A Boccaccian Renaissance brings together essays written by internationally recognized scholars in diverse national traditions to respond to the largely unaddressed question of Boccaccio’s impact on early modern literature and culture in Italy and Europe. Martin Eisner and David Lummus co-edit the first comprehensive examination in English of Boccaccio’s impact on the Renaissance. The essays investigate what it means to follow a Boccaccian model, in tandem with or in place of ancient authors such as Vergil or Cicero, or modern poets such as Dante or Petrarch. The book probes how deeply the Latin and vernacular works of Boccaccio spoke to the Renaissance humanists of the fifteenth century. It treats not only the literary legacy of Boccaccio’s works but also their paradoxical importance for the history of the Italian language and reception in theater and books of conduct. While the geographical focus of many of the essays is on Italy, the volume concludes with three studies that open new inroads to understanding his influence on Spanish, French, and English writers across the sixteenth century. The book will appeal strongly to scholars and students of Boccaccio, the Italian and European Renaissance, and Italian literature. Contributors: Jonathan Combs-Schilling, Rhiannon Daniels, Martin Eisner, Simon Gilson, James Hankins, Timothy Kircher, Victoria Kirkham, David Lummus, Ronald L. Martinez, Ignacio Navarrete, Brian Richardson, Marc Schachter, Michael Sherberg, and Janet Levarie Smarr

Boccaccio's Decameron and the Ciceronian Renaissance demonstrates that Boccaccio's puzzling masterpiece takes on organic consistency when viewed as an early modern adaptation of a pre-Christian, humanistic vision.

In this cross disciplinary study of a seminal work of literature and its broader cultural impact, Franklin shows that the stories in Boccaccio's Famous Women were used to promote social ideologies in both Renaissance Tuscany and the dynastic courts of northern Italy. She brings needed clarification to the text by demonstrating that the moral criteria Boccaccio used to judge the lives of legendary women-heroines and miscreants alike-were employed consistently to tackle the challenge that politically powerful women represented for the prevailing social order.

Giovanni Boccaccio devoted the last decades of his life to compiling encyclopedic works in Latin. Among them is this text, the first collection of biographies in Western literature devoted to women.

This major study looks at the heritage and literary transformation of Giovanni Boccaccio's De mulieribus claris in late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth-century Italy. The monograph is the first full-length study of the new elaborations of women's role and potential that were being developed in the north Italian courts in this period. The Ghost of Boccaccio presents a sustained textual analysis of a selection of male-authored texts. It treats these texts as highly specific events in the development of the querelle des femmes, or 'the woman question', providing an important and often neglected Italian context for this question. By analysing these texts together in one volume, this study places them firmly on the scholarly map. They represent an extraordinary variety of voices seeking to be heard about the status of women in Renaissance Italy, ranging from the most conservative to the truly radical. They provide vital perspectives on constructions of women in the Renaissance. A number of these texts also represent a crucial moment in the development of intellectual strategies to challenge the dominant gender ideologies of Renaissance and early modern Europe. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of Renaissance history and culture, Italian studies, neo-Latin studies, and gender studies.

The early modern and modern cultural world in the West would be unthinkable without Petrarch and Boccaccio. Despite this fact, there is still no scholarly contribution entirely devoted to analysing their intellectual revolution. Internationally renowned scholars are invited to discuss and rethink the historical, intellectual, and literary roles of Petrarch and Boccaccio between the great model of Dante’s encyclopedia and the ideas of a double or multifaceted culture in the era of Italian Renaissance Humanism. In his lyrical poems and Latin treatises, Petrarch created a cultural pattern that was both Christian and Classical, exercising immense influence on the Western World in the centuries to come. Boccaccio translated this pattern into his own vernacular narratives and erudite works, ultimately claiming as his own achievement the reconstructed unity of the Ancient Greek and Latin world in his contemporary age. The volume reconsiders Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s heritages from different perspectives (philosophy, theology, history, philology, paleography, literature, theory), and investigates how these heritages shaped the cultural transition between the end of the Middle Ages and the early modern era, as well as European identity.

Boccaccio's Decameron and the Ciceronian Renaissance demonstrates that Boccaccio's puzzling masterpiece takes on organic consistency when viewed as an early modern adaptation of a pre-Christian, humanistic vision.