Boccaccio
A Biography
Marco Santagata author Emlyn Eisenach translator
Format:Hardback
Publisher:The University of Chicago Press
Publishing:7th May '25
£30.00
This title is due to be published on 7th May, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
A comprehensive biography of the celebrated author of the Decameron, a medieval masterpiece written in early Italian.
Boccaccio (1313–75) stands with Dante and Petrarch as one of the “Three Crowns” of Italian letters, a trio of writers who shaped the history of humanism, literature, and poetry. In this book, Dante’s award-winning biographer, Marco Santagata, takes up the moving life and legacy of Boccaccio—whose unflinching story of a pandemic-era community (the Decameron) created new possibilities for vernacular Italian prose.
This landmark biography sheds new light on Boccaccio’s life—his family, friends, and foes, his aspirations, fears, and frustrations—and it shows how he was affected by transformations in Italian society. It also charts the influences that shaped Boccaccio’s understanding of literature: what kinds of stories it could tell and what kinds of characters it could depict; and, perhaps most importantly, what role art could play in a changing world. An insightful portrait of one of literature’s most important figures, this book promises to be the definitive biography of Boccaccio for many years to come.
“A well-informed, learned, scholarly, comprehensive, ambitious, imaginative, justly critical, authoritative, accessible biography of one of the titans of Italian literature, and the founding father of modern Italian prose writing.” -- Robert Black, author of 'Machiavelli: From Radical to Reactionary'
“Santagata’s Boccaccio presents us with a portrait of the great Florentine writer that is rich in historical detail, exquisitely sensitive to the particular mix of literary tradition and innovation that Boccaccio represented, and brilliantly evocative of the fourteenth-century Florentine environment out of which Boccaccio emerged. Attending to Boccaccio’s work in both Latin and the Tuscan vernacular, Santagata has produced a magnum opus that will be the standard biography for years to come.” -- Christopher S. Celenza, author of 'Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer'
“In this engaging biography, a master scholar brings Giovanni Boccaccio to life through sensitive readings of virtually all his writings and an impressive command of both secondary and archival sources. This richly informative study offers a completely new portrait of Boccaccio that will breathe new life into our understanding of Italian Renaissance literature.” -- Guido Ruggiero, author of 'Love and Sex in the Time of Plague: A Decameron Renaissance'
ISBN: 9780226820941
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 454g
424 pages