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Later, Christine, with Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus before her, writes La Cité des Dames, an account of the building of an imaginary city which is to shelter within its strong ramparts the women of all times and all countries who have distinguished themselves by good and heroic deeds.
Perhaps we should not have had this curious collection of stories of women, virtuous and vicious, mythological and historical stories which are certainly very inferior as art to those of the Decameron had not a crisis occurred in Boccaccio’s life. One day a Carthusian monk came to him with a warning message from the dead, and, much troubled in mind, he resolved to try to begin life afresh.
As we sit basking in the peaceful beauty of the scene around us and serenely conscious of its glorious past, one of our party suddenly remembers in a welcome flash of inspiration that this deserted courtyard has been made the scene of one of Boccaccio’s most famous tales.
He would fain save his soul, but he liked and courted popularity, and knew well the deeper meaning of the proverb, “A terreno dolce, vanga di legno.” And so he mingles virtue and vice, hoping, as he says, that “some utility and profit shall come of the same.” To us of to-day, the chief interest of this work is that Boccaccio’s fame perhaps gave a definite impetus to the discussion of the sex, instead of wholesale assertion, and also that it probably suggested to Chaucer the idea for his Legend of Good Women.
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