Boccaccio: A Biography, Marco Santagata, translated by Emlyn Eisenach, University of Chicago Press, £30

Reflecting on his impact on my own life, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75) holds a strange distinction; he is the first medieval author to truly make me blush. I first read the Decameron back in 2020, largely because it was a well-known piece of medieval literature and, therefore, as a professional medievalist, I felt I should probably know something about it. What I wasn’t expecting was the smut. Not just sex, but lots of sex – frequent and explicit and not at all what my innocent mind was expecting. In his own idiom, this was a man who spent a great deal of time ruminating on Eros. Reading Decameron in 2020 (at the height of the Covid pandemic and lockdowns) was also a curious experience because essentially the plot consists of a series of short stories told by a group of Florentine nobles residing on a country estate while the Black Death rages through their city. Boccaccio lived through strange times, and this comes across loud and clear in Marco Santagata’s perceptive biography.

The son of a merchant, Boccaccio was born into the dynamic world of 14th-century Italy. This was a conflicted land shaped by: rival city states, each vying for power and prestige; an absent papacy exiled to the French city of Avignon but looking for an opportunity to return to Rome; and a Holy Roman Emperor hovering in the north and threatening to invade. Giovanni lived through the unfolding events of this era, managing to survive both political crisis and pestilence, only to die of natural causes at a reasonably ripe old age. In a small way, he played his part in shaping the drumbeat of contemporary events, acting on occasion as a Florentine diplomat and performing some civic responsibilities.

Even so, despite living within this awe-inspiring geopolitical arena, he seems to have been at least as preoccupied by his own intellectual musings, the doings of his circle of friends, and his own personal troubles, as by the epic happenings taking place outside his door.

Giovanni’s father was a reasonably successful Florentine merchant. Boccaccio never met his mother or even knew her name. His father travelled to Paris shortly before his birth and he liked to dream that his mother was a French princess; in reality, he knew virtually nothing about her. As a boy, he began a rather difficult education in which, over a period of many years, he managed to disappoint his father’s hopes of his becoming either a merchant or a lawyer.

In the event, somewhere between his own literary and intellectual passions and the pressures exerted by his family’s aspirations, Boccaccio pursued a rather erratic career. He travelled a fair bit across the Italian peninsula and France, occasionally taking on commissions and tasks for the Florentine government, albeit with large gaps in between appointments; in practice, however, his intellectual pursuits represented his life’s guiding light. Financially, he always seems to have coped, thanks in part to his family’s wealth, although he never became especially rich. His writings don’t seem to have earned him much money and he certainly wasn’t an instant celebrity.

Yet over time – though probably not as fast as he may have wished – he acquired a reputation as a scholar, which brought him some fame. At one point he was offered – but turned down – the glittering appointment of apostolic secretary. Boccaccio’s closest relationships were almost certainly his network of friends, from whom he drew both anxiety and solace. The most celebrated of these was the intellectual Petrarch, who he esteemed greatly, even if the two men occasionally diverged bitterly in their political views. Boccaccio died on 21 December 1375 at his home in Certaldo (a town near Florence) after many years of poor health.

Taken overall, Santagata’s portrait of Boccaccio leaves the lasting impression of a rather unhappy man. After his death, as was common for many senior intellectuals, stories emerged claiming that Boccaccio possessed mystical powers; the legend even circulated that demons bore him to his lover in Naples. But I can’t help thinking that Boccaccio’s life didn’t need such lurid embellishments – he had demons enough of his own. A difficult relationship with his father, an uneasy home life, no knowledge of his mother, a constant fear of rejection by his readers, and a curious and seemingly obsessive fixation with women: he wrote a book drawing attention to famous women’s lives (De mulieribus claris), yet later condemned the entire gender as consumed by vice. He was a complex and troubled individual. One contemporary labelled him as a ‘man of glass’ and certainly his acute sensitivity frequently makes its presence felt; for a time he fell into a deep depression when, in 1361, a dying monk issued a warning casting doubt on his chances of salvation.

In and among these experiences, Boccaccio poured his emotions and energy into his scholarly pursuits, writing persistently for the greater part of his adult life. His productivity was prodigious, both in creating his own works and making copies of others. An aficionado of Dante Alighieri and a groundbreaking writer in the vernacular, he played his part in the centuries-long flourishing of writing and artistic production that is typically captioned as the Early Renaissance.

This painstakingly researched biography, scrupulously pieced together from numerous sources, warrants praise for many reasons, but for me as a historian it holds an especial significance. Given the scarcity of medieval documentation, it’s very rare for historians to be able to recreate the lives of individuals who did not exist at the very apex of society (queens, lords or princes, etc.). Those further down the social pyramid simply lack the documentation for us to gain any real insight into their lives. To be fair, Giovanni didn’t exist at the bottom of society and his comments about the brutishness of peasants make his views on this matter perfectly clear, yet the level of detail gathered on his life here is remarkable.

Of course, Giovanni was a deeply unusual person and scarcely ‘representative’ either of his cadre or his society, but even so, in this skillfully presented portrait, you can still catch a glimpse of the social pressures, expectations, privileges and upheavals shaping his life.