauty is left in a world rushing toward "the bottom line" of explicit cash deals?  Our introduction simply says, Boccaccio portrayed:
1775     women not as etherealized ideals but as realistic creatures of flesh & blood who are driven as
            much by desire as men are.

Although the young people who tell the stories may be elegant & refined; like Chaucer's characters, the men & women in Boccaccio's stories are mostly competitive, shrewd, & on the lookout to victimize each other.  We laugh at these characters, but would you like to live among them?  Or if we do, aren't we nostalgic for a better world, for better people?
 

Click on the next section: Explication above.