Boccaccio’s <i>Decameron</i> 6.10 and Chaucer’s <i>Canterbury Tales</i> VI.287-968: Thinking on Your Feet and the Set-Piece
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Both Boccaccio, in his Decameron, and Chaucer, in The Canterbury Tales, place sermons deliveredby highly skilled preachers very nearly at the centre of their story collections. Boccaccio’s Fra Cipolla appears in Decameron 6.10 and Chaucer’s Pardoner, in Canterbury Tales, VI.287-968 (“The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale”)—according to the order of the tales most widely adopted in modern editions, that of the Ellesmere manuscript (San Marino, California, Huntington Library MS EL. 26. C. 9). Boccaccio gives particular emphasis to the importance of his Cipolla by placing the master preacher in the last tale told on the sixth day of storytelling (the day when wit is the common theme of all ten tales). Chaucer’s preacher appears in the tale preceding Fragment VII of the Canter-bury Tales; it is in Fragment VII that poetic language becomes a central theme. In both Boccaccio’s Decameron 6.10 and Chaucer’s Canter-bury Tales VI.287-968, words are power, and in both tales it is significant that those words appear in sermons, a popular form of medieval literature listened to byliterate and illiterate, aristocrats and lowly alike. Preachers of sermons in the Middle Ages were as much literary figures as were storytellers; they competed with the secular entertainers for the attention of popular audiences and resorted to “artifices similar to those of their old rivals.”My concern this essay is to compare the oratorical performances of Fra Cipolla and the Pardoner — one an improvisation and the other, a feat of memory. Memorized delivery assures coherence and exactness; impromptu speech has the virtue of naturalness and liveliness. Quintilian, one of the classicalrhetoricians admired in the Middle Ages and actually named in Boccaccio’s tale, favoured the well-memorized speech because it could be made to seem extempore. The coincidence in genre, character, theme, and placement of Boccaccio’s Decameron 6.10 and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales VI.287-968 becomes especially interesting if there is even a chance that Chaucerknew the Decameron and its tale of Fra Cipolla.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.054 | 0.014 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".