Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Decameron (1353)

  For all the dramatic intensity of its opening account of the plague, what strikes one most forcibly about the Decameron’s second plane of reality, the world of the lieta brigata, is its literariness, its artificiality, its sense of unworldliness. Poetically real, it is a very different world from the tangible world of the stories themselves. The coded implications of the world of the storytellers are at once apparent from the choice of their initial meeting place. They do not meet in the cathedral, or in one of Florence’s more centrally situated churches, but in the church of Santa Maria Novella, which had only recently been incorporated within the walls of the city. The choice of assembly place is an early pointer to the author’s delight in wordplay, since its very name foreshadows the imminent participation of the young people who forgather in Santa Maria Novella in the telling of novelle. But it is when Boccaccio introduces the various members of the group to his reader that the allusive implications begin to flow in earnest. In an effort to preserve the illusion of historical objectivity that has been studiously fostered in his description of the plague and its effects, he claims that he could tell us their actual names, but will refrain from doing so in order to protect them from possible future embarrassment. The embarrassment of which he writes is that which would result from the stories that will follow, all of which they either listened to or recounted themselves. The protective pseudonyms supplied by Boccaccio for the ten members of the lieta brigata have given rise to much speculation. Confining ourselves to the facts, we may note that all of the names carry literary or mythological overtones and that several of them had already appeared as the names of characters in one or more of Boccaccio’s earlier vernacular writings. Pampinea, literally ‘full of vigour’, is a name that had already appeared in the Comedía delle ninfe fiorentine. Fiammetta, ‘little flame’, was the name of the female protagonist and narrator of the Elegia, as well as that of the presiding figure in the questioni d’amore sequence in the Filocolo. Filomena, ‘the beloved’ or ‘the lover of song’, was the dedicatee of the Filostrato, whilst Emilia, ‘she who allures’, was the object of the intense rivalry of Palamon and Arcite in the Teseida. Of the other three ladies’ names, Elissa is a variant on the original name of Virgil’s Dido, Neifile (‘newly enamoured’) probably represents, according to Branca, the poetry of the dolce stil novo and of Dante himself, whilst Lauretta is the diminutive form of Petrarch’s Laura. Thus these last three are associated with the poets (Virgil, Dante and Petrarch) whose work Boccaccio most greatly admired.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  He was a Frenchman first, an ultramontane second, but his attachment was to France as a culture rather than a crown, and he took the lead in reconciling the papacy and the French hierarchy to republican institutions. Marshal McMahon picked him for the Algiers job, and the papacy doubled his powers by making him Apostolic Delegate for the Sahara region. Colonel Playfair, British consul in Algiers, noted: ‘We have St Augustine amongst us again.’ The comment was shrewd: Lavigerie clearly saw himself in the role of a Constantinian patriarch, knitting together the ecclesiastical infrastructure of a new African empire. In Carthage, on the site of the ancient citadel, he built a cathedral bigger even than Augustine’s basilica at Hippo, and installed in it, ready for his own reception, an elaborate and grandiose tomb. He held strongly to the Elect Nation theory: ‘God has chosen France to make of Algeria the cradle of a great and Christian nation . . . our country is watching . . . the eyes of the whole church are fixed upon us.’ He thought of Algeria as ‘the open port of entry to a barbaric continent with 200 million inhabitants.’ The White Fathers were created by him as a Jesuit-style élite of priests, bound to mission-work by special lifelong vows. To assist them, Lavigerie became the first prince of the Catholic Church to take a vigorous line against the slave-trade, and swung France, and the other Catholic powers, into line. At the 1884 Berlin Conference on Colonial Questions, the Protestants at last got Catholic backing on this issue, and all the powers undertook to suppress slavery and to exterminate the traffic; they agreed, too, to adopt full religious liberty in colonial territories and to guarantee special protection for Christian missions. Five years later, at the Brussels Conference for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Lavigerie got a definitive international agreement drawn up and signed. There is no doubt that Lavigerie’s initial aim was to Christianize the Arab peoples, and thus begin to reverse the ravages introduced by the Monophysite schism over 1300 years before. He sent his White Fathers into the desert (where they were often murdered by Tuaregs) and for a time ran his own ‘Christian Militia’ to protect them. But like Raymond Lull before him, and indeed everyone else, he found it impossible to make any real headway against Islam. The French could conquer Arab territories, and annex them, or establish protectorates; and they planted huge numbers of Christian settlers in Algeria; but they could not make Moslem converts. It was this failure which led them (later followed by the Belgians) to push south of the Sahara into black Africa, and the easy missionary pickings among the pagans. Here they did exceedingly well; on the whole, much better than the Protestants. Lavigerie’s advice was: ‘Be all things to all men.’ He told his Fathers: ‘Love the poor pagans. Be kind to them. Heal their wounds.