What is courtesy? Is it good manners, chivalry, generosity, virtue, ancient wealth, inherited nobility, or love’s gentility? It seems to have been all these things in late medieval Italy, under the influence of courtly literature from France and in the efforts of urban elites to define a civic ethos. In Convivio, Dante belittles the “vulgar” view that courtesy has only to do with spending money (larghezza), equating it rather with honor or virtue (onestade) (2.10.7–8). Yet it seems to vary with circumstance, as we are told that Aeneas provides an example of courtesy when he rolls up his sleeves to chop wood for the funeral rites of Misenus, “as was their custom” (4.26.12).
Courtesy Lost is not an investigation of a key concept in the traditions of romance, conduct books, or the vast medieval literature on vices and virtues. The introduction acknowledges the enormity of the subject and studies devoted to it. Here the focus is much more concentrated, triangulating among three texts: the Decameron, the Commedia, and Boccaccio’s commentary on Dante (the Esposizioni). Some historical depth is supplied by Florentine chronicles and modern histories. The Decameron is in many places populated by characters taken from the Commedia, some briefly sketched and some only a name, with some or no historical record. Olson calls Boccaccio’s inventive recontextualization of these figures in his tales a “historicization.” Yet it is really more of a fictionalization of history, as she shows how he reduces complex political struggles and differences to an allegorical drama between a vice (avarice) and a virtue (courtesy), exemplified to some extent by identifiable political parties, but more often by two families or even just by two people. The titular “literature of history” is Boccaccio’s fleshing out of a moral idea with historical figures gleaned from Dante.
Although Dante and Boccaccio seem to be largely on the same page about something as uncontroversially praised as courtesy, Olson believes Dante connects it with lost courts, whereas Boccaccio locates it in “civil acts.” A problem with this dichotomy is that Dante too sees courtesy as possible outside any court, even if that was originally how it got its name. That is why he is writing about it in the Convivio, meant to educate the unlettered especially about those desirable qualities like courtesy, “which they can acquire for themselves” (2.10.7). It is also a key value for the quintessentially urban Guelphs he meets in hell (Inferno 16.67), whose ideology he must not wholly share, since he put them there.
Boccaccio actually does in some contexts understand courtesy as, precisely, largesse, exemplified in a culture of rotating dinner parties and praised in generous lords. This monetary aspect of the virtue can be overdone, even to the point of financial ruin, “how the ways of cortesia undermine the courtly lover” (180) — since, as Machiavelli observed, it is useful to appear liberal but ruinous to actually be so. Yet the truly courteous continue to offer hospitality even in their poverty. There is a more sinister side to the courtesy that is associated with a chivalric (i.e., medieval) ethos involving violence (knightly conquest translated into factional feuding) in tension with a more civic (i.e., classical) ethos deriving from Aristotelian liberality and Ciceronian honestas. In her take on the political reading of the last tale of the Decameron, Olson suggests that patient Griselda represents the latter and her sadistic husband the former.
Olson argues that courtesy also figures amorally as nobility, something that can be passed down through bloodlines, giving hope for a “future” of courtesy in successfully consummated marriages between noble, usually Ghibelline, houses. It can be effected by the virility of males (both expressed and repressed) and the loose virtue of women (Caterina who sleeps outside with her boyfriend), backed up by a family’s ability to contrive, enforce, or refuse a marriage. Courtesy is also said to “survive” thanks to a spendthrift lover’s clever manipulation of an infernal apparition to terrorize a young woman into accepting his amorous advances, which is an arguably discourteous kind of courtship. The “future for cortesia” is a little perplexing since the “future” of Dante’s present would be Boccaccio’s present, which is equally prone to avarice and witnesses the massive extinction of noble families. We might suggest that courtesy’s future is not transmitted through bloodlines, but rather inspired by tales of courteous people, such as ten beautiful youths behaving well in the countryside outside a city ravaged by plague.
