A crisp copy with minor scattered stains and clean tears (no loss).

Bound in contemporary English calf ruled in blind, neatly rebacked retaining the original spine, corners mended, later end-leaves. Written in the vernacular of the Florentine language, it is considered a masterpiece of classical early Italian prose. In addition to its literary value and widespread influence (for example on Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales), it provides a document of life at the time. Tales of wit, practical jokes, and life lessons contribute to the mosaic. The various tales of love in The Decameron range from the erotic to the tragic. Boccaccio probably conceived the Decameron after the epidemic of 1348, and completed it by 1353. The book is structured as a frame story containing 100 tales told by a group of seven young women and three young men sheltering in a secluded villa just outside Florence to escape the Black Death, which was afflicting the city. The Decameron is a collection of novellas by the 14th-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio (1313â '1375). Folio, 2 volumes, bound in full morocco by Riviere, gilt titles and tooling to the spine, all edges gilt, errata leaf at end of volume one, B1 is a cancellans, woodcut titles each with 6 vignettes, 98 woodcut vignettes in text chiefly repeating the title vignettes, woodcut initials, head- and tail-pieces. This is the first volume of a projected three-volume set of Boccaccios complete Genealogy.First edition in English of Boccaccio's masterpiece, published by Jaggard published three years prior to his printing of the Shakespeare First Folio. It is at once the most ambitious work of literary scholarship of the early Renaissance and a demonstration to contemporaries of the moral and cultural value of studying ancient poetry. Much more than a mere compilation of pagan myths, the Genealogy incorporates hundreds of excerpts from and comments on ancient poetry, illustrative of the new spirit of philological and cultural inquiry emerging in the early Renaissance. Throughout the Genealogy, Boccaccio deploys an array of allegorical, historical, and philological critiques of the ancient myths and their iconography. The scope is enormous: 723 chapters indude over a thousand citations from two hundred Greek, Roman, medieval, and Trecento authors. The complete work in fifteen books contains a meticulously organized genealogical tree identifying approximately 950 Greco-Roman mythological figures. The work also contains a famous defense of the value of studying ancient pagan poetry in a Christian world. Giovanni Boccaccio's Genealogy of the Pagan Gods is an ambitious work of humanistic scholarship whose goal is to plunder ancient and medieval literary sources so as to create a massive synthesis of Greek and Roman mythology.

Boccaccio books