The Renaissance novella as justice.

Philosophers writing recently in the United States and Canada, such as Martha Nussbaum, Alisdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor, although they are in fundamental disagreement on many points, especially on many political and theological issues, affirm the desirability of a re-reading of Aristotle. Let us take particularly Aristotelian ethics seriously, in its articulation of the good life, in its emphasis on virtue as a disposition, as a practice rather than a form of exact knowledge, in its emphasis on communal delineation of the virtuous life, in its emphasis on rational communication and description of ethical behavior. In addition to a rereading of Aristotle an implicit historical claim emerges in the writings of recent moral philosophers. I read books such as MacIntyre's After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Taylor's Sources of the Self as, in their different ways, moral critiques of modernity, set up in terms that imply the existence in history of societies whose ethical language was more commonly understood, agreed upon, and had more existential purchase. This ethical language was in its most acceptable and articulated form Aristotelian, based on the account of the good life in the Nicomachean Ethics, and modified eventually through Roman and then Christian culture. Thus, the Augustinian civitas dei was a rejection of the hierarchies and boundaries defining the Greek polis; and Augustine's emphasis on the will, informed by grace, as prior to the disposition of virtue, constituted an important modification of Aristotle's description of ethical behavior. Aquinas's synthesis of Augustine and Aristotle reintegrated classical ethical thought into a Christian framework of divine grace and charity, and certain strains of Renaissance humanism recuperate even more fully Aristotelian-Ciceronian ethics, although other strains underline the sharp conflicts between Aristotelian ethics and Christian theology. In any event, the shifting distinctions within the tradition notwithstanding, the historical claim would then be that, in counterdistinction to modern society, there were earlier Western societies in which moral language was available, enjoyed a certain social consensus, and provided powerful ways of understanding and evaluating individual behavior. It is during the Enlightenment that this moral language crumbled, under the pressure of a demand for an epistemologically iron-clad definition of the Good, and the concomitant defense of an entirely unbound Self whose rational justification of moral behavior is felt to be a constraint or an imposition on its own freedom and the freedom of other, similarly unbound selves. A language of rights replaces the description of a good life. Presumably, the Renaissance, that is, anywhere between the Italian fourteenth century and the English seventeenth century, represents a period during which either moral language was beginning to experience the sapping of its foundations, or was still enjoying the last decades of the bronze age, the iron of skepticism and empiricism having just been introduced. Ideally, an historical examination of moral philosophy and literature should be able to contribute to an understanding of the effectiveness of the moral bonds that unite the societies of the early modern period.

What one finds in literature, however, is more complex than the progression from viability of Aristotelian moral discourse to its destruction. In the Renaissance the discourse of the virtues is widely available and permeates many levels of literature, both as a theme and as a structuring device. On the one hand, literature - surprisingly, to modern readers - coherently reproduces moral paradigms derived from the Aristotelian-Ciceronian tradition; on the other, it also, frustratingly (once the surprise has become an expectation), produces variants of behavior models and formal structures that seem resistant to that same tradition. Do these variants signify what is truly "literary" about literature? Undoubtedly not for Renaissance readers, for whom in essence literature conveys and argues moral truths in pleasing ways. It is also unclear that literary variety in the Renaissance represents the loosening of the bonds of moral discourse, a sort of existential pulling back of the individual from the claims and possibilities of a commonly-defined good life. Among the virtues it is justice that to the greatest degree orients the individual towards a community, and that governs exchanges between individuals. An analysis of justice and the novella seems to hold substantial promise for exploring these questions.

THE DEFINITION OF JUSTICE

What is justice? Or rather, how does the Renaissance speak about justice? The first distinction one should make is between the representation of Justice (or perhaps the myth of Justice) and the concept of justice. One could - but I will not - study the permutations of the Golden Age, although these representations may present critiques of political organizations and proto-utopian projects entirely relevant to the conceptualization of justice. Another area which shall remain neglected is apocalyptic myths of the Last Judgment, of divine justice. I am also not interested in the law as such, in the legal tradition or in representatives of the law such as lawyers and judges. The law is, presumably, an expression of justice, and in one sense, indistinguishable from the just, but in another sense justice can be conceptually prior to the law and even a corrective to it.

Several rather simple definitions of justice are available, inherited mainly from Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, book 5), Cicero (De officiis, book 1, sections 20-41, and the important summary in De inventione, book 2, sections 160-61), and the opening section of Justinian's Institutes (1.1.1). For Renaissance versions of these definitions, among the various compilations and commentaries the following are well-known sources: Jacques Lefevre d'Etaples's Moralis . . . in Ethicen introductio, with commentary by Josse Clichtove (1535); a sixteenth-century florilegium, Flores celebriorum sententiarum graecarum ac latinarum . . . by Bartholomaeus Amantius (1556); Magnum theatrum vitae humanae: hoc est, rerum divinarum, humanarumque syntagma catholicum, philosophicum, historicum, et dogmaticum (1656) - a revised and augmented edition of Theodor Zwinger's Theatrum humanae vitae - by Laurent Beyerlinck; and a vernacular treatise, Academie francoise (1581), by Pierre de la Primaudaye, whose first volume is devoted to moral philosophy. The common themes and definitions seem to be:

a. Although it is only one of the four "cardinal" virtues - that is, one of the four sources of honestum, or moral goodness (Prudence or Wisdom, Fortitude, Justice, Temperance)(1) - Justice contains all other virtues,(2) has the greatest "splendor,"(3) and is essential to the functioning of human society.(4) In other words, it is that without which nothing is praiseworthy.(5) It is also the virtue essential to the good prince.(6)

b. Renaissance compilers repeat the "juridical" definition of justice, which constitutes the first sentence of Justinian's Institutes: "Justice is the constant and perpetual will to attribute to each his own right."(7) In Cicero's De inventione we find an important source for the beginning sentence of the Institutes, since Cicero's terms insinuate themselves, as is often the case, into translations and commentaries of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics ("Justice is a habit of mind which gives every man his desert [dignitas], the common advantage having been preserved.")(8) Cicero thus introduces the preservation of the common good as a condition sine qua non of the recognition and compensation of individual merit, in other words, as both a constraint on the rewarding of individual merit and as a consequence of the rewarding of merit and punishing of demerit. The terms habitus and dignitas will resurface frequently in Renaissance discussions of justice, and I think that they are key to certain analogies between concepts of justice and literary narrative. The Institutes goes on to identify the basic precepts of the law: "live honorably, harm nobody, give everyone his due."(9) The precept enjoining one not to harm another derives, according to Renaissance compilers such as Amantius, from Plato's Republic (1.335e). Cicero has a similar wording: "The first office of justice is to keep one man from doing harm to another, unless provoked by wrong; and the next is to lead men to use common possessions for the common interests, private property for their own."(10)

c. Aristotle distinguishes, in his discussion of justice in book 5 of the Nicomachean Ethics, between justice as simply the law, that is, the laws conceived and enacted by a political community to further individual happiness and the common good, and equality, that sense of fairness of exchanges and relationships between members of a community. In this sense there is a distinction between the lawful (to nomimon) and the fair or equal (to ison). In Renaissance terms, the distinction is between iustitia legitima and aequitas or aequalitas, between "justice as a whole" and "particular justice."(11) Renaissance literary narrative, I would propose, in its connection to moral categories is concerned essentially with particular justice (equality, fairness), not with "legal justice," although the law and legal procedure are often themes, especially in short narrative.

d. Particular justice (equality, fairness) - Lefevre's term is the ambiguous aequitas(12) - is distinguished, following Aristotle, into two kinds: distributive justice and corrective or commutative justice. Distributive justice is the distribution of honor, wealth, and other goods to members of the community according to their merit. Commutative justice is the assurance of fairness in exchanges of goods between members of the community.(13) In Renaissance treatments particular justice is sometimes conflated with justice as a whole, and iustitia distributiva and iustitia commutativa are cited as the two species of justice.(14) When Cicero speaks of the "foundation" of justice, his terms are often associated with the Aristotelian concept of commutative justice: "The foundation of justice, moreover, is good faith - that is, truth and fidelity to promises and agreements."(15) Thus, La Primaudaye writes: "Aristotle and Cicero divide Justice into these two parts: distributive and commutative. Distributive justice consists in giving to everyone what he deserves, either honor and status, or punishment; commutative justice consists in keeping, and causing others to keep, faith in things promised and contracted, and to do to others only as we would like to have done to ourselves."(16) Distributive justice is an equality of the proportion between goods and the merit of the persons receiving the goods; that is, the relationship between individual merit and compensation must be constant among members of the community. Commutative justice ensures that what is exchanged in private transactions - either a voluntary exchange such as a contract, or an involuntary exchange, such as a theft or injury - is of equal value.(17) The value of the goods exchanged is determined by money, and the individual merit of the exchanging persons is irrelevant to the justice of the exchange. Commutative justice, regulating exchange between human beings, is a consequence of the fact that human beings have needs, and other human beings have means by which the need (indigentia) can be satisfied. Commutative justice also comprises and transcends the principle of revenge or simple reciprocity (contrapassum in the Latin tradition), where the goods or injuries exchanged are identical, not just of equal value ("an eye for an eye," etc.). Reciprocity can be just, under certain conditions, but there are many instances where simple retaliation is inappropriate, that is, where the differing circumstances of the reception of the good or the injury and the differing characters involved may render the exchange unjust.(18)

We have, then, the following relevant distinctions: first, legal justice (whatever is the law) vs. particular justice (what is equal or fair); second, within particular justice, distributive justice, commutative justice, and reciprocity. Renaissance discussions of justice tend to concentrate on particular justice, which comes to stand for the entire concept.

