Boccaccio’s Decameron 6.10 and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales VI.287-968: Thinking on Your Feet and the Set-Piece

Abstract

Both Boccaccio, in his Decameron, and Chaucer, in The Canterbury Tales, place sermons deliveredby highly skilled preachers very nearly at the centre of their story collections. Boccaccio’s Fra Cipolla appears in Decameron 6.10 and Chaucer’s Pardoner, in Canterbury Tales, VI.287-968 (“The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale”)—according to the order of the tales most widely adopted in modern editions, that of the Ellesmere manuscript (San Marino, California, Huntington Library MS EL. 26. C. 9). Boccaccio gives particular emphasis to the importance of his Cipolla by placing the master preacher in the last tale told on the sixth day of storytelling (the day when wit is the common theme of all ten tales). Chaucer’s preacher appears in the tale preceding Fragment VII of the Canter-bury Tales; it is in Fragment VII that poetic language becomes a central theme. In both Boccaccio’s Decameron 6.10 and Chaucer’s Canter-bury Tales VI.287-968, words are power, and in both tales it is significant that those words appear in sermons, a popular form of medieval literature listened to byliterate and illiterate, aristocrats and lowly alike. Preachers of sermons in the Middle Ages were as much literary figures as were storytellers; they competed with the secular entertainers for the attention of popular audiences and resorted to “artifices similar to those of their old rivals.”My concern this essay is to compare the oratorical performances of Fra Cipolla and the Pardoner — one an improvisation and the other, a feat of memory. Memorized delivery assures coherence and exactness; impromptu speech has the virtue of naturalness and liveliness. Quintilian, one of the classicalrhetoricians admired in the Middle Ages and actually named in Boccaccio’s tale, favoured the well-memorized speech because it could be made to seem extempore. The coincidence in genre, character, theme, and placement of Boccaccio’s Decameron 6.10 and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales VI.287-968 becomes especially interesting if there is even a chance that Chaucerknew the Decameron and its tale of Fra Cipolla.