Ambrose book is a great read for anyone with even a passing interest in the event but it is not without its faults. It’s purpose should be thought of as an introduction to this amazing event in military history rather than a definitive or in-depth history of the action.

Growing up on war movies and historical miniatures gaming, I’ve pretty much always been aware of the efforts of Johnny Howard‘s lads to take and hold the bridges over the Orne River at Benouville the night before the Normandy beach landings in 1944. However, it was only after visiting the site in 2005 that I understood the magnitude of the task and the difficulty of the feat these young men achieved. It’s always puzzled me – even more since visiting the site – how the bridges’ defenders were not alerted by the huge gliders crashing to earth.

As with all this author’s work, he concentrates on collecting first-hand accounts of the action from soldiers on both sides of the engagement and from the civilians so often caught in the middle of the conflict. He spend as much time on the preparations made before the action as he does on the events of the assault itself. In this book he adds a third section of equal size which traces what happened to the members of the assault force after D-Day and the history of the bridge from 1944 to the present.

For those who don’t know, just after midnight on D-Day, 6 June 1944, two lots of three gliders each carrying a platoon of British airborne troppers crash-landed into farmland no more than 50 yards from two of the most strategically important bridges in Occupied Europe. These bridges, if not taken by these men, would have allowed the elite German 21 Panzer Division to attack the eastern flank of the Normandy landings and, because they were held, allowed the Allied forces to breakout of the landing zone and push towards the heart of Hitler’s war machine. Because of the difficulties of parachuting into enemy territory at night, the force which was expected to relieve them within two to three hours of taking the bridges didn’t arrive in any strength until more than twelve hours later. While they were waiting for these much needed reinforcements, these few men held off a determined German counterattack.

The problem with the book is that it’s light-weight. The reader has to work fairly hard to figure out who was where and when and the diagrams meant to explain the action are not terribly helpful. On the flip-side, however, the book is best thought of as an oral history collection rather than an analysis of the taking of the bridges or the progress of the battle.

In all, the book is a well-written page-turner which provides a good overview of the event for someone who knows little about it. It’s target audience is the average reader with an interest in World War II rather than the amateur military historian.

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This is a fascinating read which ultimately tries to cram too much into too small a book. Depending on which of its many and sometimes conflicting aims you are considering, it either succeeds marvellously or fails dismally. At its heart, however, the book explores what happens to men on the battlefield, what it takes to make them kill and how they live with the knowledge that they’ve taken the life of some poor bastard just like them.

The core of the book looks at what is required to make soldiers kill in combat. It relies heavily on the now generally discredited work of Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall which showed that in World War II only around 25% of front-line infantry, even when directly engaged in combat, fired their weapons. Grossman extrapolates this data back in time to account for similar statements made about armies during the American Civil War and the Napoleonic Wars. He then claims this as the basis of changes in training procedures which raised the fire rates from the World War II lows to highs of around 95% in Vietnam. I’m not equipped to comment directly on his argument other than to note that there is a significant body of research which disagrees with him.

The telling point for me is that, when describing the emotional resistence to killing another human being even in battle which needs to be overcome, he appears to echo the thoughts and feelings of veterans. This is the reason why no one who has not been in that situation can truly understand what it is to experience the battlefield. Grossman goes so far as to suggest that there is a genetically in-built prohibition to killing another of our own kind in all of us that needs to be overcome by soldiers on the battlefield who then need to be ritually healed before being welcomed back into society.

One of the benefits of of the book is in the valuable addition it makes to the clichéd schema of the supposed “fight or flight” instinct. Grossman proposes two other points on the line between these two poles which he calls “posturing” and “submission.” I’d like to see some research to back up his claims but these two poles make a great deal of intuitive sense to me. Fights almost never happen. In a conflict situation, one side puffs itself up to look bigger and more threatening than the other. In the end, one submits and slinks away rather than taking the comflict to the fight stage.

