Was a disheartened Dave Cameron his work?

Usage examples of boccaccio.

The person appointed was Boccaccio, who had written the first biography of Dante and copied out the entire Divine Comedy himself as a gift for Petrarch.

The calamity chilled the hearts of men, wrote Boccaccio in his famous account of the plague in Florence that serves as introduction to the Decam­eron.

The rich fled to their country places like Boccaccio’s young patricians of Florence, who settled in a pastoral palace “removed on every side from the roads” with “wells of cool water and vaults of rare wines.

Though translated from Boccaccio’s De Claris vrulieribus, Christine makes it her own in the prologue, where she sits weeping and ashamed, wondering why men “are so unanimous in attributing wickedness to women” and why “we should be worse than men since we were also created by God.

Chaucer returned steeped in new material, but his epic of Troilus and Criseyde, adapted from Boccaccio, had to wait while he was dispatched to treat of peace with France.

It contained the poet’s copy of Vergil as well as his own and Boccaccio’s works and Dante’s Commedia.

Giovanni Boccaccio was born, most probably at Paris, in the year 1313.

So much as this Boccaccio has himself told us, under a transparent veil of allegory, in his Ameto.

Of Boccaccio's early years we know nothing more than that his first preceptor was the Florentine grammarian, Giovanni da Strada, father of the poet Zanobi da Strada, and that, when he was about ten years old, he was bound apprentice to a merchant, with whom he spent the next six years at Paris, whence he returned to Florence with an inveterate repugnance to commerce.

Their liaison lasted several years, during which Boccaccio recorded the various phases of their passion with exemplary assiduity in verse and prose.

Both these poems are in ottava rima, a metre which, if Boccaccio did not invent it, he was the first to apply to such a purpose.

King Robert was then dead, but Boccaccio enjoyed the favour of Queen Joan, of somewhat doubtful memory, at whose instance he hints in one of his later letters that he wrote the Decameron.

Without impugning Boccaccio's veracity we can hardly but think that the Decameron would have seen the light, though Queen Joan had withheld her encouragement.

How much Greek Boccaccio learned from him, and how far he may have been beholden to him in the compilation of his elaborate Latin treatise De Genealogia Deorum, in which he essayed with very curious results to expound the inner meaning of mythology, it is impossible to say.

One of the revelations concerned a matter which Boccaccio had supposed to be known only to Petrarch and himself.