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Olivia Holmes explores the Decameron's sceptical and sexually permissive contents against the backdrop of medieval religion and didacticism.
Giovanni Boccaccio devoted the last decades of his life to compiling encyclopedic works in Latin. Among them is this text, the first collection of biographies in Western literature devoted to women.
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.
This volume is the first sustained study of Boccaccio's consoling fictions as well as his reflections on the way literature can, and should, offer solace. It analyzes the affective, exemplary, and cognitive modes of consolation that mark the poet's works; but it also underlines the critical dialogue with the ancient and medieval traditions Boccaccio inherits. The limits of Stoic, Boethian, and Dantesque views of consolation are laid bare as Boccaccio fashions a new vision of consolatio for the later Middle Ages.
Re-examining key passages in Dante’s oeuvre in the light of the crucial issue of moral choice, this book provides a new thematic framework for interpreting the Divine Comedy. Olivia Holmes shows how Dante articulated the relationship between the human and the divine as an erotic choice between two attractive women—Beatrice and the “other woman.” Investigating the traditions and archetypes that contributed to the formation of Dante’s two beloveds, Holmes shows how Dante brilliantly overlaid and combined these paradigms in his poem. In doing so he re-imagined the two women as not merely oppositional condensations of apparently conflicting cultural traditions but also complementary versions of the same. This visionary insight sheds new light on Dante’s corpus and on the essential paradox at the poem’s heart: the unabashed eroticism of Dante’s turn away from the earthly in favor of the divine.
A major re-evaluation of Boccaccio's status as literary innovator and cultural mediator equal to that of Petrarch and Dante.
13occaccio's 'Revenge or the Old (9row 3 notes 64 Index 76 Introduction If Giovanni Boccaccio had encountered the deadly widow in black when he was ten years younger, he might have laughed oft'the humiliating incident and dressed it up for a rollicking episode of the Decameron, instead of laying the lady bare in a vitriolic satire under the name of the Old Crow. According to the most logical interpretation of his personal account, how ever, he was a greying man of forty-two; the bloom of youth had withered within him; and by the end of 1355, when he wrote the bitter denunciation, his "inimical Fortune" had dealt him a series of nasty blows. Since the publication of the Decameron, new material responsibilities had complicated his life; his diplomatic missions for the government of Florence were marked by some cruel disappointments, -in particular the defection of his beloved Petrarch to the Republic's arch-enemy, the hated Visconti. His old, undependable friend, Niccola Acciaiuoli, a glittering star at the court of Naples, had used his influence to have his own secretary, Zanobi da Strada, crowned poet laureate by the emperor, while Boccaccio himself had cul tivated the Muses for years in the footsteps of Dante and P('trarch, without the recognition he deserved.
Although the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales have often been linked, this is the first ever major study of the two most popular medieval collections of framed narratives to examine the texts as a whole. The present study goes well beyond shared general similarities and the inconclusive search for source or analogue material in order to look at the internal dynamics of each text and the surprising similarities that emerge there in terms of theories of literature, authority and authorship and the particular reader response envisaged by their authors.