Grossman suggests, and I tend to agree, that these additions to the schema make sense of early gunpowder weapons, known for their unreliability and inaccuracy. They are a means of making a bigger and louder posturing gesture than can be made without them. In these terms, battles are not so much won by the victors as they are lost by the defeated collectively submitting to this display of agression.

However, I reckon he loses the plot completely when he steps away from the narrow focus of the battlefield and extrapolates to violence in modern life. In short, he claims that video games, especially, first-person shooters follow the same Pavlovian training techniques used by the military to overcome the soldier’s innate resistence to killing without applying the rigid discipline that prevents soldiers from becoming murders. Such simplification of a stupendously complicated topic makes me wonder whether the same principle is at work in other sections of the book.

In short, the book is a fascinating read which has opened discussion on a previously taboo topic. I hope the discussion continues and some real research is done to put Grossman’s coherent and intuitively appealing claims to the test.

Related posts:

1. Book Review: A Canticle for Leibowitz
2. Review: Pegasus Bridge
3. Review: A Model Victory

(At this point, I predict half of you have stopped reading and the other half have pricked up your ears. There’s plenty of other music and genres from folk to jazz to industrial and metal available. Keep reading.)

Now, a little about Magnatune. The company began life in 2003 out of the experiences of the founders in trying to get their recordings published. Unlike the major record labels, Magnatune is an entrepreneurial venture by music makers rather than music exploiters. It’s grown to an important, if niche, music publishing company on the basis of a couple of strengths.

First, the company exists only online. For around $15 per month you can get an account which permits you to either stream content through Magnatune‘s Shoutcast stations or download music to any and all computers and other devices you own. Music is available in a variety of formats from loss-less FLAC and WAV files to both fixed and variable rate MP3, AAC and Ogg Vorbis.

Second, there’s no DRM (digital rights management) on any of the tracks you buy from them. That’s right. There’s no lock-in to any particular player application and, more importantly in the modern world, no limit to the number of your devices you can copy the music to. Once you’ve purchased a track or an album, it’s yours to listen as you please.

Third, they pay their artists well and fairly. Magnatune‘s business model is pretty simple. Each user of service pays his or her $15 per month. That money is divided between all artists the user downloads that month. Magnatune takes half. The artist gets half. There’s no mucking about with percentages or negotiated rates. There’s one simple policy for all.

For me, I’m a Magnatune download customer because they have tons and tons of early music available – all created by professional classical musicians as side projects to their day jobs in the orchestras of the world or by music academics with a passion for these periods. In both cases, the quality of the performance are miles above the dross generally available at medieval and renaissance faires. And the breadth of styles is surpassed nowhere else that I’ve found. Whether Middle-Eastern or Western, court music or peasant melodies, you’ll find a big stash of it on Magnatune.

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I was looking for a small and accessible history of the Napoleonic Wars or of Waterloo (most books on the subject are neither) when I found this gem. It’s not so much a history of Waterloo, as I originally thought, but a description of how of the Battle for the Battle of Waterloo in which various force vie to be the one who writes the history of that fateful day — a much more interesting subject as it turns out.

William Siborne, more than fifteen years after the event, hit upon the idea of making a large, scale model of the battle which would explain the momentous occasion to the public. Initially, Siborne even garnered some government funding for the project. He also gained government approval for the job. At least until they learned of his aim.

Siborne wanted to show the “crisis” of the battle, that is, the moment at which the battle was won or lost rather than the smaller, more heroic actions of the day (the fight at Hougoumont or La Haye Sainte, the charge of the Scots’ Grays, etc) or the positions of the troops at the start of the day. Worst still, after several years of diligent reseach, surveying the field of battle and interviewing surviving officers for their recollections of the day, Siborne had the audacity to suggest that perhaps the arrival of the Prussian army on the field late in the day turned the tide against Napoleon.

This outraged the government and the Duke of Wellington in particular and all support and funding immediately dried up. After so much suffering and British blood spilled that day, how could a place in the history books be awarded to an army which turned up nine hours late to the field? Whether the Prussian arrival in the rear and flank of the French army caused the French rout or whether that rout had already begun after the final British charge has not been settled to this day.

