Introduction:

Medieval vs Renaissance: In the last unit you studied Dante's medieval outlook that considered life in this world important solely because it determines where we spend eternity.  The easiest way to hell is to become attached to the things of this world.  Your best chance for salvation lies within the strict discipline of the monastery where you are forced to follow a regime that the church promises will lead you to the pearly gates.  The Renaissance did not preach atheism.  It respected religion.  Consider all the Renaissance visual art that continued to glorify the Virgin Mary & other Christian themes.  It did however object to the totalitarian nature of the medieval church, which claimed that salvation was the sole & exclusive value in life.  Nothing else mattered.  The Renaissance declared an interest in enjoying this life: in art, music, food, fashion, literature, commerce, exploration, anthropology, & a thousand other things.  The central institution of the Renaissance was the secular university, with dozens of departments & schools, rather than the monastery.
     Your 5th grade teacher, like mine, probably told you: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all.  Apparently this is not good advice for winning debates or political elections.  In any case, Renaissance writers felt that they needed to first destroy an allegiance to the medieval outlook, by ridiculing it, before they could sell a positive notion for a new social order.  Cervantes does this by describing how absolutely insane it would be for anyone to actually go about in the real world as though he was slaying dragons for the Virgin Mary.  In laughing at Don Quixote, we are also laughing at the medieval Cult of the Virgin & Courtly Love.  Boccaccio uses humor as well, but it ends up in moral outrage.  Whether actual members of the clergy or only impostures, con men use religion to have their way with gullible victims (seducing women, defrauding men).  In either direction the moral or lesson is to be less gullible, less credulous, & moral analytic -- to think things through for yourself instead of trusting the first guy you see wearing a cowl.  The man wearing the monk or priest's uniform is first a man & not a medieval type or ideal.  In the other direction, Boccaccio's victims tend to deserve what they get because they are so gullible & self deluding.

Themes: Boccaccio illustrates two themes in the stories we will study.  You just considered the first, which is to assert the authority of reason against the demand for blind faith & deference to the authority of the church.  If you are told tales that sound too fantastic to be true, they probably are not true.  Grow up.  Get real.  Consider motives besides those claimed (e.g., that we are doing this for your best interests, although you are too stupid to understand), to explain why someone wants your money & obedience.
     The second theme asserts that people have fundamental human rights.  The church had claimed the exact opposite.  You are a creature who belongs to God.  Creatures, livestock, do not have rights.  You are made in the image & likeness of God & God should be your first thought.  He isn't.  We are "depraved" by the effects of original sin so that we cannot help but put our own desires first.  This is why we deserve to roast in hell, according to Augustine & Calvin.  In Christian theology you have no right to pursue your desire (concupiscence) & if you do so you will end up in hell.  Rather than argue against this line of thinking, Boccaccio invites your sympathy for Cinderella (p. 1804).  The story tells how a king (the church) selects a peasant bride (anyman), who has nothing herself (i.e., no rights).  The story is something like that of Job, but the point illustrates torture rather than faith.  After giving birth to a daughter, the mother is stripped naked & returned to her original condition.  Years later she is enticed to play Medea, whom you recall murdered her estranged husband's new bride.  Our Cinderella, however, is a perfect saint, which heightens our sense of outrage.  How dare the king spend 15 years or more torturing this woman!  The point is that she has a dignity that cannot be discarded & trampled on by calling her (& everyone else) a sinner. People are worthy of respect as people.  They should not be condemned from the moment of birth to the class of sinners who deserve to be in hell.
     We see a similar theme evident in the story on p. 1798 in which the woman claims to have a right of sexual gratification!  In the context of the church this sounds like mutiny, like saying sexual pleasure has a dimension that has nothing to do with morality & that every adult has a right to this pleasure without being labeled a sinner who deserves to go to hell.

Realism: Like medieval religion, medieval  literature was otherworldly.  Dante's work sought to illustrate the world that is more real than the world we presently live in.  Medieval romance (that we didn't read), such as Tristran & Isolt, imagines an escape or retreat from this world into the suspension offered by romantic love.  Lovers seem to temporarily escape time & duty to float serenely in bliss that offers a taste of heaven.  Renaissance Europe found its way to India & the new world. In a hundred years time Spain doubled all the gold in Europe, stealing it from Mexico & Peru.  This world seemed to be something more than a way station or waiting room to be endured before arriving at "real life" in the next world.  Boccaccio invented an especially powerful technique to further realism, beginning with the horrific history of the black death of 1348 & then transitioning into tales about people who had nothing to do with the plague.  Cervantes is more blunt, suggesting that like don Quixote, anyone who really believes in slaying dragons for the Virgin Mary, is simply insane.  What does this suggest about other medieval religious beliefs?
 

Click on the next section: Background above.