With a new foreword. Written in the fourteenth century by Italian author, poet and scholar Giovanni Boccaccio, the Decameron contains stories told by ten young Florentines who have fled the city to escape the Plague. Presented within the sophisticated structure of a surrounding frame story, the one hundred allegorical tales are shared through the voices of these people as they spend their nights regaling the company with tales intended to guide and comfort, from the erotic, sensual, and bawdy to the intellectual, philosophical and tragic. The work’s fundamental purpose is one of ethical instruction through the means of beautiful and entertaining prose, touching on themes of morality, fortune, human will, wit, virtue, female agency, and love won and lost. This is Boccaccio's masterpiece and is generally viewed as the work that confirmed his reputation as the founder of Italian prose literature. It is also one of the world's great literary masterpieces.

Originally published in 1986, this translated version of Giovanni Boccaccio's Il Filostrato is of particular interest as the principal source for Chaucer's great work, the Troilus. This edition includes the original Italian alongside the translation, so that even the English reader with no knowledge of Italian will be able to make out a good deal of the original assisted by a close translation.

Published in 1990: This book tells the life story of Dante, the poet and his work.

Published in 1990: This book tells the life story of Dante, the poet and his work.

Originally published in 1985, this book contains a full translation of Giovanni Boccaccio's L'Ameto, alongside textual notes.Giovanni Boccaccio is famous for his great collection of short stories, the Decameron, but his other literary accomplishments are generally less well-known. Yet he helped revive the Latin eclogue and epistle and fostered the study of Greek; he made the major Renaissance compilation of classical myths, established the pastoral romance, and began formal Dante criticism. Among his more minor works belongs the Ameto, the first moden pastoral romance, translated here.

Originally published in 1985, this book contains a full translation of Giovanni Boccaccio's L'Ameto, alongside textual notes.Giovanni Boccaccio is famous for his great collection of short stories, the Decameron, but his other literary accomplishments are generally less well-known. Yet he helped revive the Latin eclogue and epistle and fostered the study of Greek; he made the major Renaissance compilation of classical myths, established the pastoral romance, and began formal Dante criticism. Among his more minor works belongs the Ameto, the first moden pastoral romance, translated here.

Originally published in 1986, this translated version of Giovanni Boccaccio's Il Filostrato is of particular interest as the principal source for Chaucer's great work, the Troilus. This edition includes the original Italian alongside the translation, so that even the English reader with no knowledge of Italian will be able to make out a good deal of the original assisted by a close translation.

The year is 1348. The Black Death has begun to ravage Europe. Ten young Florentines seven women and three men escape the plague-infested city and retreat to the countryside around Fiesole. At their leisure in this isolated and bucolic setting, they spend ten days telling each other stories tales of romance, tragedy, comedy, and farce one hundred in all. The result, called by one critic "the greatest short story collection of all time" (Leonard Barkan, Princeton University) is a rich and entertaining celebration of the medley of medieval life.

Witty, earthy, and filled with bawdy irreverence, the one hundred stories of The Decameron offer more than simple escapism; they are also a life-affirming balm for trying times. The Decameron is a joyously comic book that has earned its place in world literature not just because it makes us laugh, but more importantly because it shows us how essential laughter is to the human condition.

Published on the 700th anniversary of Boccaccio s birth, Wayne A. Rebhorn's new translation of The Decameron introduces a generation of readers to this "rich late-medieval feast" in a "lively, contemporary, American-inflected English" (Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University) even as it retains the distinctly medieval flavor of Boccaccio's rhetorically expressive prose.

An extensive introduction provides useful details about Boccaccio's historical and cultural milieu, the themes and particularities of the text, and the lines of influence flowing into and out of this towering monument of world literature."

Genealogy of the Pagan Gods by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) is an ambitious work of humanistic scholarship whose goal is to plunder ancient and medieval literary sources so as to create a massive synthesis of Greek and Roman mythology. The work also contains a famous defense of the value of studying ancient pagan poetry in a Christian world. The complete work in fifteen books contains a meticulously organized genealogical tree identifying approximately 950 Greco-Roman mythological figures. The scope is enormous: 723 chapters include over a thousand citations from 200 Greek, Roman, medieval, and Trecento authors. Throughout the Genealogy, Boccaccio deploys an array of allegorical, historical, and philological critiques of the ancient myths and their iconography. Much more than a mere compilation of pagan myths, the Genealogy incorporates hundreds of excerpts from and comments on ancient poetry, illustrative of the new spirit of philological and cultural inquiry emerging in the early Renaissance. It is at once the most ambitious work of literary scholarship of the early Renaissance and a demonstration to contemporaries of the moral and cultural value of studying ancient poetry.