JUSTICE AND SHORT NARRATIVE: CLOSURE, BANALITY, EXEMPLARITY

It is my contention that short narrative prose in the Renaissance provides scenarios of particular justice, in its staging of closure. Closure, that is, the actual moment of a narrative's conclusion, the resolution of the logic of exchanges between characters, and the satisfaction that this moment conveys to the listener, depends on the specific terms I have just discussed. Both the proportionately equal compensation of merit, of dignitas, and the equality of goods exchanged, underlie many plots of short narrative, and indeed determine the motivational logic of the narrative itself and the pleasure derived from the conclusion. The pleasure of closure is, then, peculiar to the satisfaction one derives from seeing a cycle of revenge ending, needs having been satisfied, merits and demerits recognized, rewarded and punished. The ethical world of the novella is one in which everyone is measured in relation to someone else, in which solipsistic interiority is impossible since it would prevent an ending from occurring. The novella's momentum towards closure emphasizes the relational nature of character, reproducing the relational nature of models of justice.(19)

The novella does not usually represent a world in which legal justice is reinforced; rather, in spite of formal and thematic reminiscences,(20) the short narrative often protests against legal justice and the men who represent it in terms deriving from particular justice, equity, or natural law.(21) In other words, the transgressiveness of these narratives is highly teleological: the disruption of social order takes place so that fairness may be achieved, so that a satisfying ending may occur. This is the case, with some important exceptions, even in the kind of novella that relates a practical joke, a facetie, a burla, or a Schwank.

The relationship between justice and closure is perhaps already adumbrated by the very fact that justice is what ends well. The only symptom of the practice of justice is a finished exchange, or the equal distribution. This teleological nature of justice is all the more evident when justice is contrasted with, say, prudence, the art of negotiating contingents, the more or less unforeseeable future, or temperance and fortitude which are more obviously dispositions in continuous exercise. What ends well is also, in a sense, what is banal: the exchanges in a novella reinforce sociability, reinforce what is normal or should be normal. The banality of justice is also, more profoundly, an urgent desideratum; if just exchanges do not characterize society, if the prince is not just, life is reduced to a sort of hell. Disorder is not liberation from constraint, to the contrary: it is a version of tyranny.

Connected to the issue of justice and the novella in the Renaissance is the so-called crisis of exemplarity: critics have argued that the Renaissance represents a period during which the awareness of the historicity of examples, on the one hand, and the multiplicity and open-endedness of interpretation, on the other, called into question the example's role in the conveying of moral truth, its application to empirical situations whose degree of difference from the example can never be controlled.(22) Thus short narrative, although formally constructed as an example, an account of individual behavior illustrating a sententia, begins to illustrate the gap between actual behavior and universal moral categories.(23) It is true that some novellas are indeed constructed as examples of behavior to be imitated or at least to inspire improved behavior on the part of the listeners, but the vast majority of novellas do not feature any one character exemplifying an admirable virtue. Indeed the most commonly featured character trait seems to be cunning, or craftiness, which, since it is often disjoined from any perception of the right, is more what Aristotle would call deinotes, the ability to negotiate contingencies to one's own advantage, a morally indifferent ability.(24) However, that is in some way not the point. Narratives can convey a moral understanding without featuring exemplary behavior, precisely because justice as the underlying logic of the plot can be quite indifferent to the actual merit of any one character. What is important is the proportional distribution or the fairness of the exchange; the pleasure of the just resolution is indeed moral without inspiring any other particular virtue or conversion among the listeners.

SCENARIOS OF JUSTICE: THE DECAMERON 

My first examples illustrate a typical scenario found in short narrative, whether in the fabliau tradition, in the German so-called Volksbuch, or in the Decameron:(25) the beffa, tromperie, or trick that one character plays on another, and, in some cases, the counter-trick played by the tricked character (the trompeur trompe, a version of the contrapasso). An entire day is devoted to this scenario in the Decameron: on the eighth day "tricks are discussed which are always played by women on men or men on women or men on each other."(26) In her Heptameron Marguerite de Navarre, in her proto-feminist way, will modify Boccaccio: on the sixth day "one speaks about tricks that have been played by men on women, by women on men, or by women on women, by greed, revenge, or malice."(27) In Aristotelian terms, these are all inverted scenarios of particular justice, that is, instead of exchanging goods the characters give or exchange injuries, involving distributive and commutative elements, and occasionally simple reciprocity, entailing development of different aspects of the story.(28)

DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE: DECAMERON, 8.7

In the seventh novella of the eighth day of the Decameron, a scholar, Rinieri, falls in love with the young widow Elena who, as a whim, decides to lead him on, although she is in love with another man. She responds favorably, by the intermediary of her servant, to his advances, but always puts off their meeting until, one winter night, she arranges a rendezvous with the scholar at her house. He arrives and is let into her courtyard, where he is told to wait until she is ready and her visiting brother has left. In reality the young woman is in the house with her lover, with whom she has dined and who is eager to see the scholar made fun of. The scholar ends up spending the entire night outside in the snow and becomes seriously ill. Rinieri's love for her turns to hatred, and he is given the opportunity to exact his vengeance when she foolishly decides to consult him on a means of getting back her lover who has since left her, as she has heard that he knows magic. Rinieri tells her to come to a small tower, take her clothes off, climb the tower, and pronounce certain magic formulas. Two women will then appear, he assures her, who will make sure to retrieve her lover. She decides that a tower on her property will do very well, and does as instructed. The scholar lies in wait, then removes the steps from the tower as soon as she has climbed, naked, onto the top. It is a summer night, and when the magic has failed to produce the two women, the sun begins to rise and the young woman realizes that she cannot descend. The scholar taunts her, suggesting that she jump over the side and end it all. She tries desperately to negotiate a return to the ground, but the scholar is entirely unwilling to forget his hatred for her. The sun becomes so strong that she is severely sunburned and when finally rescued her skin keeps peeling off, she is feverish, and it takes a long time for her to recover. Her servant, too, sustains an injury: she breaks her thigh while climbing down the steps of the ladder.

The story is constructed as a symmetrical revenge tale, apparently organized by the metaphors of erotic love: the scholar, burning with love, is forced to spend a night in the freezing cold; the young woman, cold towards the scholar, is forced to spend a day burning in the sun. The cold which the scholar is forced to endure allows the coldness to "exit" the heart of her lover who kisses her more ardently.(29) The scholar imagines that to hold her in his arms would resemble beatitude; after he is made a fool of he is described as diabolical in his desire for revenge. This symmetrical composition based on the polarities cold-hot, literal-figurative, and to some extent, foolish-wise, is, however, an epiphenomenon of the ethical question, the proportionateness of the scholar's response. Given the nature of the injury, the nature of the persons involved, which is the proportionately equal response? This is evident in the curiously casuistic negotiation that runs through the entire novella. When, for example, the young woman walks naked towards the tower, she passes close by the hidden scholar who cannot help but feel compassion and simultaneously is aroused by the sight of her body. But then the ethical calculus takes over: "But when he remembered who he was, the wrong he had suffered, the reason for it, and the person who had inflicted it upon him, his indignation was rekindled, dispelling all his pity and fleshly desires, and clinging firmly to his resolve, he allowed her to proceed on her way."(30) The young woman similarly tries to argue that she has received a proportionately equal injury by being forced to spend the night naked on the tower, and was made to realize her wrongfulness and stupidity (143); although the injury was not as great as spending a night outside in winter, the fact that she has learned from her experience should render it equal to the scholar's. In other words, it is not simply a matter of reciprocity, that is, an eye for an eye, but rather a matter of considering the relationship between the objective nature of the injury and the character of the person, her or his dignitas. Thus, in response to her pleas for compassion and her addressing him as a "gentile uomo," the scholar distinguishes between punishment ("gastigamento") and revenge ("vendetta"): revenge must exceed the offense ("la vendetta dee trapassar l'offesa"), and if she were to die and hundreds like her, it would still not be a sufficient vengeance, since he would be killing a vile and evil little woman ("una vile e cattiva e rea feminetta"(31)). The proportion between death and the dignity of a "vile woman" is not equal to the proportion between a life-threatening night in the cold and the dignity of a scholar. The point of the novella can be seen as the negotiation of distributive justice, and the commentary of the narrator Pampinea seems to underline the fact that it is less a matter of an interesting sequence of events than of finding the equal proportion of injuries. The scholar's revenge is felt to be "cruel" and "diabolical" by the narrator Pampinea, who interjects her commentary during the story, and by the listeners after its conclusion: ("Grievous and painful as the recital of Elena's woes had been to the ladies, their compassion was restrained by the knowledge that she had partially brought them upon herself, though at the same time they considered the scholar to have been excessively severe and relentless, not to say downright cruel."(32)) Pampinea repeatedly underlines the risks of offending a scholar ("Oh unfortunate woman! she did not know, my ladies, what it means to prove oneself against scholars"(33); "And therefore beware, ladies, of playing tricks, especially on scholars!"(34)). It is clear, then, that the exchange of injuries was unsatisfactory in terms of distributive justice, since the response, though satisfying to the scholar, exceeded the initial offense when seen through the eyes of the community.

