§ 63. DANTE, PETRARCA, BOCCACCIO. 577
there is a wide gulf between the inspiring passion of Dante for Beatrice and Boccaccio's sensual love.^ Boccaccio was an unmarried layman and freely indulged in irregular love. His three children of unknown mothers died before him.
In_his old age he jassed, like Petrarca, through a^certaiji conversion, and, with a preacher's fervor, warned others against the vanity, luxury and seductive arts of women. He would fain have blotted out the immoralities of his writings when it was too late. Tlie conversion was brought about b}^ a Carthusian monk who called upon him at Certaldo. Upon the basis of another monk's vision, he threatened Boccaccio with speedy death, if he did not abandon his godless writing. Terrified with the prospect, he determinedto renounce the pen and give himself up to penance. Petrarca, on hearing of his state of mind, wrote to him to accept what was good in the monk's advice, but not to abandon studies which he pronounced the nutriment of a healthy mind.
In zeal for the ancient classics, Boccaccio vied with his contemporary. Many of them he copied with his own hand, and bequeathed them to his father-confessor in trust for the Augustinian convent of the Holy Spirit in Florence. He learned the elements of Greek and employed a Greek of Calabria, Leontius Pilatus, to make a literal translation of the Iliad and Odyssey for learners. An insight into his interest in books is given to us in his account of a visit to Monte Casino. On asking to see the library, a monk took him to a dusty room without a door to it, and with grass growing in its windows. Many of the manuscripts were mutilated. The monks, as his guide told him, were in the habit of tearing out leaves to be used by the children as psalters or to be sold to women for amulets for their arms.
In 1373, the .gigiiQi-ia-alJJlQrfiuce app.oin.ted him..to the .lectureshi^on the Biviiia^omm&Ma^^}^^^ a salary of IQO guldejis gold._ He had gotten only as far as the 17th canto of the Inferno when he was overtaken by death. jloccaccio^sLatin works are mostly compilations from an-
1 The best edition of his La Vita di Dante, with a critical text and introduction of 174 pages, is by Francesco Marci-Leone, Florence, 1888. 2p
578 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
cient mythology — De genealogia deorum — and biography, and also treat the subject of geograpliy — De montium, silvarum, lacuum et marium nominibus. In^his i)e darismulieribus, he gave the biographiesjaJLlM distinguished woipen, including Eve, the fictitious popess, Johanna, and Queen Johanna of Naples, who was still living. JHis mos^ popular work isthe Becamerone, the Ten Days' Book — which in later years he would have destroyed or purged of its immoral and frivolous elements. It is his poetry in j)rose and may be called a Commedia Humana^ as contrasted with Dante's Commedia Divina. It contains 100 stories, told by ten young persons, seven ladies and three men of Florence, during the pestilence of 1348. After listening to a description of the horrors of the plague, the reader is transferred to a beautiful garden, several miles from the city, where the members of the company, amid laughter and tears, relate the stories which range from moral tales to indecent love intrigues. One of the well-known stories is of the Jew, Abraham, who, refusing to comply with the appeals to turn Christian, went to Rome to study the question for himself. Finding the jjriestly morals most corrupt, cardinals with concubines and revelling in riches and luxury, he concluded Christianity must have a divine origin, or it would not have survived when the centre of Christendom was so rotten, and he offered himself for baptism. T^he Decamerone reveals a low state of morals among priests and monks as well as laymen and women. It derides marriage, the confessional, the hypocrisy of monkery and the worship of relics. The employment of wit and raillery against ecclesiastical institutions was a new element in literature, and Boccaccio wrote in a language the people understood. No wonder that the Council of Trent condemned the work for its immoralities, and still more for its anticlerical and antimonastic ridicule ; but it could not prevent its circulation. A curious expurgated edition, authorized by the pope, appeared in Florence in 1573, which retained the indecencies, the impure personages, but substituted laymen for the priests and monks, thus saving the honor of tlie Church.^
1 In an attempt to break tlie force of the charge that in its beginnir|gs the Renaissance was wliolly an individualistic movement, independent of the