The core question asked (and ultimately left unresolved) by the book is who writes the history of warefare, the generals or the troops on the ground?
Siborne made his model, which now lies in the National Army Museum, London. Then, he made a smaller model — this one in line with the view of authorities — with which he attempted unsuccessfully to recoup the cost of the first model. Later he turned his hand to writing histories of the Napoleonic Wars from the masses of correspondence he collected over the years from the officers involved.

The book, however, attempts to interleave the progress of the Battle of Waterloo with Siborne’s fortunes in the war to gain support for his endeavour. These chapters are perhaps best skipped in order to concentrate on the wonderfully fascinating history of the model itself.

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3. Getting Back On Track … Slowly

This brilliant study is immensely valuable to the amateur historian on three levels. The least of these is how it shows the Inquisition as the outcome of the legal system of Ancient Rome. It also examines in detail the organization, procedures, process and results of the various inquisition throughout an 800+ year history based on the notoriously meticulous records recently released from the Vatican Archive. More importantly, it compares the process of the inquisition to that of secular courts and legal processes of the periods.

This in itself would be enough but Peters go further to examine how the historical inquisition was transformed from the historical reality into the myth of the Inquisition we think we know today. That’s a lot of ground to cover in 300-odd pages of text.

The fact is there is not and has never been an Inqisition. No such monolithic agency controlled solely by the Pope ever existed. There were, however, many smaller, often national, inquisitions which had key staff appointed by the pontiff. There was a Spanish inquisition (all Monty Python and Mel Brooks jokes aside), a Roman inquisition, etc. Each of these agencies was completely separate and independant of each other.

The second key point to keep in mind is that we’re dealing with a time where religion was not seens as a personal choice but a public act. Faith was not a matter of the conversation between an individual conscience and the divine but a political act of communal cohesiveness. This was not an attitude imposed from above but as deep a belief of the common people as the notion of individualism in, say, the modern United States. Before the inquisition existed and when it was deemed too slow to act, lynch mobs and local lords dealt with any considered by them a heretic.

It must be remembered that since the time of the Emperor Augustus, to fail to uphold the religion of the leader of the community was treason and Traitors were executed. When the Emperor Constantine became Christian, this notion was maintained. The main driver for the Council of Nicea was to develop for and on behalf of Constantine the limits beyond which a belief may be considered heretical. This morphed into the idea that the people accept the religious belief of the ruler. The various inquisitions were established to get someone who understands theology judging such cases rather than the accused being solely at the mercy of the local lay authorities.

In this regard, one aspect the book fails to cover to my satisfaction is why after the fall of Rome and the inital formulation of doctrine did the quest for heresy re-commence in the 12-13th centuries. I suggest the cause is that the failure of the second and subsequent crusades was popularly blamed on the impuruty of western Christendom. This and the massive clerical reform movements of the period cannot be divorced in my mind from the hunt for heresy within Europe.

During its heyday, the only criticism leveled against the various inquisitions was that they operated too slowly. Why concern oneself with rules of eveidence, taking statements, assessing witnesses, etc when we all know who the heretics are and need to kill them for the good of the community? Prisoners in secular jails awaiting execution for criminal offenses were known to falsely confess to heretical beliefs simply to get moved into an inquisition prison where the rules of whichever inquisition ran the place guaranteed them at least one meal a day and other luxuries. The inquisitions were also much less likely than the secular authorities to use torture on an accused.

So, how exactly did inquiries into heresy in particular places and times get transformed into the the myth of a vast, bureaucratic machine determined to exterminate difference?

