Giovanni Boccaccio

In the summer of 1348, as the Black Death ravages their city, ten young Florentines take refuge in the countryside. They amuse themselves by each telling a story a day for the ten days they are destined to remain there—a hundred stories of love, adventure, and surprising twists of fate. Less preoccupied with abstract concepts of morality or religion than...

The Decameron has had numerous English translations, most of them bowdlerised or reliant on corrupt texts. The challenge is to move gracefully between the widely varying idioms employed for different tales, and Rebhorn is notably successful in handling this, avoiding both an excess of slack colloquialism and the pish-tush-forsooth faux-antique of earlier renderings. The achievement genuinely honours its original. JONATHAN...

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. 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, described by one critic as "the...

Beautiful collector's edition of the famous The Decameron: one hundred fables and fairy tales with the universal wisdom of great literature... With a new foreword. The Decameron tells a story of ten young Florentines who have fled from the Plague to live in Naples. The one hundred allegorical tales are shared through the voices of these people as they spend...

Tales from the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio is bawdy and moving, hilarious and reflective. These stories offer the very best of Boccaccio's Decameron in a brilliant, playful new translation. This hugely enjoyable volume collects the best stories of Boccaccio's masterwork in a fresh, accessible new translation by Peter Hainsworth. It includes such celebrated, thought-provoking tales as Isabella and the Pot...

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 encyclopaedic 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...

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 to create a massive synthesis of Greek and Roman mythology. The work also contains a famous defence of the value of studying ancient pagan poetry in a Christian world. The complete work in fifteen books contains...

The Decameron (c.1351) was written in the wake of the Black Death, a shattering epidemic which had shaken Florence's confident entrepreneurial society to its core. In a country villa outside the city, ten young noble men and women who have escaped the plague decide to tell each other stories. Boccaccio's skill as a dramatist is masterfully displayed in this virtuoso...

The Decameron is structured in a frame narrative, or frame tale. Boccaccio begins with a description of the Black Death and a group of seven women and three men who flee from plague-ridden Florence to a villa in the (then) countryside of Fiesole for two weeks. To pass the time, each member of the party tells one story for each...

Little Black Classics – the new series to celebrate Penguin's 80th anniversary Mrs Rosie and the Priest 'When the men were off somewhere, he would come visiting their wives more solicitously than any priest they'd had before...' Mrs Rosie and the Priest is part of the delightful collection of short stories showcasing Giovanni Boccaccio's wit and insight into human nature....