Il Novellino: The hundred old tales

Title: Il Novellino: The hundred old tales

Translator: Edward Storer

Release date: August 24, 2022 [eBook #68831] Most recently updated: October 19, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: George Routledge & Sons Ltd., 1925

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/68831

Credits: Jeroen Hellingman and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net/ for Project Gutenberg (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

Broadway Translations

Il Novellino

The Hundred Old Tales

Translated from the Italian by

EDWARD STORER

To this day the author of this famous collection of tales remains unknown. But he probably was a minstrel of the Middle Ages who went from castle to castle entertaining his listeners with his stories—Bible stories, stories from French, Provençal, and Arthurian sources, stories from the Classics, and stories of Oriental origin. Some were moralistic, some humorous, some witty, some spicy.

As a collection they have never ceased to interest because of their humanness. Written in a quaint simple style, they are full of action, wit, and wisdom, and represent practically the oldest prose work in the Italian language.

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 681 Fifth Avenue New York City

Broadway Translations

“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale

Her infinite variety.”

IL NOVELLINO

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY HEADLEY BROTHERS. ASHFORD, KENT; AND 18, DEVONSHIRE STREET, E.C.2.

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN [v]

INTRODUCTION

One day about the end of the thirteenth century or the beginning of the fourteenth, when the Middle Ages still darkly curtained the Renaissance from view, a “man of the Court”, or minstrel, of some Italian lord had one of those inventive flashes which go to the making of literatures. This “man of the Court” who was perhaps a minstrel or giullare in little more than name—for his talent would be especially literary—knew by heart the little archaic tales which make up the slender corpus of the Cento Novelle Antiche, or Novellino. Often he told them or heard them told in baronial halls, and in lordly places, in rough huts after days of hunting, and in the encampments of battlefields. Before audiences of seigneurs and knights, in the company of stately prelates, and in the rollicking gatherings of dashing young donzelli, he had narrated or heard narrated by humbler men of his craft these simple [2]stories, some of them redolent of the wisdom of ages, others piquant with the flavour of his own times. Well he knew their effect, and could choose one to suit his company

and occasion. Thus for the entertainment of graver and elderly lords he would select those of monkish or ascetic origin, while when in the company of gay young cavalieri, he would not hesitate to tell over some of the more libertine tales of his oral anthology. And the beginnings of the new Italian tongue, liberating itself from the secular thrall of its parent Latin, and having taken shape in its Tuscan and Sicilian matrixes, sought an early literary expression and found it in the work of our perhaps slightly pedantic giullare who will in all probability remain for ever unknown to us. That some such person existed is obvious, even if we cannot discover his name, nor his place of birth, nor estate. He may indeed have been a worldly type of monk rather than a “man of the court”, but the choice of the novelle, included in the collection, would certainly seem rather to point to the compiler being a man of the world rather than an ascetic. As does the fact that the tales [3]were not written in Latin, for the tenacious Latin clung to the cloisters after it

had died on the tongues and pens of the lay world of those times. Our anthologist, who was in fact a great deal more than an anthologist, had coadjutors and rivals, successors and improvers, as the different manuscripts of the Novellino prove, but the original compiler of the Cento Novelle Antiche, as the work was previously called, was, one likes to believe, a single individual rather than a group of giullari or ex-giullari at the dependence of some medieval Medici. So the idea came to him of grouping together in one manuscript, which maybe he gave for copying to some Florentine monk, a selection of the knightly, moral, Biblical, classical, and popular tales which were most in vogue in his epoch. They were stories which had stood the test of time—some of them the test of successive civilizations—and had met the full-throated approval of numerous courts from Provence to Sicily, from Parma to Rome. Hitherto they had lived only on the lips of the Court story-tellers and wandering minstrels who narrated them. The

tales which make up the Novellino [4]were, for the most part, “taught”, as we learn from our text by one giullare or story-teller to another. And each man added or altered them according to his wit and company. That the professional story-tellers played tricks with the tales in vogue and added details and colour of their own on occasion, we may well presume from Novella LXXXIX, where a “man of the Court” is reminded that he is spinning out his story at too great a length by one of the yawning company. The collection here printed under the title of Il Novellino, most of which tales appear in the original edition of the Cento Novelle Antiche, by Gualteruzzi, formed part of a vast repertory of similar stories, legends and anecdotes which were bandied about from province to province, from country even to country, and closed full lived medieval days of hunting and of battle.

Perhaps it was after some especially successful night when our unknown compiler had won the approval of a generous signore for his tales, and carried off a purse filled with a few gold coins to his lonely room, that the idea came to him of [5]framing the oral stories in a literary form. He had probably no notion that he was making literature, or founding one of the purest early classics of the young Italian tongue which the wit of the people had shaped out of the mother Latin. For him it was a matter of convenience and utility, though the urge to give a literary shape to the spreading idiom was in the air, deriving as an impellent necessity from the propagation of the spoken word which was widespread in Tuscany and vigorous elsewhere though in dialect forms. The first literary stirrings of the Italian conscience were in the air, and writers brought up on Latin chronicles and used to the mixed French and Italian of works like the Entrée en Espagne of Nicola da Padua were anxious to try their hands on the wonderful virgin material

within their reach. We may reflect in passing what a marvellous opportunity it was for poets and story-tellers, although they did not recognize it as such—to find themselves in the privileged position of having a virgin language at their command, not debased by the ready-made phrase, the trite mechanical expression. With a new language coming into [6]being, nothing or almost nothing is conventionalized. The idea runs straight from the dynamic thought to the natural phrase. There are no ready-made channels to absorb the spontaneity, convenient and inevitable as such moulds afterwards become.