Not only is the ethical construction of this novella closer to the intentional world of the early modern period, but this particular ethical construction, the distribution of goods (or their opposite) to deserving characters, promotes the attuning of characters to their circumstances, that is, defines the characters in terms of the relation between their dispositions, intentions, and status. It is not simply a matter of dealing out identical injuries, it is rather a matter of weighing the sort of injury in relation to the sort of character who will receive it, and the mistakes and negotiations involved in doing so. In this sense what seems important about the story to its listeners is not a sequence of functions in a structuralist sense, but a systematic interplay of intentions - between actors in the story and its listeners and narrator. The importance of intentions in the assessment of dignitas and the corresponding reward or punishment thus distinguishes a moral analysis from one derived from narratology. The ending of the story is also the ending of the exchange of injuries, and an assurance that the cycle of exchange has been completed: Elena forgets her faithless lover and is less likely to fall in love; and the scholar is satisfied with his revenge: "he deemed his revenge sufficient, and went happily about his business and said no more about it."(35) Rinieri has nothing more to say, just as there is nothing more to say, since justice has been fulfilled.

Of course there is something left to be said: Pampinea and the ladies feel that Rinieri has been excessive in his severity. But this need for further commentary is also a sign of the communal grounding of ethical knowledge: scenarios of particular justice are a product of, and constantly refined by, critical or rather epideictic discourse of the community.

RECIPROCITY: DECAMERON 8.8

Whereas the tale of Rinieri and Elena constitutes a narrative of distributive justice, the following novella in the Decameron emphasizes not the proportionateness of the exchange, but the equality of goods exchanged and the persons involved. Fiammetta recounts the story of Spinelloccio and Zeppa and their wives. The two men are such good friends that they are almost like real brothers. However, Spinelloccio begins to have an affair with Zeppa's wife. Zeppa realizes this when he is witness to their lovemaking. He confronts his wife afterwards, and she is willing to aid him in his revenge. She arranges a rendezvous with Spinelloccio at breakfast time; while Spinelloccio is at Zeppa's house the latter invites Spinelloccio's wife for breakfast. When Zeppa returns home, his wife locks Spinelloccio in a trunk; when Spinelloccio's wife arrives for breakfast, she and Zeppa make love on top of the trunk. The trunk is opened afterwards. The released Spinelloccio is ashamed, but the four of them continue to be friends and to live in the greatest harmony; now, each of the women has two husbands and each of the husbands has two wives.

As is sometimes the case with male friendship (such as Tito and Gisippo in the tenth day), the exchange involves women: Zeppa is forced to listen to his wife and Spinelloccio make love; Spinelloccio is forced to listen to his wife and Zeppa make love. The two wives are more or less agreeable to the exchange, although Zeppa uses a combination of threats and promises of a gift to persuade Spinelloccio's wife to participate in the deal. Once they make love, however, the pleasure seems mutual ("he took his pleasure with her and she with him"(36)). The exchange is repeatedly described as equal ("you've paid me back in my own coin," "Now we are quits"(37)). The equality of the injury received corresponds to the equality of the protagonists: they are almost like brothers, and indeed, the protagonists are practically interchangeable: does it matter that Spinelloccio rather than Zeppa is the first to sleep with the other's wife? The final sentence ("from then on each of the ladies had two husbands and each of them had two wives"(38)) abandons proper names in a linguistic image of harmony as lack of individuality. This pure functionality is also close to that aspect of commutative justice that disregards the dignitas of the characters involved and concentrates instead on the equality of the value of the goods exchanged. In this sense the scenario reduces to simple reciprocity, since not only are the goods of equal value, but the goods are the same, i.e., making love to the other's wife in the other's presence. There is no third term, no money, by which the goods need to be measured. The implication also is that money can be avoided because the characters are so similar, lacking attributes that would define differently their respective dignitas; since they are so similar to each other, similar goods can be exchanged. To the extent that they have a role, both wives are described as being beautiful ("each one of them had a quite beautiful woman as a wife"(39)), and are in the end equally amenable to sharing their husbands.

In both novellas closure is achieved when the wronged character is content (Rinieri is "lieto," Zeppa is "contento"). In the second novella, however, everyone is content: they all have breakfast together and live happily ever after. Revenge here takes on the aspect of a successful business transaction, where everyone wins. This is a euphoric version of justice, perhaps practicable only because the characters have so few real differences, one of the conditions of virtuous friendship (although in this case it would be stretching it to call Zeppa and Spinelloccio virtuous, since they are quite ready to break the fides of their commitment to each other). Fiammetta also suggests that Zeppa was careful not to exceed the injury he himself received, and that this was an effect of his "mansueto animo," his moderation and douceur.(40) Spinelloccio himself, trapped in the trunk while Zeppa is making love to his wife above him, realizes the justice of Zeppa's response: "In the end, however, recalling that he himself was to blame in the first place, that Zeppa was justified in doing this to him and that he had chosen a civil and comradely way of taking his revenge, Spinelloccio vowed that, if Zeppa was agreeable, they would thenceforth become greater friends than ever."(41) The little society of the two couples avoids an ongoing cycle of vengeance by the mildness and humanity of Zeppa which strengthens the ties that bind the two men. This gentle spirit, mansuetudo and humanitas, rather than involving, say, forgiveness or charity, in fact is compatible with revenge, as long as this revenge is a precisely equal exchange, that is, justice. It is then that closure is achieved, that the offended parties not only bury the hatchet but strengthen their ties to each other.

COMMUTATIVE JUSTICE: DECAMERON 2.5

A third example from the Decameron will bring us to an exchange that more closely resembles commutative justice. In the fifth novella of the second day, Andreuccio, a horsedealer from Perugia, comes to Naples with five hundred gold florins to purchase horses. In a series of intricate misadventures he is first robbed of his money by a beautiful young woman who pretends to be his sister; he then accompanies thieves who rob the tomb of the archbishop of Naples, and he manages to keep a ruby ring which he ends up carrying back to Perugia, though without the horses he had been seeking. The narrator Fiammetta specifies that the ring is worth more than five hundred gold florins (1:106). The various misfortunes of Andreuccio together compose one essential exchange, that of the money for a ruby worth at least the initial sum. Both the summary and the final sentence of the novella underline the fact that, having set out to acquire object A, he returns with object B; but we know that he has not lost anything in the end, since object B is worth at least as much as the money required to acquire object A ("having used his money to acquire a ring, whereas he had gone there to buy horses"(42)). The final result is obtained through a series of what the Aristotelian tradition would call "involuntary transactions,"(43) in this case theft, furtum. But these transactions can be submitted to the same calculus of commutative justice as "voluntary transactions," which is what the purchase of the horses would have been. What counts is "arithmetic" equality, that is, equality in monetary value between the good offered and the good acquired. It does not matter that Andreuccio is a gullible fellow, or that he ends up becoming a thief, or, for that matter, that the persons with whom he has dealt - a courtisan, thieves, and a dead archbishop - all may have widely differing dignitas, and thus may merit accordingly different goods. The conclusion is satisfying because the essential transaction, five hundred florins for a ruby ring, was equal. Part of the reason that the novella's commutative justice appears satisfying is that no one alive was truly harmed during the series of exchanges, fulfilling the basic precept of all transactions, alterum non laedere.

Although the interest of this novella resides in the series of mishaps and comic scenes in which the horsedealer is embroiled, closure is achieved only when commutative justice has been done. It is quite possible that Andreuccio will go on to lose the ruby, or sell it and lose the money on another bad transaction, but that is felt to be superfluous to the plot, and extraneous information. The initiation of the exchange sets up its ending.

