‘The Captain of the Band is un Galant Uomo’: The Good Bandit from Boccaccio to Washington Irving

Abstract

The article explores the figure of the "good bandit," connecting representations of the historical personage Ghino di Tacco in late-medieval Italian literature with the bandits in Washington Irving's travel tales. Ghino di Tacco was a notorious bandit, known for raiding pilgrims and travelers in thirteenth-century Tuscany. Nevertheless, according to literary sources such as Boccaccio's Decameron, the infamous raider left his victims unharmed and with the means necessary to complete their journeys. Sources also indicate that Ghino di Tacco became a bandit because of factional disputes and was eventually pardoned by Pope Boniface VIII for healing the Abbot of Cluny.Similarly, the fictional bandits in Irving's Tales of a Traveller (1824) are revealed to be men of moral standing, forced into a violent life of banditry in response to the excesses of nineteenth-century Italy's ruling classes. His tales redeem the figure of the bandit from crude one-dimensional treatments common in the works of English writers such as Ann Radcliffe. Pivoting from established proposals that have characterized bandits as either criminals or revolutionaries, this article argues that, for Boccaccio as with Irving, the figure of the good bandit functions as a symbol of reconciliation and social reintegration.