Illuminating Boccaccio: Visual Translation in Early Fifteenth-Century France

In late fourteenthand early fifteenth-century Paris, interaction between members of the chancellery, the university community, and the royal family generated a rich intellectual climate in which visual and textual translation flourished and were inextricably intertwined in books made for royalty and members of the nobility. Contact with Italian literature at the papal court in Avignon at the turn of the fifteenth century sparked interest in translating Boccaccio’s work for the French courtly elite. Because of the popularity of illuminated manuscripts among the elite, translators drawn from the French chancellery sought to shape the reception of translations of Boccaccio through the interaction between translated text and visual imagery. Petrarch had translated one story from the Decameron—that of Griselda—into Latin circa 1373 and in doing so both emphasized its value as a source of moral philosophy and began to shape Boccaccio’s reception. Around 1384, Philippe de Mezières translated Petrarch’s Griselda into French and incorporated it in Le Miroir des dames mariées. Beginning in the 1400s, Boccaccio’s Latin De casibus virorum illustrium was known in Paris and mined as a source of exempla for, among others, Nicolas de Gonesse’s completion in 1401 of the translation into French of Valerius Maximus’s Les faits et paroles memorables. As interest in Boccaccio expanded, distinct individual voices emerged. One of them was Laurent de Premierfait, who had made his name as a humanist and a gifted Latin poet at the papal court in Avignon before coming to Paris in 1398. Laurent played a significant role in the textual and visual translation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s work from 1400–1414. By the early fifteenth century, complete copies of some of Boccaccio’s writings were translated into French and quickly