What nationality is Giovanni Boccaccio?
Giovanni Boccaccio (UK: /bəˈkætʃioʊ/, US: /boʊˈkɑːtʃ(i)oʊ, bə-/, Italian: [dʒoˈvanni bokˈkattʃo]; 16 June 1313 – 21 December 1375) was an Italian writer, poet, correspondent of Petrarch, and an important
Giovanni Boccaccio, (born 1313, Tuscany—died Dec. 21, 1375, Certaldo, Tuscany), Italian poet and scholar, best remembered as the author of the earthy tales in the Decameron.
While Boccaccio was writing Italian fictions, he was also producing Latin texts. In Buccolicum Carmen (ca. 1341–1372), Boccaccio revived a classical form called the eclogue.
Boccaccio's best-known work is The Decameron (composed between 1348–52; revised, 1370–71), a masterpiece of Italian literature in which which ten young Florentines, who have fled to the nearby town of Fiesole to escape the Black Plague, tell each other stories, culminating in one hundred tales.
Derived from Greek, the word decameron means ten days and is an allusion to Saint Ambrose's Hexameron, a poetic account of the creation story, Genesis, told over six days.
Giovanni Boccaccio was a contemporary witness to the effects of the Black Death pandemic, the Yersinia pestis bacterial pandemic in Europe between the years 1346-53, causing 75 million to 200 million deaths across the continent alone.
The oldest of the Placiti Cassinesi, the Placito Capuano (pictured), is considered to be the first existing documentation of the Italian language; where its closeness to Latin is still noted, but the text is closer to spoken vernacular than traditional written Latin.
The language that came to be thought of as Italian developed in central Tuscany and was first formalized in the early 14th century through the works of Tuscan writer Dante Alighieri, written in his native Florentine.
The Canterbury Tales contains more parallels to the Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio, than any other work. Like the Tales, the Decameron features a frame tale in which several different narrators tell a series of stories.
Boccaccio's most famous work, the Decameron, was condemned by the Catholic Church and included in the index of Prohibited Books (Index librorum prohibitorum) in 1559 on the grounds of its "intolerable errors." In the USA the work was banned until the 1930s.
Why was The Decameron banned?
Borghini's approved edition implied that manuscripts of The Decameron had been mischievously distorted to include outrageous slights against the Church and its servants. The erotic elements, the 'obscenity', often key to a tale's plot and meaning, remained but all the references to the clergy had been removed.
The many tales that depict explicit sexual situations and satirize the Church became the subject of much controversy, and they were indeed the same that were ultimately censored.
Along with Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarca (known as Petrarch), he is considered a father of Italian literature. His works are still valid in literature, and for his ideas, he was considered a humanist. His most famous work is Decameron, which has inspired many other works.
What is the plot of The Decameron? The plot of The Decameron involves ten young men and women feeling Florence during the Black Plague. They stay at a villa for ten days, during which time they share a total of one hundred stories to pass the time.
In the prologue of the Decameron, Boccaccio explains that his purpose of writing is to comfort and entertain his readers, specifically his friends and family who were there for him during difficult times. Earlier in his life, he was scorned by love, and his loved ones were there to comfort him.
Besides Christianity, there is mention of Judaism and the Muslim faith, and corresponding characters. Saints in the Novellas appear as holy figures, often invoked by the characters for protection.
The moral is that people can be happy, prosperous and creative even in the worst of times: nothing quenches the life force.
The overall theme of The Decameron is the power of love to survive changes in fortune and to override human intelligence. By love, Boccaccio usually means romantic passion, including lust. He portrays love as a natural force that overcomes individual will.
The world's first known plague victim was a 5,000-year-old hunter-gatherer in Europe. The skull of the man buried in Riņņukalns, Latvia, around 5,000 years ago. Humanity has been ravaged by the plague – one of the deadliest bacterial infections in history – for thousands of years.
Sicily and the Italian Peninsula was the first area in then Catholic Western Europe to be reached by the bubonic plague pandemic known as the Black Death, which reached the region by an Italian ship from the Crimea which landed in Messina in Sicily in October 1347.
Who caught the black plague first?
The plague that caused the Black Death originated in China in the early to mid-1300s and spread along trade routes westward to the Mediterranean and northern Africa. It reached southern England in 1348 and northern Britain and Scandinavia by 1350.
Orsini Family, one of the oldest, most illustrious, and for centuries most powerful of the Roman princely families.
Originally spoken by small groups of people living along the lower Tiber River, Latin spread with the increase of Roman political power, first throughout Italy and then throughout most of western and southern Europe and the central and western Mediterranean coastal regions of Africa.
The term Latin Europe is used in reference to European nations where Italians, French, Portuguese, Romanians and Spaniards live. Their cultures are particularly Roman-derived. They include the use of Romance languages and the traditional predominance of Western Christianity (especially Roman Catholicism).
The ancestors of Italians are mostly Indo-European speakers (Italic peoples such as Latins, Falisci, Picentes, Umbrians, Samnites, Oscans, Sicels and Adriatic Veneti, as well as Celts, Iapygians and Greeks) and pre-Indo-European speakers (Etruscans, Ligures, Rhaetians and Camunni in mainland Italy, Sicani in Sicily and ...
Dante is considered the “Father of the Italian Language.” Born and raised in Florence, Dante's works were not written in Latin, which was used by well-educated citizens at the time, but rather in the Italian dialect of Florence or “vernacular.” Dante set a precedent by using the local dialect, which ultimately became ...
Historians have since stated that Latin really became a dead language around 600-750AD. This is in line with the diminishing Roman Empire where few people could actually read, and the Italian, French and Spanish spoken language was rapidly evolving.
