Boccaccio
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
Few figures in Western literature cast as long a shadow as Giovanni Boccaccio, the fourteenth-century Florentine master whose wit, sensuality, and storytelling genius forever altered the course of European prose. In this authoritative study, Thomas G. Bergin chronicles the life and literary legacy of Boccaccio with scholarly precision and genuine admiration, tracing the arc from his illegitimate birth in the bustling merchant world of medieval Italy to his creation of the immortal Decameron — a work that would inspire Chaucer, Shakespeare, and countless writers across the centuries. Bergin, himself a distinguished Italianist and translator of Dante and Petrarch, brings a rare philological depth to this biography, situating Boccaccio firmly within the humanist tradition of the Italian Trecento while illuminating the man behind the masterpiece. With elegant, authoritative prose, he argues for Boccaccio's centrality not merely as an entertainer, but as a foundational architect of the modern narrative form. Readers who believe they know Boccaccio only through the bawdy tales of the Decameron will find here a far richer, more complex portrait — one that raises the compelling question of how one man's imagination can reshape an entire civilization's literary DNA.
Author: Thomas G. Bergin
Format: Hardback
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
Few figures in Western literature cast as long a shadow as Giovanni Boccaccio, the fourteenth-century Florentine master whose wit, sensuality, and storytelling genius forever altered the course of European prose. In this authoritative study, Thomas G. Bergin chronicles the life and literary legacy of Boccaccio with scholarly precision and genuine admiration, tracing the arc from his illegitimate birth in the bustling merchant world of medieval Italy to his creation of the immortal Decameron — a work that would inspire Chaucer, Shakespeare, and countless writers across the centuries. Bergin, himself a distinguished Italianist and translator of Dante and Petrarch, brings a rare philological depth to this biography, situating Boccaccio firmly within the humanist tradition of the Italian Trecento while illuminating the man behind the masterpiece. With elegant, authoritative prose, he argues for Boccaccio's centrality not merely as an entertainer, but as a foundational architect of the modern narrative form. Readers who believe they know Boccaccio only through the bawdy tales of the Decameron will find here a far richer, more complex portrait — one that raises the compelling question of how one man's imagination can reshape an entire civilization's literary DNA.