So our “man of the Court” dreamed upon his great idea, developed it, thought it over, took counsel maybe of some tale-loving signore and set to work. We may, I think, fairly argue that it was some professional teller of tales, some giullare of more than average education rather than any monk or ascetic who wrote the first manuscript of the Hundred Old Tales, and this for the extremely free, not to say bawdy character of three or four of them. (These latter have not been translated.) Moreover, the curious and often ridiculous errors in geography, history, chronology and physics which we find in the Novellino is surely proof that the person who compiled it was no great scholar or man of learning. The mistakes which appear in it could hardly have been perpetrated by a learned monk well read in history and the classics. Again, Latin was still [7]the language of science and such scholarship as existed then. The times were rude in a certain sense, though perhaps less rude than is generally imagined, but some

of the errors to be found in the tales are so gross and absurd that they could not have been committed to a manuscript by anyone of real learning. Which gives us ground for believing that the original anthologist was of the minstrel class, a giullare of degree and some education, with literary yearnings, stimulated perhaps by the exercises of his French and Provençal colleagues in the arts of story-telling and song.

Italian critics and writers generally on the subject of early Italian literature are by no means agreed as to the origins of the tales which make up the Cento Novelle. It was during the latter half of the thirteenth century, however, that the new tongue began to make headway against the obstinacy of the Latin, but it is only towards the end of the thirteenth century that original works in Italian prose appeared. Before the thirteenth century practically no Italian literature existed. Italian writers had written in Latin, [8]in French, and in a kind of mixed French and Italian. We have the Latin chronicles of the IXth, Xth, XIth, and XIIth centuries which contain classical and mythological allusions. Guido delle Colonne wrote his Trojan poem in Latin. In the Bovo d’Antona, the Venetian dialect makes itself clearly felt. It was from about the year 1250 that the national literature developed. In the North of Italy, the poems of Giacomino da Verona and Bonvecino da Riva, which were religious in character, showed traces

of the movement which prepared the way for the instrument that was to serve Dante and Boccaccio. In the South of Italy, and in Sicily especially, at the Sicilian court, there arose a school of poets who specialised in love songs which were largely imitations of Provençal rhymers. To this Siculo-Provençal school belonged Pier delle Vigne, Inghilfredi, Jacopo d’Aquino and Rugieri Pugliese. The south of the Italian continent with the exception of Naples and some monasteries like Salerno, was steeped in ignorance, and rough dialects grew out of the Greco-Latin soil with nothing literary about them. Frederick II [9]himself, who ruled his Sicilian court, was a poet of sorts himself, though his productions were imitative and unoriginal like most of the members of the Sicilian school. As to what is exactly the oldest prose writing in the Italian language opinions differ, but certainly the Composizione del Mondo by Ristoro d’Arezzo (a Tuscan) who lived about the middle of the thirteenth century, is one of the oldest, if not the oldest. Matteo Spinelli da Giovenazzo, too, may lay

claim to be one of the very earliest writers in the Tuscan dialect, which afterwards, and with great rapidity, developed into the Italian language. Another name that may be mentioned is that of Ricordano Malespina.

The French fabliaux, and the works of the French and Provençal singers and makers of contes certainly inspired writings like the Novellino and the few other contemporary works of a similar character. The former reached a far higher degree of art than they ever attained to in Italy. To the extensive works in thousands of lines which the other romance languages can show, Italy can only put forward the bare skeleton tales of the Novellino, the Conti dei Antichi Cavalieri, [10]the Conti Morali del Anonimo Senese. Earlier works there were in Latin, such as the famous Gesta Romanorum and the Disciplina Clericalis. Several of the tales which appear in the Novellino also figure in Disciplina Clericalis and in the Gesta, as we shall see.

To all the poetry of the French and Provençal bards of the Middle Ages Italy has nothing to oppose. Cantastorie or minstrels there were, but the Italian giullare was considerably lower in the hierarchy of song than his French or Provençal brothers. In Italy such poems or songs lacked the profound impress of the people’s spirit. No memory of these Italian songs has remained, though they must have existed, and perhaps in plenty, but the versifiers of the period were plebian and lowly. They lacked the protection of important courts. While France, Spain and Germany can show a rich epic popular poetry, Italy can only boast a few hundred novelle in prose.