The short answer has two parts to it. First, the rise of Protestantism transformed relgion from something public to a matter of individual faith and needed to attack the catholic church in order to gain legitimacy for themselves. All Protestant literature of the period portrays the Inquisition as the political arm of the church concerned only with continuing 1500 years of suppression of the “true faith” (as opposed to Protestantism being a 16th century invention). Second, the Enlightenment exaulted the idea of reason in the face of the superstitious primitivism of the dark ages (yep, it was these guys who coined this term to refer to the middle ages).

Both these pushes, one in the 16-17th century, the other in the 18th century, defined the church as anti-individual, anti-reason and even anti-god in order to promote their own agendas. There was a large anti-Spanish element to it all as well. Then at the start of the 19th century, Matthew Lewis, Mrs Radcliffe and the other writers who invented the Gothic grabbed this idea and made it as lurid as possible. Stories of shadow-hiding inquisitors torturing and molesting semi-naked faithful women sold in the hundreds. This is the myth of The Inquisition we still labour under today.

Peters is one of a number of scholars writing some truly transformative history about the history of religion in western culture. The book is based on documentary evidence and eye-witness accounts rather than received notions of the past. I reckon it’s next to impossible to change such deeply ingrained myths such as The Inquisition but Peters make a damned good argument. Well worth the read.

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Title:

D-Day is one of the few truly momentous events of the twentieth century. Ambrose book captures the experience from the recollections and memories of the poor bastards who lived through it. In this, he has created a wonderful record of the build up, execution and aftermath of the event which should be read by everyone. The book’s only fault is that it’s written by an American.

The strategy of the book is to start at the widest possible scale then narrow in on particular details. Ambrose outlines the problems facing the Allies and Axis powers at the start of the American involvement in the War (like always, arriving on the scene two years after everyone else): a largely demoralised Britain, an eager but untested United States, and Germany fighting on two fronts with all sorts of command and control problems. Even coming to the agreement that an invasion of Europe is desirable was a major obstacle at the political level. Once the decision had been made, the logistics of when, where and how to invade took the central focus. Ambrose spends considerable time explaining how the Allies kept the German High Command in the dark largely through misdirection.

Once he starts to focus on the men who parachuted, flew or staggered ashore on 6 June 1944, Ambrose really comes into his own. He deftly switches focus from one point on the battlefield to another showing the thoughts, fears and perceptions of the men in the middle of the action. I remember standing on the marker stones where the 6th Division gliders landed at Pegasus Bridge outside of Ranville and thinking “how the hell did they do it?” The answer is that by careful planning none of the men in the first waves of the assault were experienced soldiers. As one general quipped, “an experienced soldier is a cautious soldier.” The fact that these inexperienced men not only survived the day but won through against solid fortifications and determined resistence is something that will never be repeated.

However, there’s a fine line between writing an accessible popular history and pandering to the prejudices of your audience. Ambrose staggers like a drunkard from one side of the line to the other. If you didn’t know better, you’d think that D-Day was a solely US affair when, in the real world, other than having a US general in overall command, the British and Commonwealth forces outnumbers the yanks by close to two-to-one. In terms of soldiers landing on the beaches, by glider or parachute, the US fielded 56,000 men while the British and Commonwealth forces totaled 83,000. Behind the scenes, the US air force and navy personnel numbered approximately 55,000 while the British and Commonwealth contributed almost 120,000.

Admittedly, Ambrose did work for the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans and I guess that this pre-disposes his oral history collection to US veterans and a US view point. However, I got the distinct impression from the book that the US servicemen achieved survived D-Day through dogged determination, tenacity and courage whereas the British and Commonwealth soldiers survived despite being British. They just don’t rate the same level of attention in AMbrose’s view as the Americans.

Having said all that, Ambrose’s D-Day is a brilliant overview of this remarkable event. If you could one read one book on D-Day, it has to be this (or Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day).

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Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy (1517) is Machiavelli’s reactions in essay form to reading the Roman author’s history of the great Republic and looking at the political world of his own day and, in particular, of his home town, Florence. It was written at the same time as The Prince and, with it, they are a manual of realist political action. The book highlights the political thinking of the time but I’m more surprised at how relevant his observations remain today.

