The Apocryphal Boccaccio

Abstract

All worthy poets are magnets that attract orphaned writings in search of an author. As lodestones, they also draw legendary accretions to their life stories. With the passing of time, poets puff up, pulling into their personal space apocryphal works, specious biographical anecdotes, and fanciful portraits. Who was more deserving than Homer to have thrust upon him a third epic, the Batrachomyomachia (batrachos + mus + machia = frog-mouse war)? Actually, an epic parody of the Iliad, this amusing battle of small creatures first appeared, attributed to Homer, printed at Brescia (1474?), then at Venice in 1486. Virgil for centuries, up into the twentieth, enjoyed a surplus of verse in the Appendix vergiliana. Short poems he is said to have written at age twenty-six are filed as interpolations into the fourth-century version of his Vita by Donatus, who augmented the second-century archetype by Suetonius. Virgil’s Loeb Library translator dismisses them as spurious, but includes them as “minor poems” in his edition, first issued nearly a hundred years ago, following, as is proper for an Appendix, the trio of canonical works—Eclogues, Georgics, and the Aeneid. This suggests that major editions of an author will have what is usually an appended category at the end with suppositious writings. The apocrypha themselves cluster into canons, as we shall see for Boccaccio. Thus by attracting apocrypha do those who are already great become even greater—provided, generally speaking, that they are men. Female poets can fare rather differently. Women are subject to an opposite process of reduction. What they have written may mysteriously migrate into the orbits of their male contemporaries, as would have happened to the sixteenth-century poet Laura Battiferra degli Ammannati, if the opinion of her eighteenth-century reader Anton Maria Biscioni had prevailed. Biscioni, learned librarian of the Biblioteca Laurenziana, rightly penned in the manuscript of her poetry, Il primo libro dell’opere toscane, that it served the printer for the first edition of 1560. Biscioni then mistakenly continues: “I think