Telling Tales Out of School: The Fairy Tale and Italian Academies

With the publication of Gianfrancesco Straparola's two-volume Le piacevoli notti in Venice in 1551-53, the European literary fairy tale was born. By including a number of fantastic tales alongside more traditional verisimilar novellas, Straparola (1480?-1557?) breathed new life into the waning Boccaccian tradition. In these marvelous rise and restoration tales, the protagonists either ascend the social ladder or return to their proper rung through magical means. (1) His eclectic mix of novellas and fairy tales proved to be wildly popular with readers. Le piacevoli notti enjoyed more than twenty printings in Italy in the first fifty years following the editio princeps and was quickly translated into French and Spanish. (2) And yet, despite this stunning editorial success, Straparola's innovation inspired few imitators among his Italian contemporaries. (3) Some seventy years would pass before the Neapolitan courtier Giambattista Basile (1575-1632) embraced the nascent genre in his collection of fifty literary fairy tales entitled Lo cunto de li cunti, also known as the Pentamerone. During his own lifetime, Basile garnered respect as a competent poet of Italian odes and madrigals and as a skilled editor of sixteenth-century Italian verse. He does not seem to have undertaken his experimentation with the literary fairy tale in the hope of bolstering his literary reputation for he wrote Lo cunto in Neapolitan dialect under the pseudonym Gian Alessio Abbattutis. Furthermore, the tales were published only posthumously in rive volumes between 1634-36. While today it is considered one of the masterpieces of Baroque literature, Basile's Lo cunto encouraged few of his contemporaries to try their hand at the literary fairy tale. (4) Curiously, the genre never took firm root in Italy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It would blossom only decades after the publication Lo cunto during the years 1690-1715 in France. There the literary fairy tale was cultivated mainly by women writing in salons, as well as a few male authors like Charles Perrault. (5) Elsewhere I have explained how sixteenth-century literary theories of the marvelous served to limit the success of the fairy tale in Italy. (6) In this essay, I examine how the practices documented in the writings of three literary academies contributed to the genre's fallure on its native soil. Out of the thousands of academies that flourished in early modern Italy, I focus on the Intronati of Siena, the Oziosi of Naples, and the Incogniti of Venice because members of these academies created texts which reveal how academic practices determined the fate of the Italian literary fairy tale. Furthermore, while we do not know Straparola's relation to the academies that flourished in his lifetime, we do know that Basile belonged to both the Oziosi and the Incogniti in the years in which he wrote his fairy tales. In the pages that follow, I identify two ways in which these literary institutions thwarted the success of the literary fairy tale in Italy. First, they constructed a hierarchy of short prose narrative that privileged the verisimilar Boccaccian novella over the feminized, and thus inferior, form of the literary fairy tale. Second, they enforced a decorum of storytelling that relegated the fairy tale to spaces outside of the official meetings of the academy. In this way, the academies distanced the fairy tale from sanctioned literary pursuits and thus ensured its fallure among male authors who sought to acquire prestige or patronage through their literary endeavors in the academy. At the same time, this decorum also discouraged women writers, who by the mid-sixteenth century had begun to publish in greater numbers, from penning fairy tales. Admittedly, these texts present a methodological challenge as it is difficult to determine to what extent they are descriptive as well as prescriptive. For this reason, it is impossible to determine beyond a shadow of a doubt what actually occurred at every meeting of these academies. …