Giovanni Boccaccio was born to a Tuscan merchant, Boccaccio di Chellino and an unidentified mother who was probably French in the summer of 1313. He had an unhappy childhood in Florence, mostly because Boccaccio's father had no intention of humoring his son's literary inclinations. Boccaccio's father sent him to Naples in 1328 to study business, and while there he learned about the aristocracy of the commercial world, as well as the chivalry and feudalism that were deeply...
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The purpose of this essay is to examine to what extent Boccaccio’s insistence as to the necessity of hierarchical societies is undermined by his continual consideration of the flaws of established societal norms; as well as the motives for this...
She told him about...country sounds and country smells and of how fresh and clean everything in the country is. She said that heought to live there and that if he did, he would find that all his troubles were city troubles.
-Nathanael West, Miss...
Poetic Justice, with her lifted scale,
Where in nice balance, truth with gold she weighs,
And solid pudding against empty praise.
-Alexander Pope
In the Seventh Story of the Eighth Day in Boccaccio's Decameron, the storyteller states "Many of the...
Writing in Italy during the 14th century, Boccaccio is caught in the historical dichotomy between the blind adherence to the Church that permeated the Middle Ages and the emerging Humanism that characterized the Renaissance. It is clear that...
Introduction
Giovanni Boccaccio’s medieval masterpiece “The Decameron” is a collection of stories, chronicled over ten days, which highlights the best and worst of human nature. Boccaccio’s tales deal with themes such as adultery, love, premarital...
At the beginning of Boccaccio’s Decameron, both the male and female narrators hesitate to discuss the seemingly lewd topic of sexual relations. On Day I, the Florentines discuss various topics, yet only one narrator is brave enough to introduce...
The word “faith” in reference to religion emphasizes the uncertain nature of religion. By definition, if one is religious, they must trust and take a leap of faith to come to a conclusion about their gods, spirits, or idols. Faith is predicated...
Giovanni Boccaccio’s medieval work of art The Decameron highlights both the righteous and sinful ways of humans, through the telling of short stories. Boccaccio’s tales cover a wide array of topics, including adultery, love, devotion, trickery,...
At the time that Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron and Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron became popular there were numerous similar works in circulation. Readers mainly enjoyed the tales as facile entertainment rather than literature, and most...
Numerous scholars have examined Christine de Pizan’s seminal The Book of the City of Ladies, finished circa 1405, as a conscious “reappropriation” of earlier texts by men – most notably as a formal response to Jean de Meun’s popular additions to...
In 1362, Renaissance scholar Giovanni Boccaccio wrote Famous Women, in which he analyzed female characters from Classical texts. Other Italian scholars at the time devoted their efforts to studying male heroes and gods, but Boccaccio brought...
