Boccaccio
Italian prose master
Giovanni Boccaccio was a fourteenth-century Italian writer, best known for the *Decameron*, a collection of one hundred tales told by ten young people fleeing the Black Death in Florence.
The work influenced European literature profoundly, establishing prose narrative as a serious art form.
Along with Dante and Petrarch, Boccaccio is considered one of the founders of Italian literary tradition.
Hundred tales in ten days
Central Italian region
- ArnoTuscan watercourse
- 14th centuryYears 1301-1400
- medievalOf the Middle Ages
- DanteItalian epic poet
Petrarch · Giotto · Black Death · banking · merchant class · Italian · vernacular · Florentine
Enclosing narrative structure
- novellasMid-length fictional works
- plagueDeadly epidemic disease
- Black DeathMedieval bubonic plague pandemic
- quarantineIsolation preventing disease transmission
storytellers · tales · morality · satire · social commentary · eroticism · clergy · nobility
Ancient Mediterranean scholarship
- antiquityGreat age, ancient era
- philologyStudy of historical texts
- LatinAncient Roman language
- GreekOf Athenian origin
scholarship · manuscripts · Petrarch · Homer · Virgil · Ovid · mythology · liberal arts
- Canterbury TalesMedieval English story collection
- prose fictionImaginary tales in sentences
- RenaissanceEuropean cultural reawakening
- ShakespeareElizabethan dramatist and poet
Keats · Tennyson · literary realism · European literature · short story · narrative structure
Decameron
Hundred tales in ten days
Tuscany
Central Italian region
- ArnoTuscan watercourse
- 14th centuryYears 1301-1400
- medievalOf the Middle Ages
Dante · Petrarch · Giotto · Black Death · banking · merchant class · Italian · vernacular · Florentine · civic life
frame story
Enclosing narrative structure
- novellasMid-length fictional works
- plagueDeadly epidemic disease
- Black DeathMedieval bubonic plague pandemic
quarantine · storytellers · tales · morality · satire · social commentary · eroticism · clergy · nobility · peasants
classical studies
Ancient Mediterranean scholarship
Greek · scholarship · manuscripts · Petrarch · Homer · Virgil · Ovid · mythology · liberal arts · secular
Chaucer
- Canterbury TalesMedieval English story collection
- prose fictionImaginary tales in sentences
- RenaissanceEuropean cultural reawakening
Shakespeare · Keats · Tennyson · literary realism · European literature · short story · narrative structure
BoccaccioDante
Italian epic poet
Bernard of Clairvaux · Augustine of Hippo · Augustine · Petrarch · Thomas Aquinas
BoccaccioDante
Italian epic poet
Petrarch · epic poets · lyric poets · troubadours · Virgil