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  speeches by Peter, who supported Paul, by Paul himself and Barnabas, and a summing up by James, the younger brother of Jesus. He put forward a compromise which was apparently adopted ‘with the agreement of the whole Church’. Under this, Paul and his colleagues were to be sent back to Antioch accompanied by a Jerusalem delegation bearing a letter. The letter set out the terms of the compromise: converts need not submit to circumcision but they must observe certain precepts in the Jewish law in matters of diet and sexual conduct. Luke’s record in Acts states that this halfway position was arrived at ‘unanimously’, and that when the decision was conveyed to the Antioch congregation, ‘all rejoiced’. The Jerusalem delegates were thus able to return to Jerusalem, having solved the problem, and Paul carried on with his mission. This, then, is the account of the first council of the Church as presented by a consensus document, what one might call an eirenic and ecumenical version, designed to present the new religion as a mystical body with a co-ordinated and unified life of its own, moving to inevitable and predestined conclusions. Acts, indeed, says specifically that the ruling of the Council was ‘the decision of the Holy Spirit’. No wonder it was accepted unanimously! No wonder that ‘all’ in Antioch ‘rejoiced at the encouragement it brought’. Paul’s version, however, presents quite a different picture. And his is not merely an eye-witness account, but an account by the chief and central participant, perhaps the only one who grasped the magnitude of the issues at stake. Paul is not interested in smoothing the ragged edges of controversy. He is presenting a case to men and women whose spiritual lives are dominated by the issues confronting the elders in that room in Jerusalem. His purpose is not eirenic or ecumenical, still less diplomatic. He is a man burning to tell the truth and to imprint it like fire in the minds of his readers. In the apocryphal Acts of Paul, written perhaps a hundred years after his death, the tradition of his physical appearance is vividly preserved: ‘... a little man with a big, bold head. His legs were crooked, but his bearing was noble. His eyebrows grew close together and he had a big nose. A man who breathed friendliness.’ He himself says that his appearance was unimpressive. He was, he admits, no orator; not, in externals, a charismatic leader. But the authentic letters which survive him radiate the inner charisma: they have the ineffaceable imprint of a massive personality, eager, adventurous, tireless, voluble, a man who struggles heroically for the truth and then delivers it in uncontrollable excitement, hurrying ahead of his powers of articulation.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  the great tourist sights of the empire: an impressive symbol of a fierce, living, expanding religion. Herod was equally generous to the diaspora Jews. In all the big cities he provided them with community centres and he endowed and built scores of synagogues, the new type of ecclesiastical institution, prototype of the Christian basilica, where services were held for the dispersed. In the great Roman cities, the Jewish communities gave an impression of wealth, increasing power, self-confidence and success. Within the Roman system, they were exceptionally privileged. Many of the diaspora Jews were already Roman citizens, and all Jews, since the days of Julius Caesar, who greatly admired them, enjoyed rights of association. This meant they could meet to hold religious services, community dinners and feasts, and for every kind of social and charitable purpose. The Romans recognized the strength of Jewish religious feelings by, in effect, exempting them from observance of the state religion. In place of emperor-worship, the Jews were allowed to show their respect for the state by offering sacrifices on the emperor’s behalf. This was a unique concession. The wonder is that it was not more resented. But the diaspora Jews were, on the whole, admired and imitated, rather than envied. They were not in the least self-effacing. They could, when they chose, play a leading role in municipal politics, especially in Egypt, where they were perhaps over a million strong. Some had notable careers in the imperial service. Among these there were passionate admirers of the Roman system, like the historian Josephus, or the philosopher Philo. While the Jews of Judea, and still more so of semi-Jewish areas like Galilee, tended to be poor, backward, obscurantist, narrow-minded, fundamentalist, uncultured and xenophobic, the diaspora Jews were expansive, rich, cosmopolitan, well-adjusted to Roman norms and to Hellenic culture, Greek-speaking, literate and open to ideas. They were also, in notable contrast to the Palestine Jews, anxious to spread their religion. In general, diaspora Jews were proselytizers, often passionately so. Throughout this period some Jews at least had universalist aims, and hoped that Israel would be ‘the light of the gentiles’. The Greek adaptation of the Old Testament, or Septuagint, which was composed in Alexandria and was widely used in diaspora communities, has an expansionist and missionary flavour quite alien to the original. And there were in all probability catechisms and manuals for aspiring converts, reflecting the liberal-mindedness and large-heartedness of the diaspora Jew to the gentile. Philo, too, projected in his philosophy the concept of a gentile mission and wrote joyfully: ‘There is not a single Greek or barbarian city, not a single people,

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  evaded the normal hierarchical system of the Church. But, unlike the easterners, it was not passive and stationary. On the contrary, the Irish monks had a tremendous cultural dynamic. They were enormously learned in the scriptures, and wonderfully gifted in the arts. They combined exquisite Latin scholarship with a native cultural tradition which went back to the La Tène civilization of the first century. Their rudimentary dry-stone houses were unpretentious without, but treasure-houses within. They had a great deal to teach western Europe. And, above all, they were nomadic. In the western part of the British Isles, in fact in western Europe as a whole, sixth-and seventh-century communications were maritime. The Celtic monks were all sailors; they travelled by water and they lived on fish. The semi-mythical St Brendan, who founded the monastery of Clonfert in Galway, and died about 580, was supposed to have undertaken a remarkable series of voyages, the story of which was translated into French, Norman, Provençal, German, Italian and Norwegian. Monks were often buried at sea: the Welsh monk Gildas, the British equivalent of Gregory of Tours, though a far less gifted historian, asked, when he died, to be laid in a boat and pushed out to sea. What is more, clan relationships spanned the seas. Thus St Columba’s mission from Ulster to the Western Isles of Scotland, where he founded the great monastery of Iona, was almost certainly a product of clan politics. And from western Scotland the Celtic monks penetrated east and south; during the course of a century they moved in a great arc round the north-western fringes of the