Margaret Fuller’s Reading Worlds

Author

Giovanni Boccaccio(1313–1375)

Giovanni Boccaccio is documented in Fuller’s letters, books, published essays, and reading notebooks (1827–1849). 3 distinct works are named, most often in Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the most intensive engagement recorded is “quoted”.

Engagement
QuotedReadMentioned
Present in
Letters · Books · Essays · Notebooks
Documented
1827–1849
Totals count documented engagements, once at the earliest witness. How we count →

Reprints, Memoirs passages, and repeat notes within a single manuscript are shown but never counted twice. Evidence for this author is selective, not exhaustive. Methodology →

In Fuller’s words

“tales were told as full of grace and pathos as in the gardens of Boccaccio, only in a very different spirit, — with noble hope for men, with reverence for woman.”
Il Decamerone [The Decameron] · Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1849

When Fuller engaged with Giovanni Boccaccio

I. Childhood
II. Adolescence1record
III. Self-Directed
IV. Transcendentalist
V. New York2records
VI. Europe1record
✦. Memoirs (1852)
1810
1820
1832
1836
1844
1846
1850

This page brings together documented engagements currently identified within the Fuller Reading Worlds catalog.

Boccaccio in Fuller’s reading world

Documentary evidence

Selected passages from Fuller’s own writings, in chronological order.

1827—

Reading Notebook 1825–1827

p. 95
readSearch Digital Fuller (page unverified)
“In Boccaccio, now, you see ill concealed division of / Miracles and relics _ But Berni was a church / dignitary”

Fuller, Margaret. "Reading Notebook 1825–1827." Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Inferred Fuller mentions 'Boccaccio' by name in the context of a comparison; the specific work is not named. Fuller references Boccaccio in passing comparison to Berni's treatment of religious relics, noting that in Boccaccio the irreverence toward miracles and relics is 'ill concealed.' This likely alludes to the Decameron, which contains many anti-clerical stories.

1845—

Woman in the Nineteenth Century

p58
quoted · read
“Boccaccio, in describing the miseries that attended, in this case, "The form of an union where union is none,”

Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Greeley & McElrath, 1845.

Named in context of Dante's marriage after Beatrice's death; the phrase 'The form of an union where union is none' is attributed to Boccaccio.

1845—

The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley . . .

“The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley . . .”
mentioned
“a party of young persons gayer than and almost as inventive as those that told the tales recorded by Boccaccio.”

Fuller, Margaret. "The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley . . ." New-York Daily Tribune, 27 December 1845. · 27 December 1845

1849—

Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson

p239
read
“tales were told as full of grace and pathos as in the gardens of Boccaccio, only in a very different spirit, — with noble hope for men, with reverence for woman.”

Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. V. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Inferred Fuller explicitly names Boccaccio in comparing the tales told among wounded patriots in a garden pavilion to "the gardens of Boccaccio," an unmistakable allusion to the framing conceit of the Decameron. She dcontasts her Roman circle's ethos—"with noble hope for men, with reverence for woman"—to Boccaccio's "often ribald, amoral storytelling,"

Undated

Pieces with no legible date. They are part of the record but cannot be placed on the lifeline.

n.d.—

Notebook: Sir Thomas Browne

p. 53
mentionedManuscript page
“Whatsoever else the world terms happiness is to me a story out of Pliny, a tale of Boccace or Malizpini”

Fuller, Margaret. "Notebook: Sir Thomas Browne." Houghton Library, Harvard University; bMS Am 1086 (87); Box 6 (87).