Fabulous Vernacular: Boccaccio's Filocolo and the Art of Medieval Fiction. (Reviews).

Victoria Kirkham, Fabulous Vernacular: Boccaccio's Filocolo and the Art of Medieval Fiction

Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2001. x + 318 pp. $47.50. ISBN: 0-472-11164-7.

The Filocolo is a work in prose, written by Boccaccio in Naples, between 1336 and 1338, to comply with the wish of Princess Maria (more familiarly known as Fiammetta), the daughter of King Robert of Anjou, who wanted a "worthier" book with which to rescue the Medieval Legend of Florio and Biancifiore from the "fanciful parlance of the ignorant". Victoria Kirkham's volume, Fabulous Vernacular, winner of MIA Aldo & Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for Italian Studies, is the first length-book on Filocolo published outside the Italian borders.

The work is very original, because the author starts from preliminary remarks that the relationship between Boccaccio's literary production and his legal culture (linked to Ecclesiastical Canon Law) had never before been taken into systematic consideration. In fact, for a long time, critics and biographers have assumed that the Certaldo's writer hated legal and canonical studies, on the grounds of one possibly autobiographical memory narrated by Boccaccio in his Genealogies of the Gentile Gods. In it he recalls how his father Boccaccino had forced him to follow, for six years, a forensic career uncongenial to him, who, from the tender youth of seven, had felt growing in himself a strong call for poetry.

In her analysis of Filocolo, Kirkham presents three deserving approaches. First: the scholar always keeps focusing on Boccaccio's Opera Omnia, with continuous references to Decameron, Ameto, Amorosa Visione, Diana's Hunt, Teseida, and Genealogies of the Gentile Gods. Second: she drives a continuous parallelism between Boccaccio and the Latin classic authors, Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Statius, and Ennius, classic authors of Boccaccio's time such as Dante and Petrarch, and also minor authors like Giacomo Da Lentini, Filippo Villani, Brunerto Latini, and Cino Da Pistoia. Third: Kirkham often appeals to art, citing artists like Raphael, Sandro Botticelli, Carlo Crivelli, Filippo Lippi, and Giovanni Toscani.

All this cultural depth of the book is a witness to the amazing encyclopedic knowledge of Kirkham, who clearly has long meditated, studied, and carefully researched this work. The book is divided into the following six chapters: the first one, titled "A New Flame" is referring to woman, the author's necessary poetic figure. This Maria/Fiammetta is not a real person, but rather an emblem of the writer's evolution in a poetical and political sense. The "New Flame" rises, in contrast with the "old flame" of the great Virgilian epic (Dido): Fiammetta becomes the ideal companion for Giovanni of Certaldo, the new writer, the modern Virgil.

The second chapter ("Signed Pieces") deals with the subject of author's signature. From Homer onward epic was an unsigned genre, and such tradition was respected by Virgil, who signed only the Georgics, but not the Eclogues, nor the Aeneid. Apart from his passion for "onomastic games," Boccaccio conforms to a more refined and sophisticated protocol, for which Medieval Art Poetics required that the authors wait patiently their own turn, and seize the right moment and come forward with their identification. At a certain point of Filocolo's plot, when Florio takes the name of Filocolo (from Greek "philos" and "colon" = love's labor) for the journey, they reach a forest in Tuscany, not far from Pisa, called "cerreto" (oakgrove), from which the homologous place Certaldo, and therefore the identity of Giovanni of Certaldo alias Boccaccio.

The third chapter ("The Reluctant Canonist") concentrates on Boccaccio's Canon Law preparation, which is seen as the motive strength of his poetic. Even without disclosing his identity, Boccaccio is, however, present as an ecclesiastical law student from the very first chapter of the Filocolo. In his hands, the simple story of two separated and then reunited lovers widens into a Pentecostal epic, with the Roman Church playing the central casting role. In telling how the Spanish Prince Florio arrived to conversion, to baptism, and to Santiago de Campostela during the reign of Justinian, Boccaccio retells the story of all Western Europe at the moment it comes to the church.

The fourth chapter ("Reckoning with Boccaccio's Questioni d'Amore") examines the symmetrical center of Filocolo corresponding to the disposition of the thirteen Questioni d'Amore. Since Filocolo is a new version of a story modified and enlarged in order to accommodate the dimension of Christian ethics, the thirteen Questioni represent the logical interpolation which acts as an echo in the love story.

The fifth chapter ("The Poisoned Peacock") pivots on the image of a peacock as a symbol pregnant with meanings. Taking off from the poisoned peacock offered to King Felice, for which Biancifiore was unjustly accused, Boccaccio gathers in Filocolo all the references about the sacred bird found in mythography, natural sciences, Scripture's exegesis, and moralized bestiaries. For the Christian tradition, the peacock is linked to the state of our soul after death, to the resurrection of Christ, and to eternal life.

In the last chapter ("A Pentecostal Epic") Kirkham shows how Boccaccio chose, for his epic prose, a frame which is Pentecost, linked to number five, as five are Filocolo's books, and not seven. Florio and Biancifiore are both born during Pentecost, and on Pentecost are being united with a secret marriage in the Arab's Tower.

Fabulous Vernacular is to be considered an extraordinary book, a milestone for study and research on Boccaccio: a must-read work even for those who simply approach the Decameron for a pleasant reading.