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Boccaccio
Giovanni Boccaccio wrote The Decameron in the century before Geoffrey Chaucer undertook a similar project in Britain, with both The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales involving a number of stories told by members of the group, with the group in each case gathered with a common purpose, and with the stories connected by links which describe the actions of the company (Root 1). Chaucer also took some of the stories for his travelers from versions told by Boccaccio. The two writers come from similar literary traditions, and they also tended to treat women in much the same way. For Boccaccio, social traditions and his own individual view of social conventions interact to cause him to tell his stories in the manner he chooses.
One of the dominant views of the time was of courtly love. The essence of courtly love is detailed in the twelfth-century work by Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love. He addresses the issue of what persons are fit for love, and he describes the type or person to be loved and some of the reasons why they would be worthy of love. He finds that everyone of sound mind and of a certain age -- both not too young and not too old -- is capable of love. One of the elements he notes at this time is particularly interesting: "An excess of and Christian conceptions of what is proper behavior. In Boccaccio, what is proper and what is not are constantly at war, with women the focus of both.
On the one hand, the courtly love tradition places women at the center of male attention and makes them objects of reverence as well as sublimated lust. On the other, as Anna Roberts notes, violence against women is also a feature in much of The Decameron as in other medieval texts. The author…
Work Cited
Capellanus, Andreas, The Art of Courtly Love. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
Edwards, Robert. Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity. New York: Palgrave, 2002.
Roberts, Anna. Violence against Women in Medieval Texts. Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 1998.
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Religious Criticism and Idealization of Women in Giovanni Boccaccio's "Decameron" In the world of medieval literature, Giovanni Boccaccio is renowned for his timeless contributions in the form of "Decameron," also translated as "Ten Day's Work." This literary piece by Boccaccio chronicles the short stories and narratives of ten (10) people who sought refuge from the city that is being affected with Black Plague, a disease that left Europe's developing human
A wife of bad character, Who takes delight in always quarrelling, Brings her husband premature old age; So a man who seeks his own happiness, Should not even mention the name Of such a wicked woman. Women are very peculiar, They never say what they have on their minds or on the tips of their tongues And what they do is always contrary to what they say. Those who are drawn to women. By their enchanting appearances, Are destroyed, like
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plague of the Middle Ages upon Boccaccio's literary masterpiece the Decameron Boccaccio decided to write this novel as a means for women to distract themselves from their heart ache. It was clear that when it comes to men they have a lot of different outlets for their pain, which consist of: hawking, taking a walk, hunting, horseback riding, fishing, gambling, or joining to industry; all of which will reduce the
Ovid, Giovanni Boccaccio, and the authors of One Thousand and One Nights use frame narratives to add continuity and structure to the literary composition. Framing serves several literary functions. For one, framing establishes an independent narrator. The reader comes to trust and relate to this narrator, who is fictional and yet not quite a character of any of the internal narratives. This also allows the authors of their respective stories