Category: Biographies

Giovanni Boccaccio, a Biographical Study

PETRARCH AND BOCCACCIO DISCUSSING 224 From a miniature in the French version of the _De Casibus Virorum_, made in 1409 by Laurent le Premierfait. MS. late XV century. (Brit. Mus. Showcase V, MS. 126.)

Chapters

24. CHAPTER XVIII

But we cannot leave him there. For he is not dead, but living; not only where, in the third heaven, he long since has found his own Fiammetta and been comforted, but in this our...

22. CHAPTER XVI

In the summer of the year 1373 when Boccaccio was sixty years old the Signoria of Florence was petitioned by a number of citizens to appoint a lecturer who should publicly expou...

21. CHAPTER XV

Those ten years from 1363 to 1372 had not only been given by Boccaccio to the study of Greek and the service of his country, they had also been devoted to a vast and general acc...

9. CHAPTER V

I have written at some length and in some detail of the early years of Boccaccio and of the circumstances attending his love for Fiammetta, because they decided the rest of his...

8. CHAPTER IV

Of the first period of Giovanni's love-story, the period of uncertainty which lasted but twelve days, we know almost nothing, save that he was used to remind himself very often...

17. CHAPTER XII

Those embassies, for the most part so unsuccessful one may think, which from time to time between 1350 and 1354 Boccaccio had undertaken at the request of the Florentine Republi...

15. CHAPTER X

As we have seen, Boccaccio returned to Florence probably in the end of 1349. His father, who was certainly living in July, 1348, for he then added a codicil to his Will,[387] se...

20. CHAPTER XIV

Boccaccio returned from Venice to Tuscany some time before September, 1363, not long before, as we may think, for the letter Petrarch wrote him on September 7[485] seems to have...

14. CHAPTER IX

Fiammetta was dead. It must have been with that sorrow in his heart that Boccaccio returned once more from Naples into Tuscany, to settle the affairs of his father and to undert...

18. CHAPTER XIII

That a profound change had already taken place in Boccaccio's point of view, in his attitude towards life, in his whole moral consciousness, it might seem impossible to doubt af...

6. CHAPTER II

In the fourteenth century the journey from Florence by way of Siena, Perugia, Rieti, Aquila, and Sulmona, thence across the Apennines at Il Sangro, and so through Isernia and Ve...

7. CHAPTER III

For it was in the midst of this gay life, full of poetry and study, that he met her who was so much more beautiful than all the other "ninfe Partenopee," and who seemed to him "...

11. CHAPTER VI

Those years which Boccaccio spent in Florence between 1341 and 1345, and which would seem for the most part to have been devoted to literature, the completion of the works alrea...

10. chapter xiii. Here is no allegory at all, but a clear statement; the

As the title proclaims, the poem is a Vision--a vision which Love discovers to the poet-lover. While he is falling asleep a lady appears to him who is to be his guide. He follow...

13. CHAPTER VIII

The few notices we have of Boccaccio's life at this time are almost entirely mere hints which enable us to assert that in such a year he was in such a place: they in no way help...

23. CHAPTER XVII

That illness which brought those lectures on the _Divine Comedy_ so swiftly to an end in the winter of 1373 was no new thing; for long, as we have seen, Boccaccio had had a trou...

12. CHAPTER VII

Those three years of tumult in Florence cannot but have made a profound impression on a man like Boccaccio. "Florence is full of boastful voices and cowardly deeds," he writes i...

4. CHAPTER I

The facts concerning the life and work of Giovanni Boccaccio, though they have been traversed over and over again by modern students,[3] are still for the most part insecure and...

16. CHAPTER XI

Boccaccio did well to be anxious. The greed of the Visconti, the venality and indifference of the Pope, threatened the very liberty of Tuscany, and though Boccaccio had till now...

19. part did not contain the details he wanted concerning the descent

of Ulysses into Hades and his voyage along the Italian shores. Even this incomplete copy, though sent off in 1365 by Boccaccio, was a long time in reaching him. On January 27, 1...

5. i. It will be seen that if our theory be correct, Giovanni Boccaccio

bears the names of both his parents--Giovanna and Boccaccio. It is necessary to point out, however, that there is not much in this, for a paternal uncle was called Vanni, and Gi...

3. iii. A banquet is prepared for the new bride; Griselda is

PETRARCH AND BOCCACCIO DISCUSSING 224 From a miniature in the French version of the _De Casibus Virorum_, made in 1409 by Laurent le Premierfait. MS. late XV century. (Brit. Mus...

1. i. The Marquis of Saluzzo, while out hunting, meets with

2. ii. Her two children are taken from her, she is divorced,