THE RENAISSANCE NOVELLA AND JUSTICE: HEPTAMERON 22

If the Decameron provides us with a more or less stable model of exchange patterns in narratives that reflect distributive, commutative, and reciprocal justice, in the sixteenth century the situation becomes more complicated. Certain collections of short narrative, such as Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron, reproduce or present a variation on these scenarios, and represent at the same time an interpretive community which applies varied and at times disagreeing epideictic rhetoric to the narratives' characters. The Heptameron contains, among other models, the sort of narrative that is called, following Andre Jolles, a "case," in the sense of a judicial case, most often judged within the narrative itself.(44) Sometimes the ending of the novella coincides with a legal judgment pronounced against the protagonist(s); the ethical world of these novellas assumes the legitimacy of a judicial system, and justice is not simply an exchange between individuals, but involves the delegation of resolution of disputes to the representative of an institution. The closure of the novella is satisfying in part because of the coincidence between justice and the law, or because a representative of royal power has encouraged a just resolution of a conflict. Not only do stories often begin with the mention of a count or duke in whose entourage or domain the story's events took place, but Marguerite de Navarre, her mother, and her brother Francois Ier (who is a protagonist himself) occasionally intervene in the stories and bring them to an end.

In the twenty-second novella the narrator Geburon recounts the tale of Marie Heroet, apparently the sister of the poet Antoine Heroet, who resists the varied and persistent advances of the old prior of Saint Martin des Champs in Paris. This prior led by all accounts an austere life until the age of fifty, acquired a reputation as the pere de vraye religion, and was named the visiteur of the abbey of Fontevrault, administering the sacraments to the nuns in various convents of the order. He was so severe that in order to pacify him the nuns began treating him as they would the person of the king himself. When he was about fifty-five years old he began to take a liking to this treatment, became both fat and lubricious. He started to take advantage of young ignorant nuns. The prior, during his rounds, discovered a young and beautiful nun named Marie Heroet and made lewd advances to her. She resisted, and eventually he became obsessed with her, going to great lengths to install a woman as abbess who would aid his plans, and persecuting Marie Heroet mercilessly when she continued to refuse his entreaties and traps. He imposed a regime of strict penitence; after a while her family became concerned because they had no news of her. Her brother was sent to the convent and succeeded in seeing her. Marie Heroet gave him a written account of her tribulations; and her mother protested to the Queen of Navarre, Marguerite herself, who, although she had previously had entire confidence in the prior, turned him over to ecclesiastical authorities. The prior spoke to Marguerite de Navarre in person, begging her to terminate the trial, and declaring that Marie Heroet was "une perle d'honneur et de virginite" (185). The Queen was stunned, left him, and he died in solitary retirement a year later. Marie Heroet, however, was named abbess of Gy (-les-Nonains) by the King, and praises God who gave her back her honor and her "repos."

The novella's symmetrical construction - the glorious are humbled, the humbled are made glorious - is pointed out by its narrator (185), and the remaining antinomies (the convent as a hell instead of a way to heaven, the ecclesiastical vestments and honors covering a sinful, diabolical interior) can be read as the logic and theology of pre-Reformation evangelism and anti-clericalism. Indeed, God is invoked repeatedly as a behind-the-scenes manipulator of the narrative (177, 185) and it is Marie Heroet's faith that helps her endure the prior's persecutions and prevail at the end.

But the novella is also an account of royal distributive justice. The protagonists are given a status within the community consonant with their respective dignitas, in addition to ecclesiastical legal procedure, and independently of divine justice. The prior is stripped of all power within the church and dies soon afterward. The chaste sister is made abbess by the king, in recognition of her virtues:

And sister Marie Heroet, esteemed as she deserved to be by the virtues that God had placed in her, was taken from the abbey of Gif, where she had suffered so much, and by order of the King was made abbess of the abbey of Gy - close to Montargis - which she reformed, and she lived like someone filled with the Spirit of God, praising him all her life for having seen fit to give her back her honor and her tranquillity.(45)

In addition to punishment of the evil, royal justice consists in the reward of God-given virtues and personal honneur by external honneur, that is, goods and offices. Closure is achieved not by the account of a trial, but by the exact apportioning of reward to dignitas, in this life. The underlying symmetry is between the virtuous sister's reward, the power to truly reform the order, and the stripping of the prior's power to reform the order. The just distribution of goods by a higher authority also prevents the revenge scenario we have encountered so often in other novellas, including novellas in the Heptameron itself: Marie Heroet's family does not take revenge on the evil prior.(46) In other words, Marguerite de Navarre stages a parable of good royal administration, based on Aristotelian-Ciceronian precepts of distributive particular justice.(47)

THE HISTOIRE TRAGIQUE: FROM THE EPIDEICTIC COMMUNITY TO JUSTICE AS THE LAW

The informal genre of the histoire tragique,(48) especially popular in the second half of the sixteenth century and at the beginning of the seventeenth, contains elements that modify considerably the connection between justice and closure, since it seems to move closer to justice as the lawful (as opposed to the equitable or equal), and consequently affects the teleology of the plot. Similar to the romance, the genre of the histoire tragique, perhaps under pressure from critics, also demonstrates a certain sensitivity to its moral effect on readers. In the prologue to his Nouvelles Histoires tragiques (1586), Benigne Poissenot, who on the title page is described as "licencie aux loix," rehearses various traditional arguments voiced against literature, specifically the histoire tragique and Boccaccio's Decameron. For example, it encourages vice by presenting vice, sometimes in agreeable form, and since human beings are by nature inclined to evil, it is as if one were to put straw next to a fire (47-49). The reponse is no less traditional: the stories' epideictic rhetoric assures the encouragement of virtue and the discouragement of vice,(49) just as, we may note, the sign of a prince's justice is the reward of virtue and the punishment of evil. Poissenot goes on to make a more intricate argument for exemplary stories and their effect on the justice of princes. Taking his cue from Jean Bodin's proemium to his Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem,(50) Poissenot defends his stories as historical narratives which have a greater moral effect than laws or the precepts of philosophers. He distinguishes the value of mere example from a kind of stimulus to good behavior found in the stories themselves: "There is more: History does not only contain examples, it also has spurs which are not of little strength, and that can invite, even pull in spite of themselves, the most obstinate, cruel and barbarous, and who have despoiled themselves of all humanity, into a way of living completely different from the one they had before."(51)

Stories have the power, similar to a quasi-theological scintilla of conscience or goodness, to effect moral conversions in the cruelest readers, in spite of themselves. Neither laws nor philosophical precepts can do this, claims Poissenot, because laws are based on constraint, fright, and punishment, and because philosophers, distant from daily worries as they are, do not take into account the way in which everyone else acts. Indeed, a prince who has knowledge only of laws and philosophical precepts in their severity will become unjust and cruel.(52) In other words, narratives are a corrective to laws and philosophical precepts, inculcating humanity, similar to the function of equity, epieikeia or aequitas et bonitas. Most particularly, stories show that - contrary to Machiavelli - it is better for the prince to be loved than feared by his subjects (56-57). More generally, history is "as a kind of shop in which one finds a morally good manner and way of living in this world."(53) This civilizing function of narratives based on history assimilates novella collections to one of the more idealistic courtesy books, such as Castiglione's Libro del cortegiano, and Poissenot renders explicit the relationship to legal justice and to government that narrative can claim in its defense.

However, Poissenot is not addressing the moral structure of plot, but is focusing instead on individual behavior and epideictic rhetoric, as his humanist predecessors would. Indeed, one may argue that the heightened self-consciousness of the genre produced an effect opposite to the one intended: rather than a corrective to harsh laws, the stories in the histoire tragique genre become driven by the cruel behavior that corresponds to the harsh punishment. In addition, the "tragic" aspect of these stories is often produced by forces outside of any individual control, the author's and reader's apprehension intensified by the decades of bloodshed and disorder of the religious wars in France and Europe.

BOAISTUAU AND BANDELLO: VIOLENTE AND DIDACO

My first example precedes these savage times, but contains within it elements that will only be developed by later writers. Pierre Boaistuau translated several novellas of Matteo Bandello, in his collection entitled Histoires tragiques extraictes des oeuvres Italiennes de Bandel, & mises en nostre langue Francoise (1559). The fifth story goes as follows: a Spanish nobleman named Didaco falls in love with a young woman, Violente, of a lesser family than his own. He pursues her, but she resists his advances, and her family rejects an offer of money in exchange for her favors. In the end he decides to marry her, to calm his mind.(54) They arrange a marriage at her house, with her family as witnesses and a priest who performs the ceremony. However, he asks her to keep it a secret. In time he grows bored, sees her less and less, and ends up marrying a woman from a rich family, this time publicly. There is nothing Violente and her family can do, since they cannot find the priest and have nowhere to turn. Violente, true to her name, takes revenge by inviting Didaco over to her house, by stabbing him repeatedly, and tearing out his eyes, his tongue, his heart, etc., since they were the instruments of her suffering. The mutilated corpse is left in front of the house, and Violente insists on explaining the crime publicly, in front of the magistrates of the city. She asks to be put to death, otherwise she will commit suicide and incur a mortal sin. The magistrates find the priest and thereby confirm the legality of the clandestine marriage. However, "Violente [is] condemned to be decapitated, by the most common opinion of those who were present at the council, not only because it was not up to her to punish the fault of the gentleman, but because of the excessive cruelty she used against the dead body."(55) She is executed in the presence of the viceroy, the Duke of Calabria, who has her story written down.

