Giovanni Boccaccio and the Decameron: Influence on Literature
Giovanni Boccaccio: Father of Italian Literature
Giovanni Boccaccio (Florence 1313 – Certaldo or Florence, 21 December 1375) was an Italian writer and humanist. He wrote in Latin and Italian and is considered, along with Dante and Petrarch, one of the fathers of Italian literature. His most famous work is the Decameron. This book was translated into Catalan in 1429, and its influence on Catalan literature was enormous. Sentences extracted from Boccaccio’s Decameron appear in Tirant lo Blanc by Joanot Martorell (also known as Joanot Martí). Boccaccio is the master of Italian vulgar prose (spoken by the people).
The Decameron: A Glimpse into 14th Century Life
The Decameron offers a fresh look at the habits of life in the fourteenth century. The tales are told by ten young people – seven men and three women – who flee the city to spend a few days in the countryside to escape the plague of 1348.
Stories and Themes
During their stay, the young people devote themselves exclusively to entertainment, unconcerned and without prejudice, eating, singing, dancing, and, in particular, telling stories together. These stories are a clear example of the purest medieval style, albeit with a moral sensibility of humanism, marked by a rich erotic tone and themes of travel, separations and reunions, burlesque outbursts of ideal love that end tragically, earthly love that ends happily with the consummation of sexual passion, lies, and ridicule of religious institutions. Their stories, always with an educational theme, as was characteristic of literature of the Middle Ages, appealed to the plebeian class while being entertaining.
Boccaccio’s Impact on the Renaissance
The Decameron, like Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy or Petrarch’s works, announces what was later called the “Renaissance.” It breaks with the tradition of mystical writing dominant in the period, presenting humans as they are: people with virtues and flaws, with their penises and their glories.
Enduring Influence
The influence of this work is immense, both for its intrinsic quality (in content but also in form, in Boccaccio’s elegant style) and for the deep mark it has left on later works (from Joanot Martorell to Jean de La Fontaine, by Matteo Bandello to Miguel de Cervantes). It has been considered a classic.
The Rise of the Novel
The beginning of the novel.la (short story) during the medieval period slowly evolved into novels based on ancient times. Adaptations were made to the French Tebaid of Statius, and Virgil’s Aeneid. These changes were called romance, which indicated the passage of a Latin work to a Romance language. Novel.la ended in French, meaning in Spanish and Catalan a traditional poetic piece.
Medieval Romances
These adjustments included references to the Trojan War and Alexander the Great, which are the Roman de Troie and the Roman d’Alexandre.
Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote Historia Regum Britanniae, a Latin text which presents itself as a book introducing a mythical Breton. There has been much discussion about the influence of Breton and Celtic mythologies; this is known as Dene novel.la courtesy.
There was a Tristan written for Chrétien de Troyes, and Romanticism is in this character. The work of Chrétien de Troyes represents the culmination of the Arthurian cycle. Walter Map compiled all the French Arthurian prose and he named it the Vulgate.
In French literature, the Roman de la Rose stands out, of which three hundred manuscripts are known. It is written in verse with an allegorical and didactic tone.
In Spanish, the most notable work is the Book of Good Love by the Archpriest of Hita. It is a feigned autobiography that develops a complex plot through metrics established by the master of ministry.
An important English work of the month is the Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer, where English grammar is fixed on the literary tradition. It speaks of all social classes with a religious motive.