British Isles, reaching the English kingdom of Northumbria in the early sixth century, where Aidan from Iona was invited by the Northumbrian court to found a sister- house at Lindisfarne in 634. Meanwhile the Irish had moved far east. St Columbanus, born c .540, was like Columba an Irish tribal leader, head of a family monastery. He was a big man, with big ideas, a good knowledge of Latin – he had read Virgil, Pliny, Sallust, Horace, Ovid and Juvenal as well as the Fathers – and even a little Greek; and a burning passion to spread his own austere brand of Christianity. In 575 he landed in Brittany with a shipload of monks. They wore long white habits, nothing else, carried curved staffs and their liturgical books packed in waterproof leather bags; and around their necks they had water-bottles and pouches containing holy relics and consecrated wafers. This was one of the most remarkable expeditions in history. By the time Columbanus died in 615, he, his entourage and their immediate followers had spread

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Nyasaland, which had a pit-prison, and where a man died after receiving over two hundred lashes. Andrew Chirnside reported to the Royal Geographical Society: ‘Flogging with the whip is an everyday occurrence, three lads in one day getting upwards of 100 lashes; and it is a fact that after being flogged on several occasions, salt has been rubbed on their bleeding backs.’ He claimed he had seen a man executed without trial. In 1883 there was a similar case in Nigeria where a woman died after she had been beaten and had red pepper rubbed in her wounds. These cases were rare, and caused uproar. More damaging, in the long run, was the gentle deprecation of missionary work by travellers like Mary Kingsley, whose Travels in West Africa (1897) was a huge success; she hinted that the natives were probably better if left alone, polygamy and all, and she poured scorn on missionary efforts to dress African women in the asexual ‘Mother Hubbard’. In general, though, missionaries were held in high esteem, and reporting on their work was almost universally favourable. The pattern of hero-worship was set by the Livingstone legend, and in the late nineteenth century they provided a new type of hero for European, and still more American, society. Their competitors for fame, imperialists and business tycoons, had their opponents; but to all except a tiny minority, the missionaries seemed harmless as well as valiant. Biographies of well- known missionaries sold in large editions, and formed a special department of literature. S. W. Partridge, the leading performer in the field, wrote no less than thirty-six; and they often had children’s editions. For the Catholics, the missionary became a new type of saint, and even the Protestants indulged in hagiography. There were children’s games, such as The African Picture Game ; What Next?, which had thirty-six cards, four series of nine each devoted to famous missionaries; A Missionary Tour of India, like snakes and ladders; Missionary Outpost, ‘an instructive round- game for children’; missionary jigsaws and painting-books, and, for adults, Missionary Lotto. In Catholic countries there were elaborate money-raising schemes, run by convent schools, by which schoolgirls could buy stamps and ‘adopt’ African orphans. The climax of missionary expectations coincided with the climax of European imperialism, and it was very widely supposed that the entire world would be Christianized in the process of being westernized – that is, incorporated politically, economically, or at any rate culturally, in a system which was still wholly identified with Christendom. It is this optimistic background of global predominance which helps to explain the

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The shaming of a parsimonious benefactor forms the subject, also, of the tale that follows (I, 7), but this time it is brought about by the elaborate telling of a story within a story by one Bergamino, described as ‘a faster and more brilliant talker than anyone could ever imagine’ (‘oltre al credere di chi non l’udí presto parlatore e ornato’). The target of Bergamino’s timely parable is Can Grande della Scala, whose sudden fit of meanness towards his guest is totally out of character, whereas the protagonist of the following tale (I, 8), Ermino Grimaldi, is not only the richest man in Italy but also so much of a miser that his name has become synonymous with avarice. The transformation of his character is effected by the sharp riposte (‘Let Generosity be painted there’) of a distinguished courtier, Guiglielmo Borsiere, to his request for a suitable topic for a new picture he intends to commission for the main hall of his house in Genoa. Admonitory wit effects a comparable transformation in the next story (I, 9), recounting the way in which a gentlewoman of Gascony, travelling through Cyprus, having suffered a brutal assault from a pack of ruffians, converts the king, a cowardly weakling, into the implacable scourge of all wrongdoers. And the First Day ends with yet another admonitory tale (I, 10), this time featuring a brilliant physician, Master Alberto of Bologna, now ‘an old man approaching seventy’, who reproaches a young gentlewoman and her companions for mocking his amatory feelings towards her, by his witty and delightfully allusive account of the way young ladies go about the eating of leeks. No specific topic is prescribed for the stories of the First Day, but all are concerned with various forms of human weakness, and all involve the application of the intellectual faculties to correct or modify their harmful effects. Intelligence is thus established as the initial theme of the work as a whole, whilst in the stories of the Second Day the theme of Fortune occupies a dominant position. Boccaccio’s third major theme is Love, which figures prominently in the stories of the following three days, although in several of the stories narrated on those days, especially on the Third Day, Intelligence is an important ancillary theme. As already noted, the protagonists of the story of King Agilulf and the groom (III, 2) embody the qualities of wisdom and ingenuity respectively in their reactions to the events of the narrative. Ingenuity is also the distinguishing feature of the anonymous Florentine noblewoman (III, 3) who hoodwinks a solemn friar into unwittingly acting as pander between herself and the young man on whom she has fixed her amorous longings. The initial description of the lady is significant, stressing as it does the strength of her intellectual character.