The tale or novella was a literary product especially pleasing to the Middle Ages, which was, in the matter of culture, an infantile age. The period seems to have almost a childish [11]affection for the marvellous tale. Learning and intellectual sophistication of any kind was in the hands of a few, was almost a kind of vested interest in which not only the common people, but even the lords and knights themselves had no interest or claim. This was especially the case in Italy, where no vehicle existed for its propagation until the end of the thirteenth century. Therefore to simple minds, unused to the mysteries of literature, save those written in a hermetic and pompous tongue fast disappearing from common use, the tale was a spiritual refreshment aptly suited to the time. In England, too, we see examples of Latin tales as in the De Naturis Rerum of Neckham.

But if Italian culture was backward at this time, or non-existent save in Latin forms, it grew very quickly, and from its plebian sources there came into being the new art of Boccaccio. For though the language was new, the Italians were by no means a new people. They had behind them a long uninterrupted literary tradition from which they could with difficulty withdraw themselves. There was even a similarity of [12]spirit between those who clung to the old traditions and wrote in Latin, and the people seeking to express themselves in their young language. The two literatures had a great deal of the same spirit and character. The early Italian prose developed to a great extent along the lines of the earlier chroniclers who wrote in medieval Latin. Nor could it very well be otherwise, for even a new literature of a new tongue requires models, and where should the new nationalist scribes turn for models save to the Latin writings of their own countrymen? It is not too much to say that Italian grew quickly

because of its Latin traditions. It is astonishing to think how quickly it did grow, from the simple beginnings of the Cento Novelle to Boccaccio. In less than one hundred years Dante is reached. This rapid growth evidently depended on the fact that Italian was a continuation of Middle-Age Latin. In its spoken form, it had been in use for some time, and it merely required a certain amount of independence and belief in the popular idiom to turn it to literary uses.

In the tales which make up the Novellino, [13]we can see how near the form is to the spoken language, especially in those tales which are of contemporary and local origin. The compiler did little more than put into simple Tuscan prose tales that for the most part were well known in oral tradition. When I come to examine the tales individually, we shall see which came from the classics, which from Oriental sources, which from Provence and which were the product of local wit.

It is alleged in some quarters that the Novellino or the Cento Novelle Antiche was not the work of a single compiler. This thesis is supported by arguments which point out the diversity of style and colour in the tales. It seems to me that it may also be argued from this that, as indisputably the stories derive from many stories, such as Provence, the Bible, the Greek and Latin classics, and the tales of the moral and ascetic writers, such a variety of style and colour is only to be expected. If one prefers the theory of single authorship—an authorship of course which is limited as the subject matter of the tales was common property—one can find just as many arguments for it as the [14]upholders of the plural authorship theory can lay against it. There are those who deny the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey to one poet. One cannot pretend to settle a question which still perplexes Italian critics of their own early literature. One may, however, refer briefly to some of the best accredited opinion on the subject.

Francesco Costerò, who believes the tales to be written by several hands, writes in his preface to a popular edition of the Novellino: “Nobody has yet, in spite of all the efforts of the learned, arrived at determining for certain the time or authorship of the Novellino. This is very natural, in the case of a work which was obviously written by several people and gathered in volume with time. In the Novellino, Saladin is spoken of, and we know that he died in 1193, during a war with the Christians of the Third Crusade. The book also makes reference to the Cavaliere Alardo di Valleri, who contributed to the victory of Charles d’Anjou at the battle of Tagliacozzo in 1268. From one date to the other there pass some seventy-five years, whence we should have to admit that the author was more than a hundred [15]years old if he were one and the same person. Further, we must take account of the style of the book”. This argument of Costerò does not seem very difficult to answer.

Some people are of the opinion that Brunetto Latini was the author of some of the tales and Professor Carbone writes that: “Latini added some of the finest flowers of the collection and the two narratives of Papirius and the Emperor Trajan are to be found with slight differences in the Cento Novelle and in Fiore di Filosofi e di molti Savi”.

To give an idea of the close similarity that exists between the two versions of the Trajan tale, I give a translation of both versions and place them side by side. The Trajan story is No. LXIX of the present collection. The version to be found in the Fiore di Filosofi runs:

Trajan was a very just emperor. Having one day mounted his horse to enter into battle with his cavalry, a widow woman came before him, and taking hold of his foot, begged him very earnestly and asked him that he should do justice on those who had wrongfully killed her son, a most upright [16]lad. The Emperor spoke to her and said: I will give you satisfaction on my return.…

The version in the Novellino runs:

The Emperor Trajan was a most just lord. Going one day with his host of cavalry against his enemies, a widow woman came before him, and taking hold of his stirrup, said: Sire, render me justice against those who have wrongfully killed my son. And the Emperor answered: I will give you satisfaction when I return.

As we see, the versions are almost identical, and the similarity continues in about the same degree throughout the two versions of the same tale.

The opinion has been put forward that Francesco da Barberino had a hand in the shaping of the final collection of tales. This theory was advanced by Federigo Ubaldini in 1640. Adolfo Ancona, certainly one of the weightiest authorities on early Italian literature, is of the opinion that the Novellino was the work of one man. The matter is complicated by the existence of more than one manuscript. [17]