The story of Violente and Didaco resembles that of Boccaccio's story of Elena and Rinieri; this time it is a woman taking revenge on the man. The violence of her revenge is remarkable, and the story's ending is not simply the end-point of the exchange, but the judgment and execution of Violente. The judgment at the same time indicates that revenge is inadmissable ("ce n'estoit a elle de punir la faute"), and that excessive revenge, the mutilation of his body, is the cause for her capital punishment.(56) In this sense the legal authorities within the novella resemble the ladies discussing the cruelty of the scholar. Indeed, legal problems pervade the story: the conditions of the clandestine marriage are described in detail; Didaco's excuse to Violente for marrying another woman is that he was obliged to marry her because her family was in a position to deprive him of his father's inheritance, and the scene of Violente's judgment, her speech and the legal investigation, are painstakingly evoked. The closure of the histoire, as that of other stories in the same collection, is simply that the law is applied, in other words, justice is that which is according to the law. In addition, the highest legal authority next to the king of Aragon is present, and the execution is accomplished under his gaze. The institution of the law seems to have replaced the exchanges governed by a "popular" sense of equity.

On the other hand, the law is not without foundation, and it does not call for rectification by equity. Violente herself wishes to be executed, in fact, she obliges the legal authorities to execute her because, failing to do so, since she planned to commit suicide, they would be "the cause of the entire ruin of my soul."(57) The legal judgment is not explicitly based on her plea; however, from the point of view of particular justice, her speech provides ample justification for the application of the death penalty.

So what is left? Violente's story will be recorded, but not as an example of virtuous or ingenious behavior, or justice being done, but because it is a particularly horrifying case of violent revenge, a piteux spectacle, an orrendo spettacolo of betrayal and mad, bloodthirsty cruelty. In Boaistuau's version the scene of the law is the backdrop to a spectacle of extreme behavior; the law is a sort of voyeur of the egarements des passions. The suggestion is that the very institutional distance that the ending provides is an occasion to view the sight of human beings tearing each other apart. Legal justice is done, as is particular justice, but since closure comes not with the end of the exchange but with the formal epilogue, the teleology of the plot comes to be determined by the legal details interspersed in the story: the law is an explicit norm. The duke intervenes not in order affirm the goodness of his government but to see the execution and to have the story recorded. We have gone significantly beyond the model of prudent intervention of the monarch represented by Francois Ier and his sister.

JEAN-PIERRE CAMUS AND THE SPECTACLE OF PUNISHMENT

The histoire tragique is taken a step further, however, when the law functions in the story as a very blunt instrument of a nearly unpredictable divine justice. The bishop Jean-Pierre Camus's prodigious production of short narrative collections - twenty-one in all - provide evidence of a dark, obsessive turn of the genre in early seventeenth-century France. The titles alone of certain works give clues to the content: L'Amphitheatre sanglant, ou sont representees plusieurs histoires tragiques de notre temps (1630); Les Spectacles d'horreur, ou se descouvrent plusieurs tragiques effects de nostre siecle (1630); and Les Rencontres funestes, ou Fortunes infortunees de nostre temps (1644). The stories are generally introduced by one or more sententiae, more or less commented upon by the narrator, and the novella or novellas - Camus sometimes furnishes more than one novella per sententia - tend to function as an illustration ("une naifve peinture de ce que je viens de dire"), a cas, or an example of the general statement.(58) The conclusion points out dramatically the efficaciousness of divine retribution and often forgets the initial sententia that had given rise to the narrative. Thus, in "Le Gondolier," the tenth "spectacle" of the first book of the Spectacles d'horreur, we learn first that "by some general confidence we leave our life in the hands of many people we do not know at all, and to whom we would not trust our wallet."(59) Not only arc we foolhardy, but the world is full of "traps where the feet of inattentive people are caught, perils on land, perils on sea, perils in travel, perils at home, perils in solitude, perils in the company of false friends.(60) The novella, set in Venice, concerning what would be considered a contract killing today, ends with the two protagonists being executed (after one has implicated the other under torture), and Camus concludes: "Both of them passed through the hands of Justice, and finally received the reward for their evil deeds, serving as Spectacles of Horror on the bloody theater stage of this big city."(61) The connection between the novella and the initial sententia is the fact that the victim had the habit of taking a gondola to the sites of her trysts in the city, something one can presumably hardly avoid in Venice, thus exposing her to her killer, an evil gondolier. The novellas parade in front of the reader-spectator (the language of evidentia is pervasive) a succession of horrible murders and assaults, ending in bloody punishments. Closure is achieved when the main characters are all killed off: one novella, 2.3, is actually called "Les Morts entassees" ("The Piled-up Dead").

In this world of countless mortal perils and thoroughly evil human beings, human justice is essentially an apparatus of physical torture designed to extort confession. In "La tardive Justice" (2.7, "Belated Justice"), one of the characters is falsely accused of murder, and "the legal authorities, after having tortured him well, did not find enough proof to send him to the gallows: so he was released, but so decrepit and maimed that he could no longer work for his living, and he died a little afterwards among great miseries and needs, protesting ceaselessly his innocence."(62) In the following novella Camus readily admits that "human justice is sometimes too prompt in the execution of its judgments,"(63) and happily provides another tale of an innocent man being tortured and executed. However, we cannot be sure if that man, falsely accused of one crime, was not guilty of another: "who can say that he was not guilty of some crime unknown to men, yet known to God alone?"(64)

The novellas of Camus are scenarios of distributive justice, in the sense that divine justice "gives to everyone according to his desert,"(65) and the bishop himself considered them to be negative exempla, encouraging the good behavior of his readers.(66) But this is an entirely indiscriminate and one-sided justice: it consists largely of punishment, not of reward, and the punishment seems the same for everyone: torture and death. At the same time, Camus's evil characters (the great majority) all possess the same (negative) dignitas, that is, they all deserve torture and death. Divine justice projects most human beings as essentially equally sinful; although they all have proper names and their actions take place in different locales, they are in the end the same. Even when apparently innocent people are put to death, they might possibly have deserved it in their hearts. In other words, the closure of the novella here is not the reestablishment of a proportion attuned to the individuals involved, but a destabilization of the frame within which exchanges take place: anything can happen to anybody, and no human ingeniousness or judiciousness can avoid "estranges & prodigieux effects" (311). We are all sinful, divine justice is beyond the possibilities of human prudence.(67) The novellas become a serial production of general suffering. If legal justice is often on stage, in the form of cruel punishment inflicted on the guilty and the innocent, the combination of human actions that formed the Aristotelian-Ciceronian just exchange of many of Boccaccio's and Marguerite de Navarre's novellas is hollowed out by the unforeseen interventions of divine wrath.

THE TRICKSTER AND JUSTICE

Another direction leading away from the scenario of justice as exchange exaggerates, rather than minimizes, the role of human ingeniousness. Initially, however, this ingeniousness does not exceed the boundaries of distributive justice. A frequent plot of short narrative seems to be only one side of the equation, an ingenious trick on or embarrassment of a character. When the Florentines make fun of a judge in the fifth novella of the eighth day by pulling down his breeches, the trick is precisely not gratuitous, but intended to show up the judge's incompetence. The innumerable narratives of tricks target characters whose high social standing and wealth do not correspond to their moral attributes, such as a valet giving a nobleman a frozen turd wrapped in confectionary's paper (Heptameron, novella 52). The trick reestablishes the proportion of dignitas to reward by humiliating those whose social status exceeds their merit. In this sense a burla or facetie is working within the implicit model of distributive justice.