While The Prince concerns itself solely with managing “new” principalities, The Discourses looks at the structure of government Machiavelli considers the highest, the republic, and takes as his template, that most worthwhile of republics, Rome before the empire. In each discourse he pulls incidents which support the point he’s making both from Livy and from his own time. Here’s some examples of discourse titles (there’s around 150 of them) which illustrate his thought.

I.4. That discord between the Plebs and the Senate of Rome made this Republic both free and powerful.

Unlike his contemporaries (and ours) who long for the day of Star Trek when we can all have an adventure which shows how we’re really all the same under the skin, Machiavelli shows that it is in fact the tensions between different layers of society which keeps the powers of the other(s) in check. This is not the wishy-washy checks-and-balances of modern democracies but the real gut-level discord when the citizen feels his or her rights abused. If enough of them feel this way, they act.

I.7. How necessary Public Indictments are for the maintenance of liberty.

Machiavelli highlights the importance of courts and public prosecutions to maintain social order and freedoms. Secret accusations and star chambers only result in death for the rules of the state.

I.45. It is a bad precedent to break a new law especially if the legislator himself does it.

Some truths are universal throughout all space and time.

II.25. To attack a divided city in the hopes that its division will facilitate the conquest is bad policy.

Sounds a little like the Iraq War, doesn’t it. I’m stunned at the list of examples he pulls from both Livy and his own time to support this statement. Some things just never change. If you attack a feuding couple, rather than one siding with you both united against you.

II.31. How dangerous it is to put confidence in refugees.

Iraq and the WMD scam was my first thought here. He’s not talking about the poor unfortunates our government seems so hell-bent on demonising but defectors who come bearing “intelligence” of “secret weapons programs” that are “truly-ruly real.” They are not interested in reality and they’re only interest in you is what you can do for them to punish their former country.

III.17. That to a person to whom offense has been given, no administrative post of importance should be subsequently assigned.

I reckon he’s talking about Kevin Rudd. Only a super-human or a complete idiot could take being ousted from the office of Prime Minister and accept a post like Foreign Affairs Minister without thinking how he could fuck up those who dumped him.

III.29. That the faults of the people are due to princes.

He recognises the the real power in any state at any time is the people: people who form the army, who form the merchant class, who grow the food, who make the tools for daily life, who run the households. This man, despite the reputation which has developed around him, just loves humanity.

III.36. Reasons why the French have been, and still are, looked upon in the beginning of a battle as more than men, and afterwards as less than women.

I already mentioned that some truths are universal.

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I’ve read and studied Petrarch before, at university and after. Reading him in translation is always a bit of a disappointment. The translator can choose either to convey his carefully nuanced meaning complete with complex classical allusions or to capture the easy flowing music of his words. No single translation can do both.

Among my personal problems in approaching Petrarch is that I’ve heard poems from the Canzoniere read in the original without understanding them. Just listening to the music of the words is wonderful in itself. I’ve also read some particularly good translations which show his ideas and philosophical arguments in their best light. I’ve never been able to do both at the same time and that begins to annoy me.

(I’ve also come to the conclusion that anyone who can experience the Canzoniere without developing an immediate and burning need to learn Italian has no soul.)

This current translation includes the standard selections from the Canzoniere but, more important, a goodly selection of his other poetry and letters.

The portion of the Secretum included in this anthology is the third chapter in which Petrarch and Saint Augustine engage in socratic dialogue on the fate of Petrarch’s soul. In his later life Petrarch was a big fan of Augustine and many see it as a way of him reconciling his humanism with traditional church belief. Naturally, he was attracted to Augustine’s insistence on free will as a means to salvation. I’ve read many other philosophical debates of the kind but this one struck me as nothing more than an old man trying to justify the actions of his life. The dialogue centres on Petrarch’s stalker obsession with Laura (who I believe more and more is a fictional construct rather than a real person as almost all academics insist) and how adoration of her has thrown him a long way down the slippery slope to hell.