Giovanni Boccaccio's Genealogy of the Pagan Gods is an ambitious work of humanistic scholarship whose goal is to plunder ancient and medieval literary sources so as to create a massive synthesis of Greek and Roman mythology. The work also contains a famous defense of the value of studying ancient pagan poetry in a Christian world. The complete work in fifteen books contains a meticulously organized genealogical tree identifying approximately 950 Greco-Roman mythological figures. The scope is enormous: 723 chapters include over a thousand citations from two hundred Greek, Roman, medieval, and Trecento authors. Throughout the Genealogy, Boccaccio deploys an array of allegorical, historical, and philological critiques of the ancient myths and their iconography. Much more than a mere compilation of pagan myths, the Genealogy incorporates hundreds of excerpts from and comments on ancient poetry, illustrative of the new spirit of philological and cultural inquiry emerging in the early Renaissance. It is at once the most ambitious work of literary scholarship of the early Renaissance and a demonstration to contemporaries of the moral and cultural value of studying ancient poetry. This is the first volume of a projected three-volume set of Boccaccio's complete Genealogy.

After the composition of the Decameron, and under the influence of Petrarch's humanism, Giovanni Boccaccio(1313-1375) devoted the last decades of his life to compiling encyclopedic works in Latin. Among them is "Famous Women," the first collection of biographies in Western literature devoted exclusively to women.

The 106 women whose life stories make up this volume range from the exemplary to the notorious, from historical and mythological figures to Renaissance contemporaries. In the hands of a master storyteller, these brief biographies afford a fascinating glimpse of a moment in history when medieval attitudes toward women were beginning to give way to more modern views of their potential.

"Famous Women," which Boccaccio continued to revise and expand until the end of his life, became one of the most popular works in the last age of the manuscript book, and had a signal influence on many literary works, including Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" and Castiglione's "Courtier." This edition presents the first English translation based on the autograph manuscript of the Latin.

A new version of John Payne's Victorian translation, with an Introduction by Cormac O Cuilleanain. 1348. The Black Death is sweeping through Europe. In Florence, plague has carried off one hundred thousand people. In their Tuscan villas, seven young women and three young men tell tales to recreate the world they have lost, weaving a rich tapestry of comedy, tragedy, ribaldry and farce. Boccaccio's Decameron recasts the storytelling heritage of the ancient and medieval worlds into perennial forms that inspired writers from Chaucer and Shakespeare down to our own day. Boccaccio makes the incredible believable, with detail so sharp we can look straight into the lives of people who lived six hundred years ago. His Decameron hovers between the fading glories of an aristocratic past - the Crusades, the Angevins, the courts of France, the legendary East - and the colourful squalor of contemporary life, where wives deceive husbands, friars and monks pursue fleshly ends, and natural instincts fight for satisfaction. Here are love and jealousy, passion and pride - and a shrewd calculation of profit and loss which heralds the rise of a dynamic merchant class. These stories show us early capitalism during a moment of crisis and revelation.

New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt/M., Oxford, Wien, 2002. Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures. Vol. 116 General Editors: Tamara Alvarez-Detrell and Michael G. Paulson The first epic poem written in Italian is the Teseida delle nozze di Emilia (Theseid of the Nuptials of Emilia) by Giovanni Boccaccio, the well-known author of the Decameron. Conceived and composed during the Florentine author's stay in Naples, it combines masterfully both epic and lyric themes in a genre that may be defined as an epic of love. Besides its intrinsic literary value, the poem reflects the author's youthful emotions and nostalgia for the happiest times of his life. The Translator: Vincenzo Traversa, a United States citizen born and educated in Italy, has taught Italian language and literature at UCLA, Stanford University, and the University of Kansas. He holds a Doctorate in English language and literature and a Ph.D. in Romance languages and literatures from UCLA. He is Professor of Italian and Humanities at California State University, Hayward, where he served as Chairman of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures for thirteen years. His works include Parola e Pensiero, Idioma in Prospettiva, Frequency Dictionary of Italian Words (coauthor), Racconti di Alberto Moravia, Luigi Capuana: Critic and Novelist, and The Laude in the Middle Ages (Peter Lang, 1994). The Italian government awarded him the Cross of Knight in the Order of Merit and he was honored in the 2000 edition of Who's Who Among America's Teachers.

In the summer of 1348, with the plague ravaging Florence, ten young men and women take refuge in the countryside, where they entertain themselves with tales of love, death, and corruption, featuring a host of characters, from lascivious clergymen and mad kings to devious lovers and false miracle-makers. Named after the Greek for "ten days," Boccaccio's book of stories draws on ancient mythology, contemporary history, and everyday life, and has influenced the work of myriad writers who came after him.
J. G. Nichols's new translation, faithful to the original but rendered in eminently readable modern English, captures the timeless humor of one of the great classics of European literature.
A brilliant new translation of the work that Herman Hesse called "the first great masterpiece of European storytelling."

The more than 100 women whose life stories make up this volume range from the exemplary to the notorious, from historical and mythological figures to Renaissance contemporaries of its author, the master storyteller Giovanni Boccaccio. The first collection of biographies in Western literature devoted exclusively to women, Famous Women affords a fascinating glimpse of a moment in history when mediaeval attitudes toward women were beginning to give way to more modern views of their potential. Virginia Brown's translation, commissioned for the I Tatti Renaissance Library, is the first English edition based on the autograph manuscript of the Latin.

Four hilarious and provocative stories from Boccaccio's Decameron, featuring cuckolded husbands, cross-dressing wives and very bad priests. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375). Boccaccio's Decameron is available in Penguin Classics in both a complete and selected edition.