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  It was at any rate in Florence that Boccaccio spent his childhood. Contemporary records indicate that his infancy coincides with the period when his father was making his mark with the famous Florentine banking house known as the Compagnia dei Bardi. At some time before 1320, his father married Margherita de’ Mardoli, whose family could proudly boast an ancestral connection with Beatrice Portinari, the inspiring force of Dante’s Commedia. From early childhood, therefore, he was ideally placed to acquire the rudiments of that veneration of Dante which is evident in the whole of his work from his earliest compositions to the lengthy but unfinished commentaries on Dante’s poem that constitute his last major literary labour. One of the companions of his childhood and adolescence was Zanobi da Strada, who like Boccaccio was destined to become a poet and to establish himself in Neapolitan society. And it was Zanobi’s father, Giovanni Mazzuoli, acting as tutor to both, who encouraged his pupils to study and admire the work of the poet of the Commedia. Boccaccio’s reverence for Dante was similar in its intensity to that of Dante himself for Virgil. Just as Dante’s poetry is interspersed with echoes and reminiscences of the Aeneid, so Boccaccio’s work is consistently studded with fragments from the medieval epic of his Florentine predecessor. Boccaccio’s description of Dante, in a letter to Petrarch of 1359, as the first guide of his studies (primus studiorum dux) recalls the terminology used by Dante in the Commedia to describe the great Latin poet. At the age of thirteen, or thereabouts, Boccaccio moved from Florence to Naples, where his father had been appointed to a high-ranking position in the Neapolitan branch of the Bardi bank, which, like the other leading Florentine banking houses, the Peruzzi and the Acciaiuoli, had for many years been the financial mainstay of the kingdom’s Angevin rulers. Even before reaching adolescence, the young Boccaccio had himself been apprenticed by his father to a career in banking, for which he had no natural inclination whatsoever. After what he later described as ‘six wasted years’, he persuaded his father to allow him to take up the study of canon law at the Neapolitan Studium, a Dominican institution established in 1269, which had close links with the university, founded in 1224 by Emperor Frederick II. Although his formal course of studies there was little more congenial to him than the career he had abandoned, it enabled him not only to begin assembling the vast store of erudition that underpins all of his literary work, but also to establish influential contacts in the fields of scholarship and culture in general.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  His withdrawal to Certaldo signalled a pause in his involvement in Florentine diplomatic affairs, which had lasted for more than a decade and had taken him at least three times to the Romagna (in 1350, 1353 and 1357), once to the court of Ludwig of Brandenburg in the South Tyrol to explore the reasons for his intervention in Milanese affairs (in December 1351/January 1352), and once as leading spokesman of an apparently very successful legation to Pope Innocent VI at Avignon (in May–June 1354). There was also his diplomatically abortive mission to Petrarch in Padua during the spring of 1351. Other journeys he undertook during the decade preceding his move to Certaldo included a visit in September 1355 to Naples, during which he worked briefly in the great library at Monte Cassino, and a further visit in March 1359 to Petrarch, who was now established in Milan. Boccaccio had long admired Petrarch’s clerical garb, which by this time he had probably himself adopted, for there is a decree of Innocent VI dated 2 November 1360 granting certain dispensations and privileges to Boccaccio, which would suggest that he had taken holy orders some little time before it was issued. The decade was notable also, from Boccaccio’s point of view, for the fleeting visit to Florence in 1355 of Niccola Acciaiuoli, by now universally known as the Grand Seneschal. It seems that during his visit, Acciaiuoli referred disparagingly to Boccaccio as Iohannes tranquillitatum, a label implying that he was a fair-weather friend whose support was not to be counted upon in times of political adversity such as Acciaiuoli had experienced during his exile from Naples to Avignon some years before.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  He is apologetic about his cramped kitchen with its peeling counters and ’70s stove, but I tell him he could be cooking in a cave and I would be equally enchanted. When dinner is on the table, glistening scallops from the fishmonger at the farmers’ market, a bright green salad, long stems of roasted baby broccoli, fresh focaccia from the Italian market, I stand by the table with my hands pressed together over my heart. He urges me to sit down before the food gets cold. “I will in a minute, I’m just taking it in. It’s always been my dream for a man to cook for me. Sorry to tell you one man beat you to the punch by preparing a lovely picnic for me this summer, but this is next level. I really appreciate it,” I say and am quiet; if I say more, I will cry. Our nights always end the same way, with my going back to his kid-free apartment after dinner if we have eaten out, or straight to the couch and then bed after cleaning the kitchen if he’s cooked for me. He is intrigued and enthralled by how easily I can orgasm and peppers me with questions about my previous liaisons. “Your confidence is a huge turn-on,” he says one night after we have depleted ourselves and are lying naked in his bed. “You have so much power.” I appreciate the compliment and love that this is how he views me, but I clarify that I’m more curious than confident. I’ve slept with twice as many people in the past four months as I did the rest of my life until now, so having sex has become something of a fact-finding mission for me at this point. “Yes, but you have to have enough confidence to get to that point. I don’t have the same insatiable curiosity as you do, maybe because I had so many years as a bachelor before I got married. And honestly, it’s enough for me just to keep up with your sexual appetite,” he says. I laugh and he continues, “No, really. I was forty when I got married. That’s a lot of years of bachelorhood. I’m older than you and you have a ton of energy.” “You’re not that much older than me,” I say. He raises his eyebrows, so I ask, “Wait, how old are you?” “62,” he says. “Oh come on! How old really?” I ask, propping myself up on my elbow, my hair spilling over his bare chest. “62,” he repeats. “No way!” I shriek, my eyes widening. “I’m shocked. You have a six-pack for God’s sake! Are people as old as 62 even capable of having six-packs? You’re my first older man. I’ve slept with men a little older but this is a big age difference.