The letters are great but they are another example of the same phenomena. There’s a famous letter in which Petrarch compares his climb of Mount Ventoux outside his home in Avignon to the getting of wisdom. There’s a very condescending letter to Boccaccio in which the famous poet tells that younger that he’s re-written one of Boccaccio’s tales and been praised for it even though he won’t lower himself to read a book aimed at the masses.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Petrarch and his poetry. You can really feel in his words a man who celebrates people with all their faults and virtues. But I found reading the selections from his prose works quite tedious.

Related posts:

1. Italian Renaissance Reading List
2. Machiavelli’s The Discourses
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Before saying a few words about each of the three books of the Commedia, I want to point out a couple of things about the whole which I found quite surprising.

The work is an allegory of the getting of wisdom and follows Dante as he voyages through Hell and Purgatory, guided by the Roman poet Virgil, and then through Heaven in the company of Beatrice, his lifelong object of obsession. That’s the basic story. Most educated people know at least this much and we can easily understand it as allegory without any problems. However, in Dante’s day, it was shocking and quite controversial. Why?

In late medieval literary theory there’s two types of allegory: that of the poets and that of the theologians. Allegory of both types is an extended metaphor, making extensive use of personification, in order to illuminate an interior moral/philosophical struggle. The key difference between them is that the allegory of the poets is at pains to point out that it is dealing with wholly fictive events. This is the allegory of hares and tortoises (yes, I know, keep your shirt on), etc. The theologians’ allegory is made manifest purely in real, historical (by which I mean biblical) events. What caused all the fuss with Dante is that he presents his imaginary journey as real and historical, not fictional. The Virgil who accompanies him is not the personification of Reason or untutored Morality but the real ghost of the real Roman poet who wrote the all too real Aeneid.

To me, this innovative genre-bending is what lifts the Commedia out of the morass of standard medieval Everyman tales (man, I’ve sure read a few) and elevates it to the heights of the highest literature.

This is but one aspect of the Commedia which I could go on about to explain its greatness. There’s the gradually collapsing distinction between Dante the poet and Dante the traveller and fine-grained structural unity explaining the philosophical debate running through the work. But this is not an essay. Be warned, though. Never buy me a beer and ask me my opinion of the work. You’ll have a hard time shutting me up.

Inferno

The key thing to note about people in Hell is that the reason they’re there is never their fault. Other people made them do it. Circumstances dictated they do whatever they did. The refusal to take responsibility for one’s own actions is a very interesting aspect of the philosophical problem of evil.

The aptness of the punishments is usually what excites people reading the Inferno. Yeah, they’re cool but I’m a little over them. For me, they show more than just the moral imperative Dante wants to communicate. These and the way he incorporates people and creatures from both classical history and mythology point clearly to the start of the Renaissance love of the literary past for its own sake.

Purgatorio

This book differs from the Inferno in that the punishments are less physical and more philosophical. It marks the start of the movement away from the physical world in a more spiritual realm. The punishments, a mixture of the self-imposed and mandated from on high, are no less apt for that. It means only that they are less showy and spectacular.

Paradiso

This is the really interesting book of the three. In Paradise, we’ve left the material world behind. Dante (the poet and the traveller) must find a way to describe a world composed of light. In doing this, Dante actually provides a really useful insight into the study of optics as it was understood at the time.

During this book, Dante the traveller approaches the understanding of Dante the poet. I’m beginning to understand why scholars say the way to understand the Commedia is to finish reading it then immediately start again. I’m not going to do that I can see the gulf between the two Dante’s narrowing during the whole experience. I’d be dead keen on seeing how his (my) new understanding of the universe affects how he describes Hell. But there’s plenty here which puzzles me. For instance, I can’t make out the principle which differentiates souls consigned to Purgatory from those rewarded with heaven.