There is, however, a set of novellas that feature tricks played by certain recurring protagonists, a buffone, on anyone in their path, whether they are peasants or wealthy bourgeois. I am thinking of Bruno and Buffalmacco in the Decameron, the tricks by Ponzio mentioned in the Cortegiano (2.89), the tricks of Panurge in Rabelais's Pantagruel (chapter 15, "Des moeurs et conditions de Panurge"), and the incessant deceptions of Till Eulenspiegel. Once the protagonist remains constant in several episodes, and the episodes become serial, each individual narrative loses the connection between ending and justice that we find in the novellas previously analyzed. When this occurs, the ingeniousness of one deception anticipates the ingeniousness of the next, diminishing the sense of closure of each individual episode and undermining the moral foundation of the narrative. Thus Bernardo Bibbiena in the Cortegiano warns against the danger of burle becoming accounts of cheating and becoming too harsh: "One should also be careful that the tricks do not become cheating, as we see many evil men who are going about with various swindles to make money, making up this or that; one should also be careful that the tricks are not too harsh . . . ."(68)

Indeed the serialization of deception and provocation characterizes the novellas that constitute the life of the Schalk (trickster), Till Eulenspiegel. Originally published in 1478, it is known today through an edition of 1515: Ein kurtzweilig lesen von Tyl Ulenspiegel. There are various editions in Germany during the sixteenth century, and the so-called Volksbuch was partially translated into French in 1532. Eulenspiegel's victims are all those who can be victimized, that is, who are not as cunning - as schalkhaftig - as the protagonist; thus he deceives peasant women as readily as priests and Jews and the pope. For example, Eulenspiegel comes to a marketplace and sees a peasant woman sitting with a basket of chickens, several hens and one rooster. He picks up the basket and turns to go; the woman asks to be paid; Eulenspiegel says that he will go to the abbey where he is employed and get her the money. He leaves her own rooster as security and goes off with the basket of hens, never to return. The "moral" of the story is: "Then what happened to her is what happens to those who are so extremely intent upon their own affairs that they are the first to shit on themselves (i.e., to deceive themselves)."(69) The deceit is not motivated by much else than Eulenspiegel's will to deceive and to degrade; the moral universe of the novellas seems to be one of unceasing cynicism: everyone is out to get everyone else, and only the most schalkhaftig can avoid being humiliated or deceived. Even as Eulenspiegel is lying on his deathbed, he cannot keep from performing his pranks. The presumed avarice of his victims is always an excuse for a further performance. Thus his mother who comes to see him is described as someone who seeks money from him, "because she was a poor old woman."(70) When she asks him to say a sweet word to her, he says "honey"; and when she asks him to give her some "sweet" wisdom by which he can be remembered, he says that when you fart you should turn your arse away from the wind so that the smell does not get into your nose, and so forth. Similarly both the apothecary and the priest who take care of him in his sickness are victims of crude scatological jokes. Eulenspiegel's pranks are arranged in a potentially infinite series that only his death can bring to an end. In Aristotelian terms he is the exemplar of cunning, deprived of the disposition to virtue that distinguishes prudence from mere cynical cleverness. That cunning is an end in itself, since there is no sense that any larger order of justice is being served. Serial performances of trickery come very close to what we may somewhat anachronistically call the gratuitous.

There are other, quite peculiar forms of short narrative (one can cite in particular the propos, such as Noel du Fail's Propos rustiques of 1549, and, of course, the "picaresque" narratives towards the end of the period I am interested in - Lazarillo de Tormes was translated into French in 1560), none of which exhibit closure in the same way as the novellas analyzed above. There are also tendencies within the logic of the "just" novella that work against the balanced exchanges which we have observed in the Decameron and the Heptameron. The development of individual character, for example, will go beyond the social proportions assigned in distributive justice: characters will be developed beyond the dignitas which corresponds to reward or punishment, and beyond comparison with other characters rewarded or punished. On another level, the primacy of "newness," in the sense of the unheard-of, already present in the name novella and in the advertisement of the collections (such as Cent nouvelles nouvelles), coupled with literature's increasing connection to an historical, referential "Real," will come to undermine the predictable schema of exchange that Aristotle and Cicero were thought to identify as justice. On the other hand, it is clear that the connection with justice enjoyed by short literary narrative does not cease.

A further reflection leads back to the perhaps unresolvable problem of the purchase of moral language in the Renaissance, as a counter-scenario to modernity's profound unease with the claims of moral philosophy on the individual. To some extent an answer to the question would simply consist of a recital of all the cliches of modern historiography of the Renaissance: rise of the individual, decline of feudal cohesiveness, beginnings of a mechanistic world-view, or in semiotic terms, replacement of the symbol by the sign. To some extent, also, the attempts to construct a pre-modern world of moral cohesion and transparency can come close to nostalgic projections. I would maintain, however, that literature as an imaginary world enjoyed a more immediate connection with Aristotelian-Ciceronian moral philosophy than it does now. This connection did not preclude contestation or interpretation, and the mere presence of ludic elements, of difficulties, doubts, obscurities did not radically vitiate literature as a moral enterprise, as part of a good life. As opposed to, say, mathematical knowledge, the sort of knowledge conferred by Aristotelian-Ciceronian moral analysis is a product of an epideictic community weighing and judging over time. Literature (none more obviously than framed novella collections) can be seen as a representation of an interpreting community, praising (or not) various narratives that involve exchanges between members of a similar community. In this sense, also, literature in the Renaissance is absorbed by the moral enterprise as Aristotle and Cicero were perceived to identify it. Thus the imaginary world constituted by many novellas transmitted structurally notions of justice that are to be found in the "theoretical" material of the time. This not always conscious collusion between the literary and the moral did not exclude developments that stepped outside of the framework of exchanges fundamental to Aristotelian-Ciceronian justice, which in their way anticipated the modern.

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON

This essay is part of a book-length project on moral philosophy and literature in the Renaissance, Vertu du discours, discours de la vertu: Litterature et philosophie morale au XVIe siecle en France. Various colleagues have given me useful suggestions on this essay; I wish to thank in particular Richard A. Carr, Francis Goyet, Jan Miernowski, and an anonymous reviewer for their careful remarks.

1 See De officiis, 1.4.15. In the De inventione Cicero divides justice into two aspects, deriving first from natural law but also from customary law. Justice in its "natural" aspect includes religio, pietas, gratia, vindicatio, observantia, veritas (religion, piety or pious affection, gratitude, vengeance, reverence and frankness) (2.53.160-61). The florilegium of Amantius adds to these virtues of iustitia naturalis: charitas and fides (218), terms used by Cicero elsewhere (caritas, in the sense of affection among human beings, in the De oratore 2.58.237 and the De amicitia 6.20; fides in the De officiis 1.7.23). Iustitia consuetudinaria or consuetudine ius, is what proceeds from nature and is reinforced by custom, or the principles which usages of the community have established, such as covenant (pactum), the equal or the equitable (par), and decisions (iudicatum) (2.54.162).

2 See Nicomachean Ethics, 5.15 (1129b26-35).

3 De officiis 1.7.20: "splendor maximus."

4 See De officiis, 1.7.20: "ea ratio, qua societas hominum inter ipsos et vitae quasi communitas continetur" (this ratio includes justice and beneficentia, giving or doing good). See Amantius, 220: "Iusticia omnium virtutum princeps, tuta & fida comes humanae vitae: Ea enim imperia, regna, populi, civitates reguntur: quae si e medio tollatur, nec constare posset hominum societas"; also Beyerlinck, quoting Macrobius, 4:486: "De iustitia veniunt, innocentia, amicitia, concordia, pietas, religio, affectus humanitas: his virtutibus vir bonus primum sui, atque deinde Reipublicae rector efficitur."

5 See La Primaudaye, 1.10.37, 118: "[La justice] est le fondement d'une perpetuelle gloire & renommee, sans laquelle rien ne peult estre de louable."

6 See Skinner, especially 415-16 and 425-26. The justice of the prince is immediately associated with the virtues of benevolentia, liberalitas, and clementia.

7 1.1.1: "Iustitia est constans et perpetua voluntas ius suum cuique tribuens." All translations of Justinian by Birks and McLeod.

8 2.53.160: "Iustitia est habitus animi communi utilitate conservata suam cuique tribuens dignitatem." All translations of Cicero, De inventione, by Hubbell. The term dignitas designates at the same time the merit of the person and the office or rank that constitute this merit and produce the respect of the community. This is not, then, a "personal" quality, in the sense that dignitas is half-way between the individual and society; it is the good functioning of the individual vis-a-vis the community. See Cicero, De inventione, 2.54.166: "dignitas est alicuius honesta et cultu et honore et verecundia digna auctoritas" ("Rank is the possession of a distinguished office which merits respect, honour, and reverence," in Hubbell's translation).

9 1.1.3: "honeste vivere, alterum non laedere, suum cuique tribuere."

10 De officiis, 1.7.20: "Sed iustitiae primum munus est, ut ne cui quis noceat nisi lacessitus iniuria, deinde ut communibus pro communibus utatur, privatis ut suis." All translations of Cicero, De officiis, by Miller.

11 See Lefevre d'Etaples, 25v: "Iustitiarum haec legitima est, qua quis leges condit, conditas discernit, condita autem & decreta exequi curat, & qua eius studium in beatam vitam & commune bonum dirigit: & haec iustitia tota dicitur. Haec vero aequitas, qua quis neque plus neque minus ant accipit, aut tribuit: sed ut unusquisque dignus sit, ac mereatur: & haec iustitia quae pars est nominatur." The scholastic terms are iustitia legalis and iustitia particularis.

