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Updated: June 29, 2025
Even in these poems the humanity of the writer's personality makes itself felt. While Laura tends to fade into a personification of poetry, and Petrarch's strongest convictions find expression through the mouth of St. Peter, we feel that behind Boccaccio's humanistic exercise lies his own amorous passion, his own religious enthusiasm, his own fatherly tenderness and love.
An edition issued in 1620-25 is called by Lowndes "the first English translation," by which apparently is meant the first complete one. A translation by E. Dubois was issued in 1806. Boccaccio's Tales were known in England before the invention of printing. Chaucer, who made use of the story of Griselda, has told as follows how he first obtained it from Petrarch in Padua.
Beyond the walls, the whole sweet Valley of the Arno, the convent at Fiesole, the Tower of Galileo, BOCCACCIO'S house, old villas and retreats; innumerable spots of interest, all glowing in a landscape of surpassing beauty steeped in the richest light; are spread before us.
We have all heard of Boccaccio's Decameron only naughty people have read it and how it was written when the plague was raging at Florence, the great plague that carried off Petrarch's Laura, and those other thousands of whom the world knew nothing then and knows nothing now.
An unexpurgated edition of Shakespeare's "Complete Works," or of Boccaccio's "Decameron," could not be circulated through the United States mails, and there are many good people who are asking how long we shall continue to allow the unexpurgated "Old Testament" the privilege of circulation. It is not simply prose and poetry that has been purified.
I see them both but particularly perhaps Verrocchio's in the intervals of strife most acceptably holding up a lady's train, or lying at her feet reading one of Boccaccio's stories; neither could ever have watched a flock. Donatello's second David, behind the more famous one, has more reality; but I would put Michelangelo's smaller one first. And what beautiful marble it is so rich and warm!
I thought your piazza was free from those furred and scarlet-robed lackeys of death. This man looks as if he had had some such night adventure as Boccaccio's Maestro Simone, and had his bonnet and mantle pickled a little in the gutter; though he himself is as sleek as a miller's rat."
Certainly Cosimo de' Medici was not the first Florentine to retire from the city perhaps to Careggi, perhaps to S. Domenico, perhaps farther still; for already in Boccaccio's day we hear the praise of country life, his description of Villa Palmieri, for instance, when at the end of the second day of the Decamerone those seven ladies and their three comrades leave Poggio Gherardo for that palace "about two miles westward," whither they came at six o'clock of a Sunday morning in the year 1348.
The monk did not understand where he was, but thought he was in the hell of the heathen; but it was still worse when a priest disguised as Bacchus, his face smeared with dregs of wine, entered the pulpit, and, taking a text from Boccaccio's Decameron, preached an indecent discourse, presently, with a skilful turn, going on to narrate a legend about St. Peter.
An interesting example remains to us in Boccaccio's "Decameron," whose stories were told by a group of pleasure-lovers who had fled from plague-stricken Florence. In many localities the hatred of the Jews by the people led to frightful excesses of persecution against them, they being accused by their enemies of poisoning the wells.
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