BOCCACCIO’S DECAMERON IN TRANSLATION

Catalog description

The Decameron, one of the most entertaining, beloved and imitated prose works ever written, is an accurate reflection of fourteenth-century life in Italy. Like Dante's Divine Comedy, this human comedy was written not only to delight, but also to instruct by exploring both our spiritual and our natural environment. Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), considered by some typically medieval and by others one of the first truly modern literary figures to emerge from the darkness of the Middle Ages into the light of the Renaissance, shows himself, as author of The Decameron, to be both a passionate believer and a passionate critic as he reconstructs society, destroyed by the Black Plague, through the perfection of his 100-fold narrative. Boccaccio’s Decameron, of course, generated a flourishing early modern tradition of proto-novelistic short-story collections (think of Marguerite de Navarre and Cervantes), but also provided substantial material for the nascent dramatic tradition (from Machiavelli’s Mandragola to Shakespeare’s All’s Well). His biographical collection, Of Famous Women, was an indispensable source and model for the wide-spread debates on the status of women. His Genealogy of the Gentile Gods was a staple of the Renaissance mythographical tradition. This course is taught in English.