12 Such as in his Introductio, 25v; see also Le Plessis, who uses iustice particuliere and equite interchangeably in his French translation of the Nicomachean Ethics (see for example 76-76v.). The Latin and vernacular traditions are confusing when translating particular justice (he kata meros dikaiosyne) as aequitas. This usage undoubtedly derives from Cicero (e.g. De officiis 1.19.64): "aequita[s], quae est iustitiae maxime propria" (fairness which is absolutely essential to justice). Aristotle uses a different term (epieikeia) when speaking about equity as a corrective to legal justice, as a flexible application of the general law to the particular case (especially Nicomachean Ethics 5.10, 1137a31-1138a3). Here Lefevre uses aequitas & bonitas: "Est praeterea aequitas & bonitas, virtus qua quis recte legem ea ex parte qua ob universale deficit, emendat. qui autem emendat, aequus & bonus dicitur" (Ibid., 29). Saint Thomas Aquinas simply uses the Latinized Greek word epiichia, following Robert Grosseteste's translation of the Nicomachean Ethics (In decem libros ethicorum Aristotelis ad Nicomachum expositio, Liber V, lectio 16). On Renaissance and medieval definitions of equity (in the sense of epieikeia only), see Maclean, 175-77.

13 See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 5.2.12-13, 1130630-1131a9, and Lefevre, Introductio, 25v: "Aequitatum quaedam est communium distributiva: qua ex communibus bonis unicuique ut dignus sit ac mereatur, distribuitur. Illa vero commerciorum commutativa, quae est eorum quae ab uno in alterum commutantur, aequitas." In Cicero distributive justice finds an echo in the discussion of generosity (liberalitas), and goods must be distributed according to the merits of persons: "Videndum est . . . ut pro dignitate [benignitas] cuique tribuatur; id enim est iustitiae fundamentum, ad quam haec referenda sunt omnia" (We must . . . see to it . . . that [our act of kindness] be proportioned to the worthiness of the recipient; for this is the corner-stone of justice) (De officiis 1.14.42).

14 For example in Amantius, 218: "Species Commutativa & Distributiva: Dupliciter enim communicamus cum civibus: aut fortunis commutandis, aut humana civilique consuetudine."

15 De officiis 1.7.23: "Fundamentum autem est iustitiae fides, id est dictorum conventorumque constantia et veritas."

16 La Primaudaye, 119: "Aristote & Ciceron divisent la Justice en ces deux parties, la Distributive, & la Commutative. La Distributive, consiste a baillet a chacun ce qu'il merite, soit honneur & dignite, ou punition: la Commutative, a garder, & faire garder la foy es choses promises & contractees, & ne faire a autruy, que comme nous vouldrions nous estre faict."

17 Commutative justice (to diorthotikon) is sometimes translated as "corrective justice," and is thought to concern exclusively the righting of wrongs by punishment and amends in the case of injuries inflicted by a private citizen on another private citizen (see MacIntyre, 1988, 103-04). This restriction of Aristotle's sense is sometimes found in the Renaissance as well: see Savigny, who subdivides "justice particuliere" into "distributive" and "corrective, a laquelle appartiennent les punitions & supplices."

18 See Aristotle, 5.5.1-7, 1132b21-1133a5.

19 This is one of the reasons for the predilection that narratology has shown for the so-called "closed" or "classic" novella, from Tzvetan Todorov to Roland Barthes. The narratologists' focus on structure, function, or action as opposed to psychology, elocutionary rhetoric, and socio-historical context, finds in the novella a naturally fertile corpus. In spite of varying claims of scientificity and varied rejection of bourgeois-liberal humanism, certain forms of narratology were squarely situated within a rather traditional ethical framework in their very choice of method and focus. See, on the nouvelle fermee as opposed to the nouvelle ouverte, Tibi, especially 23-33; for a lucid account of the attractiveness of the "classic" novella to narratology, see Goyet, especially 84-88.

20 On connections to the format of legal writing, see Davis, on letters of pardon. On the presence of lawyers, judges, and the themes of legal justice in novella collections, see the somewhat superficial chapter in Clements and Gibaldi, 145-64. On the social distinctions associated with lawyers and judges in short narrative, see Perouse, 351-53, and passim.

21 See Mazzotta, especially "The Law and Its Transgressions," 213-40.

22 See Hampton.

23 See Stierle.

24 When deinotes is in the service of prudence, then it is a morally positive ability, that is, praiseworthy (laudabilis). Aquinas translates deinotes as potentia dinotica, and, interestingly, as ingeniositas sire industria. When craftiness is used for a bad end, it becomes "knavery" (panourgia, or astutia in the Latin tradition). See Aquinas, Expositio, Liber VI, lectio X. On the novella as incarnation of prudence, see Wehle, 206-12. Wehle does not distinguish, however, between prudentia and astutia.

25 The examples of various types of justice expressed in the plots of novellas are taken from the Decameron, a late medieval and not a Renaissance work. The Decameron, however, constitutes a model for the novella collection of the Renaissance, explicitly so in the case of the French Cent nouvelles nouvelles first printed in 1486 and in Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron, published posthumously in its complete form in 1559. The Decameron is poised between the medieval fabliau and the exemplum tradition on the one hand, and the beginnings of sentimental and "realistic" narrative, on the other. Its translations abound in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, and the novellas are often anthologized in other collections, such as Le Parangon de nouvelles in the early 1530's. Along with Poggio's Facezie and Matteo Bandello's Novelle, the Decameron is one of the most important literary models for short narrative in the fifteenth and sixteenth century.

26 2:101: "si ragiona di quelle beffe che tutto il giorno o donna ad uomo o

uomo a donna o l'uno uomo all'altro si fanno."

27 328: "on devise des tromperyes qui se sont faites d'homme a femme, de femme a homme, ou de femme a femme, par avarice, vengeance et malice." Translations from Marguerite de Navarre and all vernacular texts are my own unless otherwise credited.

28 The connection between justice and the eighth day has been noted by other critics, most notably and systematically by Kirkham, who sees in the Decameron an allegorization of the virtues. Kirkham interprets the eighth day as devoted to Justice, and identifies Lauretta, its "queen," as a representative of Justice, and sees the stories she tells all throughout the novella collection as incarnations of distributive or commutative justice. While I am sympathetic to Kirkham's perspective, I rather think that the novella as a whole, as a genre, engages the problematic of justice, and that this can be shown in many novellas not found in the eighth day and not narrated by Lauretta (see Kirkham, 159-60). She also argues that the eighth day is a "parodistic version of the Last Judgment" (215-35). Mazzotta, too, sees Aristotelian justice at work, this time in day 6, novella 7 (230-31 and the somewhat confusing 230, n. 31). The issue of closure of the novellas and satisfaction of the reader inevitably brings up the related esthetic question of dispositio: there are various levels of rhetorical closure in the Decameron, as has been demonstrated by Forni, especially 29-39. I am more concerned with the minimal level of the novella itself.

29 On these erotic symmetries, see Almansi, 92-99.

30 Translation by McWilliam, 631; "Ma nella memoria tornandosi chi egli era e qual fosse la 'ngiuria ricevuta e perche e da cui, e per cio nello sdegno raccesosi, e la compassione ed il carnale appetito cacciati, stette nel suo proponimento fermo e lasciolla andare" (2:142).

31 2:145.

32 McWilliam, 645; "Gravi e noiosi erano stati i casi d'Elena ad ascoltare alle donne, ma per cio che in parte giustamente avvenuti gli estimavano, con piu moderata compassione gli avean trapassati, quantunque rigido e costante fieramente, anzi crudele, reputassero lo scolare" (2:154).

33 2:134: "Ahi cattivella cattivella! ella non sapeva ben, donne mie, che cosa e il mettere in aia con gli scolari."

34 2:154: "E per cio guardatevi, donne, dal beffare, e gli scolari spezialmente."

35 McWilliam, 644; "parendogli avere assai intera vendetta, lieto, senza altro dirne se ne passo" (2:154).

36 2:157: "con lei si sollazzo, ed ella con lui."

37 McWilliam, 649; "voi m'avete renduto pan per focaccia," "noi siam pari pari" (2:158).

38 2:158: "da indi innanzi ciascuna di quelle donne ebbe due mariti e ciascun di loro ebbe due mogli."

39 2:155: "ciascun di loro area per moglie una donna assai bella."

40 2:154.

41 McWillaims, 648-49; "Poi, pur ripensandosi che da lui era la villania incominciata e che il Zeppa aveva ragione di far cio che egli faceva, e che verso di lui umanamente e come compagno s'era portato, seco stesso disse di volere esser piu che mai amico del Zeppa, quando volesse" (2:157-58).

42 1:109: "avendo il suo investito in uno anello, dove per comperare cavalli era andato."