Paradiso is also the hardest of the three books to understand. Dante (the poet) struggles to explain the inexpressible. Rather than describing what Dante (the traveller) sees and experiences in this non-material world, he can only describe the impression it leaves on him. The reader then needs to get beyond this in order to deduce what Dante senses. I feel like I’ve been listening to a long joke and haven’t understood the punch line.

I can see how this work has become a lifetime study for some people.

Related posts:

1. Italian Renaissance Reading List
2. The Venerable Petrarch
3. Machiavelli’s The Discourses

The first thing the struck me was the lengthy description of how the Black Plague hit Florence only a couple of years before. Even across a gap of some 650 years, this is gut-wrenching stuff: people going to bed fearing they’ll wake in the morning to discover the first symptoms of their ugly and inevitable death sentence, bodies piled up outside doorways and on street corners, finding out the fate of one’s neighbours only when the stench of their rotting corpses overpowers the general stink of a city in arnarchy and social collapse. I thought the Lost Generation‘s poetry about the day-to-day experience of life the trenches in WWI was the pinnacle of horror until I read this.

This introduction on serves to make all the more artificial the escape of the young people from the city to estates where around in manicured gardens telling each other jolly tales of love and witty comebacks. I note is that the group doesn’t just stay in the one location during the ten days of story-telling. They move from a very comfortable country villa into the manicured garden of a neighbour and on into ever-increasingly artificial gardens. They move further away from the trappings of an admittedly idealised civil society represented by the villa to more and more imaginary landscapes. Contrast, for instance, the description of the idyllic pastoral fantasy landscape of the sixth day with the Black Death in the introduction. The group’s escape from the realities of the Plague is more than simply a physical relocation.

Each of the seven ladies and three gents has his or her own personality which colours the tales each of them tells. For example, Pampinea’s stories highlight the socially appropriate, Pamfilio can’t tell a tale without the conventional happy end, Dioneo just wants to mess with people’s mind and Lauretta can’t help point out the inferior legal position and the differential in structural power of the women in her tales . The songs that each character sings at the close of each day makes plain their agendas. I’m sure there’s a great deal of subtlety displayed in who chooses to sit next to whom each day but devining meaning there is going to require a second or third reading of the text and a whiteboard.

And then it ends. They all pack up and go back to the plague ridden city, say goodbye to each other and wend their separate ways. The Danny Boyle movie would have them confront the city abandonned and deserted (or full of plague-infested zombie – either way is good). The Edgar Allan Poe version would have the plague find them in their pastoral idyll making mockery of any attempt to escape. None of this happens. It just ends – and is followed a second essay in which Boccaccio justifies a) telling a whole bunch of bawdy stories, and b) writing a bunch of stories solely for the amusement of women trapped at home rather than for the edification and improvement of the (male) soul.

I was surprised how many of the stories centre on the hypocrisy of the clergy — not because I think they aren’t/weren’t hypocritical (afterall, the  Catholic church today quiet openly shelters paedophiles) but because the anti-clericism is so open. The two great reformers of the Church, St Francis of Assisi and St Dominic, had been dead more than 120 years at the time Boccaccio wrote but it seems their reform efforts had either been in vain or the Church had relapsed into it’s old ways. In this way (and in many others similar but too numerous to mention), you can gain a real understanding of how life at the time was actually lived in contrast to the shallow, one-dimensional view we’ve received late medieval life.

The other issue common to all stories the group tells is sex. All the characters in the stories are at it like knives. If they’re not avoiding someone’s advances, they’re making the advances or duping their wives and husbands so they can do it with their lovers. Priests cannot keep their cassocks on and wives bitterly complain of lack of bodily attention from their husbands. Although the strictures of the Church about sex and the medieval attitude of women as more susceptible to lust and other carnal desires are ever-present in the tales, they serve only to make the characters in the stories Boccaccio’s young people tell a little more discreet about their activities than they may have been otherwise. How closely the attitude to sex in the tales matches the social reality is a matter for debate.

This is a great book and repays many times over the effort to read it, especially if you can find the J.M Rigg’s literal translation of 1903.

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