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘A bad one, and may God deal harshly with the whole lot of them. And my reason for telling you so is that, unless I formed the wrong impression, nobody there who was connected with the Church seemed to me to display the slightest sign of holiness, piety, charity, moral rectitude or any other virtue. On the contrary, it seemed to me that they were all so steeped in lust, greed, avarice, fraud, envy, pride, and other like sins and worse (if indeed that is possible), that I regard the place as a hotbed for diabolical rather than devotional activities. As far as I can judge, it seems to me that your pontiff, and all of the others too, are doing their level best to reduce the Christian religion to nought and drive it from the face of the earth, whereas they are the very people who should be its foundation and support. ‘But since it is evident to me that their attempts are unavailing, and that your religion continues to grow in popularity, and become more splendid and illustrious, I can only conclude that, being a more holy and genuine religion than any of the others, it deservedly has the Holy Ghost as its foundation and support. So whereas earlier I stood firm and unyielding against your entreaties and refused to turn Christian, I now tell you quite plainly that nothing in the world could prevent me from becoming a Christian.2 Let us therefore go to the church where, in accordance with the traditional rite of your holy faith, you shall have me baptized.’ When Jehannot, who was expecting precisely the opposite conclusion, heard him saying this, he was the happiest man that ever lived. And he went with him to Nôtre Dame de Paris,3 and asked the clergy there to baptize Abraham. This they did, as soon as they heard that he himself desired it: Jehannot stood as his sponsor, and gave him the name of John. And afterwards he engaged the most learned teachers to instruct him thoroughly in our religion, which he quickly mastered, thereafter becoming a good and worthy man, holy in all his ways. THIRD STORYMelchizedek1 the Jew, with a story about three rings, avoids a most dangerous trap laid for him by Saladin.2 Neifile’s story was well received by all the company, and when she fell silent, Filomena began at the queen’s behest to address them as follows:

• From The Decameron (1353)

  According to the narrator, Filomena, she was: a noblewoman of striking beauty and impeccable breeding, who was endowed by Nature with as lofty a temperament and shrewd an intellect as could be found in any other woman of her time. 65 The narrative, carefully structured and brilliantly told, includes a smattering of anti-clerical polemic and, by way of justification for the lady’s adulterous quest, a disapproving commentary on arranged marriages (her husband being an immensely rich woollen-draper, incapable of anything more than ‘distinguishing wool from cotton, supervising the setting up of a loom, or debating the virtues of a particular yarn with a spinner-woman’), but the novella’s strength derives from the high degree of sophistication with which the lady pursues and eventually achieves her objective. The exercise of intelligence in the pursuit of an objective, generally amatory in scope, is seen in most of the other stories of the Third Day, from the initial account of Masetto’s heroic exertions in the convent (III, 1) to the tale, appropriated by Shakespeare in All’s Well that Ends Well, of Gilette of Narbonne’s successful fulfilment of the seemingly impossible conditions imposed by a reluctant husband for the consummation of their marriage (III, 9). A variant on the same theme (intelligence as the spur in the cause of love) is found in the story of Cimon (V, 1), where the boorish hero, having miraculously acquired wisdom through his chance discovery in a woodland clearing of the sleeping form of the beautiful Iphigenia, employs all his resources of guile and physical strength to secure her as his bride. Whether he is deserving of such a prize, which he obtains through murder and abduction, depends on how much importance one attributes to the underlying intent to echo the myth of Pholus the centaur. The tale that immediately follows (V, 2) is a love story of quite a different kind, and includes an episode where Martuccio Gomito, having been captured and imprisoned by the Saracens, wins his freedom and the grateful esteem of the King of Tunis by providing him with some ingenious advice on how to win a war against a powerful invader. The form of intelligence displayed in the narratives of the Sixth Day is verbal wit, of which several examples have already appeared in the course of the First Day’s proceedings. The tale of Madonna Oretta (VI, 1) is of special interest, since her clever response to her admirer’s persistent but clumsy attempts at storytelling is preceded by a catalogue of his shortcomings. Like the scene in which Hamlet advises the players on what to avoid in the art of acting, the passage reveals by implication the qualities that Boccaccio considered essential to the art of the storyteller: variety of phrasing, avoidance of repetition, clarity of exposition, and a delivery suited to the characters and incidents being described.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  the Treaty of Westphalia and the end of religious warfare. During the eighteenth century they virtually ceased in most areas, especially after the dissolution of the Jesuits led to the enforced withdrawal of over 3,000 of the best field-workers, and by far the most efficient international organization. In the eighteenth century, then, the Protestants were left with virtually a clear field. They were slow to take advantage of their opportunities. In Protestant countries too, the flame of faith burned low. Not only were German freelances the first in India; for a long time they were the only ones. The British upper classes and the Anglican Church were very slow to endorse missionary work. The East India Company did not want missionaries at all, and approved of clergymen only to minister to the European community. The most famous of the south Indian missionaries, Christian Friedrich Schwartz, who served there for forty-eight years ending in 1798, was not only a German but was not even validly ordained by Anglican standards. One British officer wrote of him: ‘The knowledge and integrity of this irreproachable missionary have retrieved the character of Europeans from imputations of general depravity’. But this was the view of an enthusiast. The British establishment did not want such people. The first Anglican bishop sent out to India, Thomas Fanshawe Middleton, consecrated Bishop of Calcutta in 1814, did not know what to do with his largely German missionaries: ‘I must either license them or silence them.’ Indeed, the first positive missionary efforts by the British had nothing to do with government, officialdom, the ruling class or the Anglican Church. They were essentially lower middle-class, dissenting ventures. The first modern missionary society, 1792, was Baptist, and was followed by the largely Congregationalist London Missionary Society in 1795. These people actually got missionaries working in the field. Carey, for instance, was a Northampton shoemaker, the son of a weaver; his companion in India, William Ward, was a printer. Such men were not necessarily ill- educated. Carey, who was self-taught, spoke Latin, Hebrew, Greek and Dutch, and he produced a Sanskrit grammar of 1,000 pages; his 1792 pamphlet, An Inquiry into the Obligation of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen, was the most influential of all tracts in getting a large-scale missionary movement going. Again, his printer friend Ward wrote a book on Manners and Customs of the Hindus; and together they created Serempore College for the Instruction of Asiatic, Christian and Other Youth, in Eastern Literature and European Science. But, as a rule, they were impelled more by simple Bible-reading enthusiasm than by any knowledge of

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  to which the custom of Sabbath observance has not spread, or in which the feast days, the kindling of the lights, and many of our prohibitions about food are not heeded.’ This claim was generally true. Though it is impossible to present accurate figures, it is clear that by the time of Christ the diaspora Jews greatly outnumbered the settled Jews of Palestine: perhaps by as many as 4.5 million to 1 million. Those attached in some way to the Jewish faith formed a significant proportion of the total population of the empire and in Egypt, where they were most strongly entrenched, one in every seven or eight inhabitants was a Jew. A large proportion of these people were not Jewish by race. Nor were they full Jews in the religious sense: that is, few of them were circumcized or expected to obey the law in all its rigour. Most of them were noachides, or God-fearers. They recognized and worshipped the Jewish God and they were permitted to mingle with synagogue worshippers to learn Jewish law and customs – exactly like the future Christian catechumens. But, unlike the catechumens, they were not generally expected to become full Jews; they had intermediate status of various kinds. On the other hand, they seemed to have played a full role in Jewish social arrangements. Indeed, this was a great part of the appeal of diaspora Judaism. The Jews, with their long and assured tradition of monotheism, had much to offer to a world looking for a sure, single god, but their ethics were in some ways even more attractive than their theology. The Jews were admired for their stable family life, for their attachment to chastity while avoiding the excesses of celibacy, for the impressive relationships they sustained between children and parents, for the peculiar value they attached to human life, for their abhorrence of theft and their scrupulosity in business. But even more striking was their system of communal charity. They had always been accustomed to remit funds to Jerusalem for the upkeep of the Temple and the relief of the poor. During the Herodian period they also developed, in the big diaspora cities, elaborate welfare services for the indigent, the poor, the sick, widows and orphans, prisoners and incurables. These arrangements were much talked about and even imitated; and, of course, they became a leading feature of the earliest Christian communities and a principal reason for the spread of Christianity in the cities. On the eve of the Christian mission they produced converts to Judaism from all classes, including the highest: Nero’s empress, Poppaea, and her court circle, were almost certainly God-fearers, and King Izates II of Adiabene on the Upper Tigris embraced a form of Judaism with all his house. There were probably other exalted converts. Certainly many authors, including Seneca,

• From The Decameron (1353)

  FIRST STORY Cimon 1 acquires wisdom through falling in love with Iphigenia, whom he later abducts on the high seas. After being imprisoned at Rhodes, he is released by Lysimachus, with whom he abducts both Iphigenia and Cassandra whilst they are celebrating their nuptials. They then flee with their ladies to Crete, whence after marrying them they are summoned back with their wives to their respective homes. Delectable ladies, I can think of many stories with which I could aptly make a beginning to so joyful a day as this. But there is one in particular that strikes me as specially pleasing, for not only will it enable you to perceive the happy goal to which our discussions will from now on be directed, but it will also allow you to appreciate the sacredness, the power, and the beneficial effects of the forces of Love, which so many people, ignorant of what they are saying, mistakenly treat with contempt and abuse. All of which, unless I am mistaken, you will find most agreeable, for I take it that you are yourselves in love. In the chronicles of the ancient Cypriots, then, we read that there once lived in the island of Cyprus a very noble gentleman, Aristippus by name, who was richer in worldly possessions than any other man in the country. And if Fortune had not presented him with one particular source of affliction, he would have accounted himself the happiest man alive. This consisted in the fact that one of his children, a youth of outstandingly handsome appearance and perfect physique, was to all intents and purposes an imbecile, whose case was regarded as hopeless. His true name was Galesus, but since the sum total of his tutor’s persistent efforts, his father’s cajolings and beatings, and all the ingenuity of various others, had failed to