43 See Lefevre, Introductio, 25v: "[Commerciorum] [q]uaedam vero sunt quae invitis fiunt, quae non utraque partium volente fiunt" ("Among transactions there are those which are done by unwilling partners, that is, in which not each of the parties is willing").

44 On the distinction between "example" and "case" see most recently Bideaux, 37-52 and especially 48, and Lyons, 88-89 and 266 n. 24. The distinction was first proposed by Jolles in 1930. The example assumes a general law or value that is not in dispute; the case presents a story that has to be judged, i.e., it is not obvious under which law or value the story falls. For a good survey of the different types of short narrative (exemplum, cas, chroniques, etc.) at the end of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, see Wehle, 52-76. He underlines, rightly so, the intimate relationship between the very fact of narrating and the domain of the moral.

45 185: "Et seur Marie Heroet, estimee comme elle debvoit par les vertuz que Dieu avoit mises en elle, fur ostee de l'abbaye de Gif, ou elie avoit eu tant de mal, et faicte abbesse par le don du Roy, de l'abbaye de Giy, pres de Montargis, laquelle elle reforma et vesquit comme celle qui estoit plaine de l'esperit de Dieu, le louant toute sa vie de ce qu'il luy avoit pleu luy redonner son honneur et son repos" (my emphasis).

46 In part, this is because we are dealing with an elevated social class enjoying direct access to the Queen. However, in certain other novellas the Queen intervenes to reestablish justice in inferior social classes (see for example novella 61). Royal intervention is admittedly a matter of chance.

47 See Clichtove's commentary on Lefevre: "Aequitas communium distributiva est qua ex communibus bonis unicuique ut dignus sit ac mereatur distribuitur: Ut ex bonis ecclesiasticis pro meritorum qualitate iis qui eccesiasticam sortem sequuntur, ex bonis civilibus itidem secundum meritorum rationem iis qui res civiles agunt: id unum potissimum observando, ut dignitati meriti respondeat dignitas praemii" (Lefevre, 26). This is a commonplace of treatises on the "education of the prince": see Saint Thomas Aquinas, De regimine principum, chap. 15, and Erasmus, Institutio principis christiani (1515), chap. 6: "Quamquam autem egregii civis est vel nullo proposito praemio, quod optimum est, sequi, tamen expedit hujusmodi illectamentis, rudium adhuc civium animos ad honesti studium inflammare. Qui generoso sunt animo, honore magis capiuntur: qui sordidiore, lucro quoque ducuntur. Omnibus igitur hisce rationibus lex sollicitabit, honore et ignominia, lucro ac damno" (286). See also Claude de Seyssel, La Monarchie de France (1515), 2.2. On the political ideology (preabsolutist monarchy) underlying the Heptameron, see Brockmeier, 54-82.

48 For a structural definition of the histoire tragique, see the illuminating study by Boggio Quallio; for a more thematic definition, see Poli, 21-41. See also Vaucher Gravili.

49 Poissenot, 49: "Les vices y sont blamez, on y loue la vertu."

50 Noted by the editors of this edition, 54 n. 44.

51 Poissenot, 55: "Il y a plus, l'histoire ne contient seulement des exemples, elle a avec cela des aiguillions qui ne sont pas de peu de force, et qui peuvent convier, voire trainer malgre soy, les plus revesches, cruels et barbares, et qui se sont despouillez de toute humanite, en une maniere de vivre toute autre que celle qu'ils gardoient au paravant."

52 Ibid., 55-56: "Qui est celuy qui ne forlignera aysement de son debvoir, et qui n'abandonnera les resnes de la justice pour decliner a l'injustice, qui n'a autre cognoissance que de la force des loix les plus aspres et severes; et qui rant seulement a appris les rudes commandemens, et facheux a digerer, que les Philosophes les plus sourcilleux veullent estre gardez par ceux qui frequentent leur escole et veullent estre de leur secte? Le passage de l'injustice, pour estre et devenir immisericordieux et sans pitie, n'estoit-il pas tres-facile et aise? La cruaute ne s'ensuit-elle pas necessairement de l'immisericorde?"

53 Ibid., 55: "comme une certaine boutique, en laquelle on trouve la maniere et facon de vivre honnestement en ce monde."

54 Boaistuau, 145: "resolut en fin que c'estoit le plus profitable pour le repos de son esprit de l'espouser."

55 Ibid, 167: "Et fut Violente par la plus commune opinion de ceux qui assisterent au conseil condamnee a estre decapiree, non seulement parce que ce n'estoit a elle de punir la faute du chevalier, mais pour la trop excessive cruaute de laquelle elle avoit use envers le corps mort."

56 This double justification of the sentence is an addition of Boaistuau. Bandello underlines that the audience was impressed by Violente's animo: "Rimasero udendo questa tragedia tutti quei signori fuor di loro, e giudicarono la donna esser di piu grand'anim che a femina non apparteneva." After exhibiting the mutilated body "che a tutti diede un orrendo spettacolo," the family is interrogated, and it is indeed found that she had been married to Didaco. Then "altri non si trovarono colpevoli che Violante e Giannica [the servant], le quali publicamente furono decapitate" (1.42, 398). Both women accept death joyously. When Boaistuau points out the excessiveness of Violente's revenge at the end of his story, he may have been reproducing an observation by Bandello in his dedication of the novella to Camilla Bentivoglio: some women, having been duped by men, "s'attristano e con tutte le forze s'ingegnano di vendicarsi. Dove, pur che la vendetta non sovramontasse l'offesa, si potrebbe passare; ma eglino di picciola vendetta non si contentano, come infinite volte s'e veduto. Percio [gli uomini] non si deveno meravigliare se talvolta le donne gli rendono a doppio la pariglia . . ." (Ibid., 389). On the differences between the Italian and the French versions, see the perceptive study by Tortonese, who emphasizes the heroic nature of Violente in Bandello.

57 Ibid., 166: "la cause et entiere ruine de mon ame." This threat of suicide is an addition made by Boaistuau. In Bandello's novella Violente makes a speech to the viceroy, saying that she intends neither to deny her action nor to pray for mercy, but wants to make sure that everyone knows that she had been legitimately married to Didaco, and that she killed him because he betrayed her. In sum, "mi basta che l'onor mio sia salvo, avvenga mo cio che si voglia" (397).

58 See the brief remarks by Zinguer on Camus, 202-04.

59 Camus, 113: "[p]ar je ne scay quelle commune confiance nous remettons nostre vie a beaucoup de gens que nous ne connoissons point, & a qui nous ne voudrions pas fier nostre bourse."

60 Ibid., 114: "chausse-trapes ou se prennent les pieds des personnes inconsiderees, perils en terre, perils en mer, perils en voyageant, perils en la maison, perils en solitude, & perils en compagnie a cause des faux freres."

61 Ibid., 123: "Tous deux passerent par les mains de la Justice, & receurent en fin le salaire de leurs meschancetez, servans de Spectacles d'Horreur sur le theatre sanglant de cette grande ville."

62 Ibid., 331-32: "[l]a Justice, apres l'avoir bien travaille, ne trouva pas assez de preuves pour l'envoyer au supplice: il fut done r'envoye, mais si gaste & estropie qu'il ne peut jamais travailler ny gaigner, qu'il finit de la a quelque temps parmy de grandes miseres & necessitez, protestant sans cesse de son innocence."

63 Ibid., 338: "[la justice] humaine est quelquefois trop prompte en l'execution de ses jugemens."

64 Ibid., 344: "qui pourra dire s'il n'estoit point coupable de quelque crime incognu aux hommes, mais cogneu de Dieu seul?"

65 Ibid., 346: "[rend] a un chacun selon son oeuvre."

66 Ibid., preface, a: [2]v: "Les bons Chirurgiens guerissent en maniant les playes des blessez, & en tirant le sang des veines des malades. Nous les imitons en tirant de bons exemples des actions les plus horribles que nous fournisse le grand theatre du monde." See also, 1.10, 115-16: "Ce n'est pas mon dessein d'apprendre le mal en le descrivant, mais plustost de le destruire en le descriant, & en faisant cognoistre par les mauvais succez qui accompagnent le vice combien il est dangereux de laisser regner en nous ce cruel tyran que l'on appelle peche."

67 The same demonstration is made in the genre of the histoire devote which Camus produced in even greater abundance. See Vernet, 34 and 36.

68 Bibbiena, 2.89, 127: "Deesi ancora guardar che le burle non passino alla barraria, come vedemo molti mali omini che vanno per lo mondo con diverse astuzie per guadagnar denari, fingendo or una cosa ed or un'altra; e che non siano anco troppo acerbe . . . ."

69 "Da geschahe ihr eben als [wie denjenigen], die unter Zeiten ihr Ding allergnauest wollen versorgen, bescheissen sich zuzeiten allererst" (61).

70 148: "wann sie war eine alte arme Frau."

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