Giovanni Boccaccio
1) Famous women
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"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...
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In 1631 the Catholic Church in Spain placed this bawdy tale of earthly love on its Index of Prohibited Books. Victorian critics self-righteously censured it as "profligate and disgusting." No wonder: Written immediately after The Decameron, The Corbaccio (or the evil crow"), Boccaccio's final work, is a connoisseur's collection of traditional and medieval misogyny. In his introduction, Cassell situates The Corbaccio within literary, stylistic, and...
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The purpose of this book is to show the growth and development of the medieval tale of Troy. It contains the story of Troilus and Cressida as told by four poets: a Frenchman of the twelfth century, an Italian and an Englishman of the fourteenth century, and a Scot of the fifteenth.
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Pasolini's rendition of 8 of Boccaccio's tales. Includes lusty nuns who perform sexual "miracles," a cheating wife with a head for business, a dying con artist attempting a heavenly swindle, young lovers caught with their pants down, a servant who loses his head for love and a gullible farmer who tries to turn his wife into a mare.