Note 293 — Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Current in Italy before Boccaccio, the tale had been improved from one Italian hand to another;293 and the main credit for its full development is Boccaccio’s.294 Though the Church never officially attempted to suppress the book—leaving it to Savonarola to destroy as far as possible the first edition—the more serious clergy naturally resented its hostility, first denouncing it, then seeking to expurgate all the anti-clerical passages;295 and the personal pressure brought to bear upon Boccaccio had the effect of dispiriting and puritanizing him; so that the Decameron finally wrought its effect in its author’s despite.296 So far as we can divine the deeper influence of such a work on medieval thought, it may reasonably be supposed to have tended, like that of Averroïsm, towards Unitarianism or deism, inasmuch as a simple belief in deity is all that is normally implied in its language on religious matters. On that view it bore its full intellectual fruit only in the two succeeding centuries, when deism and Unitarianism alike grew up in Italy, apparently from non-scholastic roots.