drum a scrap of learning or good manners into his head, on the contrary leaving him coarsely inarticulate and with the manners rather of a wild beast than a human being, he had earned himself the unflattering nickname of Cimon, which in their language has the same sort of meaning as ‘simpleton’ in ours. His hopeless condition was a matter of very grave concern to his father, who, despairing of any improvement and not wishing to have the source of his affliction constantly before him, ordered him to go and live with his farm-workers in the country. Cimon was only too pleased to obey, for to his way of thinking the customs and practices of country yokels were far more congenial than life in the city. So Cimon went away to the country, where one afternoon, whilst going about his rustic business on one of his father’s estates, with a stick on his shoulder, he chanced to enter a wood, renowned in those parts for its beauty, the trees of which were thickly leaved as it happened to be the month of May.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  that he was richly clothed, provided him with money and a saddle-horse, and offered him the freedom of his household. Well satisfied, Primas thanked the Abbot as heartily as he could, before returning on horseback to Paris, whence he had set out on foot.’ Can Grande, being a man of some intelligence, had no need to hear any more in order to see exactly what Bergamino was driving at. And with a broad smile, he said to him: ‘Bergamino, you have given an apt demonstration of the wrongs you have suffered. You have shown us your worth, my meanness, and what it is that you want from me. To tell you the truth, I was never seized before with the meanness I have lately felt on your account. But I shall drive it away with the stock that you yourself have furnished.’ Can Grande saw that the innkeeper’s account was settled, then dressed Bergamino most sumptuously in one of his own robes, provided him with money and a saddle-horse, and offered him the freedom of his household for the rest of his stay.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  martyr’s palm, tended to create a climate of clerical opinion which forced other prelates to insist on church rights more than they thought prudent. It says a lot for the practical sagacity of Henry and Pope Alexander III that the cleavage in society opened by the murder was so soon healed. In practical terms Becket achieved nothing by his death. Alexander endorsed Henry’s choices for vacant bishoprics – faithful royal supporters, variously denounced by Becket as ‘archdiabolus’ ‘that offspring of fornication’, and ‘that notorious schismatic’. At Canterbury, Henry got the sort of man he wanted, Richard, Prior of Dover, who gave first place to the reform of the clergy and cooperation with the State. Alexander warmly supported Henry’s policy of conquering Ireland, and threatened excommunication to anyone who declined to aid ‘this catholic and most Christian king’. On the question of appeals to Rome, it was evident that Henry did not oppose them in principle; he merely wished to control them. When Cardinal Vivian, papal legate, arrived in England in 1176, ‘without the King’s license’, Henry, according to the chronicler Roger of Howden, sent two bishops to warn him that ‘unless he was ready to abide by the will of the King he would not be allowed to proceed further’. The cardinal swore ‘that he would do nothing on his legation hostile to [Henry] or to his kingdom’; Henry then treated him with great honour, and the next legate took good care to obtain the king’s permission to land in advance. Henry liked upright and spiritual-minded churchmen; he disliked those whom, he said, ‘embraced the world with both arms’. He often promoted men who might have been expected to give him trouble, such as Baldwin of Ford, whom he first made Bishop of Worcester, then Canterbury. Henry II was one of those medieval sovereigns, by no means uncommon, who genuinely wanted to make the Christian society work; who thought that an active, vigorous, even militant church and higher clergy were necessary for the material, as well as the spiritual, well-being of the commonwealth. Such rulers, in the Carolingian tradition, were willing to work with the Church even after it had robbed them of much of their theoretical status and power as anointed servants of the Lord. But of course none of them, however well disposed, could conceivably have accepted the line of thinking illustrated by Boniface VIII’s bulls cited at the beginning of this section. The result was that, after the twelfth century, it was rare even for the more serious-minded and hardworking monarchs to devote much of their energies to reforming the Church and improving its pastoral performance – objects which had been central to the policies even of mediocre Dark Age Christian monarchs. On the

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Alcuin, first as head of the palace school, later as the Abbot of St Martin’s, Tours, France’s most revered monastery, became Charlemagne’s chief cultural and religious adviser – the two roles were inseparable. Indeed in the mind of a man like Alcuin the desire to spread the faith, to understand it fully through literacy and knowledge of the scriptures and the ancillary disciplines, and to adorn and celebrate it through art, was all part of the same Christian vision, whose intensity and brightness were the products of personal conviction. The level of culture was directly related to the degree of faith. It was Alcuin who filled Charlemagne’s mind with the missionary fervour of Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, and it was Alcuin who showed him a copy of Gregory the Great’s letter to King Æthelbert of Kent on the subject of conversion by race. In 789 Alcuin caused the king to issue the Admonitio Generalis, a magisterial statement of Church policy, based on earlier Frankish capitularies and Roman canonical collections, and dealing with almost everything. It has, as it were, a Roman imperial vision of a Christian society living at peace within itself, united under its king and fearing nothing but injustice – an Augustinian vision, we could say. Article 62 reads: ‘Let peace, concord and unanimity reign among all Christian people, and the bishops, abbots, counts and our other servants, great and small; for without peace we cannot please God.’ What is perhaps even more remarkable, however, is the central role which culture played in this vision. Article 72 dealt with the establishment and maintenance of monastic and cathedral schools, and the transcription and correction of biblical and liturgical texts. It is clear from this and other documents that Charlemagne, inspired by Alcuin, saw a cultural renaissance, directed by the Church, as the chief means by which the perfect Christian society would be brought into existence. The Church had given the rulers of the western barbarians an awareness of their classical heritage, and an anxiety to preserve and transmit it almost as strong as among the men of the late empire and after, like Cassiodorus and Boethius. But of course the inheritance was now seen entirely in a Christian context. And because the cultural urge was Christianized, it was linked to Christian policy and objectives. Charlemagne built and endowed schools because he needed a trained clergy to convert the Frisians, Saxons, Slavs and Avars, and live among them; and because he needed more priests for the Frankish world which was already nominally Christian. And, in teaching the faith, accurate and standardized texts were needed in huge quantities. There was thus a call for trained manpower to overhaul the texts and copy

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  worked on his book about Arianism in the fourth century. He discovered on his own account how serious a threat history was to Protestantism because of its biblical fundamentalism. He wrote: ‘To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.’ He saw history as an asset to Catholicism in that its study reminded the believer of the incredible richness of its past, which Rome alone seemed fully to represent in the nineteenth century. The movement began by assuming that they were safe within the Church of England, at any rate as they conceived it, ‘a true branch or portion of the one Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of Christ’. It taught the truth, whereas the Nonconformists and Evangelicals taught only part of the truth, and Rome more than the truth. They rejected the Latitudinarian doctrine that ‘every man’s view of revealed religion is acceptable to God if he acts on it’; and they argued that religious truth was not part scriptural, part authority, as Rome maintained, but wholly scriptural – ‘though it is in tradition, yet it can also be gathered from the communication of the scripture . . . the Gospel message or doctrine . . . is but indirectly and covertly recorded there, under the surface.’ This was an exceptionally difficult halfway house to occupy. In the end many found themselves unable to maintain it, if only because they needed to rely more and more on the principle of authority to defend scripture from the ‘higher criticism’. Thus Newman wrote in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, attacking Protestant liberalism: ‘Liberty of thought is in itself a good; but it gives an opening to false liberty. Now by Liberalism I mean false liberty of thought, or the exercise of thought on matters in which, from the constitution of the human mind, thought cannot be brought to any successful issue, and therefore is out of place. Among such matters are first principles of whatever kind; and of these the most sacred and momentous are especially to be reckoned the truths of Revelation. Liberalism then is the mistake of subjecting to human judgment those revealed doctrines which are in their nature beyond and independent of it, and of claiming to determine on intrinsic grounds the truth and value of propositions which rest for their reception simply on the external authority of the Divine word.’ Now this is a very clear and weighty statement, which effectively repudiates the Erasmian tradition and specifically denies Locke’s insistence that truth must be pursued wherever it leads. Some Anglicans of the school, such as Samuel Wilberforce

• From The Decameron (1353)

  In narrating the final story of the Sixth Day (VI, 10), Dioneo for the first and only time, unless one takes seriously his curious claim that the Griselda story (X, 10) exemplifies munificence in the person of her husband, conforms to the prescribed topic by portraying a character, Friar Cipolla, who displays verbal ingenuity of a very high order indeed. The remarkable dexterity shown by Cipolla in turning an awkward situation to his advantage represents the apotheosis of the day’s talking point, which covers those who have ‘avoided danger, discomfiture or ridicule’ through resorting to a ‘prompt retort or shrewd manoeuvre’. Cipolla’s capacity for thinking and talking on his feet, comparable, according to the narrator, to the oratorical skills of Cicero and Quintilian, is not the result of a refined upbringing and education, but is simply an inborn and natural gift which he exploits to the full in persuading a not very discerning audience that his flights of fancy are nothing less than gospel truth. In his handling of the provincials who flock to hear his annual sermon, he displays all the qualities associated with a market salesman and many more besides. His triumphant escape from a precarious position, sealed by his daubing of black crosses on the clothes of his hearers, is made possible only because of the lack of sophistication of an audience whose lives ‘still conformed to the honest precepts of an earlier age’. As in the case of the holy friar who is taken in by Ciappelletto’s confession (I, 1), there is no real criticism, either open or implied, of the victims of the deception, but rather a sneaking admiration for the ingenuity of its perpetrator. Quickness of wit is the distinguishing quality, also, of most of the adulterous wives whose escapades are recounted in the stories of the Seventh Day. Although several of the narratives are traceable to other literatures, notably the French fabliaux, Boccaccio’s elaborate re-working of his source materials renders them distinctively Italian in tone and atmosphere. With the exception of the ninth story, a version of a medieval Latin text, which Boccaccio sets in ancient Greece, the locations of these tales are representative of the flourishing commercial life and prosperous bourgeoisie of fourteenth-century Italy: Florence, Naples, Siena, Arezzo, Rimini, Bologna. One recent commentator has argued that the stories of the Seventh Day reflect the ‘battle for the control of domestic space’68 that inevitably arose in a society where arranged marriages were the norm and where a woman’s only way of preserving the status she had brought to the marriage with her dowry (which passed at once into the hands of the husband) was to establish herself as mistress of her own household.