Contemporary Impact

 Contemporary Impact

Boccaccio's masterpiece is the Decameron. It features ten young men and women in Florence during the time of the Black Death. The characters share 100 tales about topics such as love, trickery, and fortune. These tales fit together to form a larger story, although each can also stand alone. The Decameron  was hugely popular. Readers enjoyed its lively speeches, witty wordplay, tight plots, and psychological insights. Several later writers discussed or imitated the Decameron in their own works. These include the Italian writer Baldassare CASTIGLIONE, the Spanish dramatist Lope de VEGA, and Shakespeare.

Contemporary Impact

While Boccaccio was writing Italian fictions, he was also producing Latin texts. In Buccolicum . Boccaccio revived a classical form called the eclogue. This form is a poem in which shepherds converse. Buccolicum Carmen is a series of such conversations on religious and political issues. Later Renaissance poets continued to use the form in Latin and in the vernacular.

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Contemporary Impact

His writing reflected his interest in classical literature, but he didn't try to copy the classics. Insted, he created something completely new, by combining ancient works with elemnts from his own time. Boccassio's Il Filostrato uses classical settings and names. His style is similar to the poetry of his time. Il Filostrato is an example of Baccaccio's strong influence on later writers.

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Sources

http://www.google.com/

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http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/boccaccio/life1.shtml

http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/HarvardPressBooks/history_images/renaissance/women.jpg

http://www.indiana.edu/~frithome/faculty/PBondanella/images/decameron2.jpg