Boccaccio S Florence

Best known as the author of the Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio is a key figure in Italian literature. In the mid-fourteenth century, however, Boccaccio was also deeply involved in the politics of Florence and the extent of his involvement steered and inspired his work as a writer. Boccaccio’s Florence explores the financial, political, and social turbulence of Florence at this time, as well as the major players in literary and political circles, to understand the complex ways they emerged in Boccaccio’s writing. Based on extensive archival research and close reading of Boccaccio’s works, the book aims to recover the dynamics of the Florentine conspiracy of 1360 and how this event affected Boccaccio’s writing, arguing that his works reveal clear references to this episode when read in light of the reconstructed historical context. In this rich and textured picture of the man in his time, Elsa Filosa documents a microhistory of connections and interconnections and offers new, more political and historically imbedded readings of Boccaccio’s seminal works.

Boccaccio's Florence draws on extensive archival research to reveal Boccaccio as a political figure and to show how deeply politics impacted his life and his work.

In the time of a devastating pandemic, seven women and three men withdraw to a country estate outside Florence to give themselves a diversion from the death around them. Once there, they decide to spend some time each day telling stories, each of the ten to tell one story each day. They do this for ten days, with a few other days of rest in between, resulting in the 100 stories of the Decameron. The Decameron was written after the Black Plague spread through Italy in 1348. Most of the tales did not originate with Boccaccio; some of them were centuries old already in his time, but Boccaccio imbued them all with his distinctive style. The stories run the gamut from tragedy to comedy, from lewd to inspiring, and sometimes all of those at once. They also provide a detailed picture of daily life in fourteenth-century Italy.

In 1631 the Catholic Church in Spain placed this bawdy tale of earthly love on its Index of Prohibited Books. Victorian critics self-righteously censured it as "profligate and disgusting." No wonder: Written immediately after The Decameron, The Corbaccio (or the evil crow"), Boccaccio's final work, is a connoisseur's collection of traditional and medieval misogyny. In his introduction, Cassell situates The Corbaccio within literary, stylistic, and structural conventions, a tradition encompassing some of the most satirical, scurrilous, scatological and parodic literature ever written.

Comprised of 100 novellas told by ten men and women over a ten-day journey fleeing plague-infested Florence, the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio is an allegorical work famous for its bawdy portrayals of everyday life, its searing wit and mockery, and its careful adherence to a framed structure. The word "decameron" is derived from the Greek and means "ten days".

As the 'father' of the English literary canon, one of a very few writers to appear in every 'great books' syllabus, Chaucer is seen as an author whose works are fundamentally timeless: an author who, like Shakespeare, exemplifies the almost magical power of poetry to appeal to each generation of readers. Every age remakes its own Chaucer, developing new understandings of how his poetry intersects with contemporary ways of seeing the world, and the place of the subject who lives in it. This Handbook comprises a series of essays by established scholars and emerging voices that address Chaucer's poetry in the context of several disciplines, including late medieval philosophy and science, Mediterranean Studies, comparative literature, vernacular theology, and popular devotion. The volume paints the field in broad strokes and sections include Biography and Circumstances of Daily Life; Chaucer in the European Frame; Philosophy and Science in the Universities; Christian Doctrine and Religious Heterodoxy; and the Chaucerian Afterlife. Taken as a whole, The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer offers a snapshot of the current state of the field, and a bold suggestion of the trajectories along which Chaucer studies are likely to develop in the future.

Reconsidering Boccaccio explores the exceptional social, geographic, and intellectual range of the Florentine writer Giovanni Boccaccio, his dialogue with voices and traditions that surrounded him, and the way that his legacy illuminates the interconnectivity of numerous cultural networks.

In the fall of 1373, the city of Florence commissioned Giovanni Boccaccio to give lectures on Dante for the general population. These lectures, undeniably the most learned of all the early commentaries, came to be known as the Expositions on Dante's Divine Comedy. Though interrupted at Inferno XVII, they provide profound, near-contemporary interpretations of Dante's poem and contain, in many ways, some of the most beautiful aspects of Boccaccio's admirable literary production: narrative vignettes worthy of the best pages of the Decameron, insights on the rapidly changing approach to literary commentary, and a heartfelt belief that poetry is the most faithful guardian of history, philosophy, and theology. Michael Papio's excellent translation finally makes the entirety of Boccaccio's often overlooked masterpiece accessible to a wider public and supplies a wealth of information in the introduction and notes that will prove useful to specialists and general readers alike.