The first edition of Florentine linguist Leonardo Salviati’s (1539-89) reviled reworking of the Decameron by Boccaccio, ‘cleaned up’ to avoid Church censorship.
The Decameron was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1559, and again in 1564 ‘for its irreverent treatment of clerics and the church, and its questionable morality’ (Carter, p.893). While the contents of Boccaccio’s hundred tales were agreed by censors to be too unsuitably lascivious and immoral for a Counter-Reformation audience, the importance of the figure of Boccaccio and his writing to Tuscan culture and language, particularly in academic circles, led to efforts to rescue the work in some form by adapting it in line with the Church’s strict code.
The present edition, Salviati’s, was the second attempt to do so. The first in 1573, prepared by Florentine academicians under the supervision of Cosimo de’ Medici, and also printed by the Giunti (at their own expense), was condemned by the Inquisition before it had left the presses, and was banned from sale on pain of excommunication (Carter, p.896). Salviati’s attempt was prepared with the approval of Giacomo Buoncompagni, the Duke of Sora, another Medici Duke, Francesco I, and at the urging of the Giunti printers, who, out of pocket after the 1573 edition, applied for the privilege to print another attempt as early as 1579. This edition appears with two imprints; the Venetian, as here, dated August 1582, and the Florentine a month or so later, in October/November.
It was deeply unpopular. ‘Salviati’s revision was poorly received, and few approved of his treatment of the text, which was far more extreme than that of the 1573 revision. Indeed, his harshest critics went so far as to accuse him of sacrificing his Tuscan literary heritage for cheap personal gain’ (Carter, p.894). Some laid the blame at printers’ door, one contemporary writing acidly that ‘for the sake of just 25 scudi the Giunta of Florence have so disfigured Boccaccio that even his most dedicated admirers wouldn’t recognise him’ (Traiano Boccalini, in Carter, p.894; our translation).
An unusual addition Is the half-page plate at the end of the text, facing the colophon, apparently recording Salviati’s endorsement of the text as his, ‘written’ in his own hand: ‘‘Io Lionardo Salviati ho riscontr. questo di 29 d’Aprile 1582, e soscritto di man ppria’. After the colophon are over 40 pages of notes that list the differences between the text of the 1573 and this 1582 edition, perhaps the work of printers keen to distance their most recent publication with the last disastrous attempt.
Sympathetic paper repairs to title page and first text leaf at gutter and corners, subsequent three leaves recornered, trimmed close at head but otherwise in very good condition.
CNCE 6372.
Tim Carter, ‘Another promoter of the 1582 “Rassettatura” of the “Decameron”’, The Modern Language Review, 81.4. 1986, pp.893-99.