A number of the Canterbury tales tell stories that also appear in Boccaccio's Decameron. There is a slim possibility that Chaucer met Boccaccio, who was living in Certaldo, just south of Florence, in the 1370s, when Chaucer was in Italy.
His early influences included Paolo da Perugia (a curator and author of a collection of myths called the Collectiones), humanists Barbato da Sulmona and Giovanni Barrili, and theologian Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro.
Decameron, collection of tales by Giovanni Boccaccio, probably composed between 1349 and 1353. The work is regarded as a masterpiece of classical Italian prose.
Why is Uncle Tom's Cabin banned from schools?
The book was removed from the shelves of a Virginia school library in 1986 because of its “profanity and sexual references;” and deemed too “mature” for high school students in California in 1984 and 1985.
"Many historians point to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin as the first book in the United States to experience a ban on a national scale," Amy Brady wrote in 2016 for LitHub.
Answer and Explanation: Though each of the 100 stories in Dameron by Giovanni Boccaccio has its own conflict, the general conflict throughout the tales is that of sex in relation to seduction, rape, and unrequited love. The stories are supposedly written by a group of ten young people: seven women and three men.
Ten friends (seven women and three men) get together, hide away from the Black Death that was killing the population of Florence at the time, and start telling stories to each other. They spend ten days together and the stories told total 100 in number.
The Decameron tells the story of a group of young people, three boys and seven girls, who escape the black death (bubonic plague) that invaded Florence and Europe in 1348 by taking refuge in the hills outside the city, passing the time with stories, songs, dances and games.
The Decameron opens with a description of the Bubonic Plague (Black Death). Boccaccio knows that it started in the East, and attributes it either to the influence of heavenly bodies or to God's anger over the wicked deeds of men.
Boccaccio states in his Introduction that women at home are the Decameron's intended audience. Just as Prince Gallehault brought relief to Queen Guinevere, so too does Boccaccio aim to alleviate the suffering of housewives by relating tales of merriment and escapism.
The Decameron is important because of its historical significance. The 100 stories act as a historical record of the Black Death, also known as the Bubonic plague. In the Decameron, Boccaccio addresses how this terrible disease impacted society and religion.
Nothing is so indecent that it cannot be said to another person if the proper words are used to convey it. Kissed mouth don't lose its fortune, on the contrary it renews itself just as the moon does. Wrongs committed in the distant past are far easier to condemn than to rectify.
Fifth tale (IV, 5)
Her brothers take the pot from her and she dies shortly after. Filomena tells this story, one of the most famous in the Decameron, and the basis of John Keats' narrative poem Isabella, or the Pot of Basil.
Was Boccaccio a feminist?
Furthermore, the women enjoy these sexual unions without authorial condemnation. Such female agency, shown primarily by sexual primacy and matrimonial decisions, establishes Boccaccio as a forerunner of feminist literature. Boccaccio's prominent proto-feminist leanings are the focus of this examination.
The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio. It was probably in the years 1348–53 that Boccaccio composed the Decameron in the form in which it is read today. In the broad sweep of its range and its alternately tragic and comic views of life, it is rightly regarded as his masterpiece.
The book is set over ten days and each day has ten stories, one from each of the people sheltering in the village, which made it so easy to read.
The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio. It was probably in the years 1348–53 that Boccaccio composed the Decameron in the form in which it is read today. In the broad sweep of its range and its alternately tragic and comic views of life, it is rightly regarded as his masterpiece.
Break 'Decameron' down into sounds: [DI] + [KAM] + [UH] + [RUHN] - say it out loud and exaggerate the sounds until you can consistently produce them.
Boccaccio was acutely aware of his position as mediator between different cultures—classical and medieval; Italian, French, and Latin; and Christian and pagan—and thus he stands as an important figure in the development of a European humanist literary culture that defines the Renaissance and beyond.
In the prologue of the Decameron, Boccaccio explains that his purpose of writing is to comfort and entertain his readers, specifically his friends and family who were there for him during difficult times. Earlier in his life, he was scorned by love, and his loved ones were there to comfort him.
Did Giovanni Boccaccio have a wife?
1355 is also the year of little Violante's death; she is one of at least five children of Boccaccio, all illegitimate (as far as we know, Boccaccio never married and, as we said, was ordained in 1360).
Decameron, collection of tales by Giovanni Boccaccio, probably composed between 1349 and 1353.
The Decameron begins with the flight of 10 young people (7 women and 3 men) from plague-stricken Florence in 1348.
The overall theme of The Decameron is the power of love to survive changes in fortune and to override human intelligence. By love, Boccaccio usually means romantic passion, including lust. He portrays love as a natural force that overcomes individual will.
Others had similar sentiments: that the plague was caused by the wickedness of humanity, and that this wickedness was manifested by an assault on the universals that held society together. In addition, plague was a cure for social fragmentation and sin. Boccaccio himself seemed to hold this belief.
Fifth tale (IV, 5)
Her brothers take the pot from her and she dies shortly after. Filomena tells this story, one of the most famous in the Decameron, and the basis of John Keats' narrative poem Isabella, or the Pot of Basil.
The book is set over ten days and each day has ten stories, one from each of the people sheltering in the village, which made it so easy to read.
Highly polished, elegant vernacular prose; fresh, descriptive, conversational vernacular. Although Boccaccio follows the well-established tradition of modestly berating his own literary abilities, there's no real way that he truly believed that he was a writer of small talent.
Taking place in the plague year of 1348 in Florence, Italy, The Decameron follows ten wealthy young people who abandon the city for a luxurious country retreat. Once there, they attempt to banish their sorrows by communing with nature, singing, dancing, and telling stories; in all, one hundred stories are told.
