The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio
Language: English
Pages: 547
ISBN: B0082VMLQA
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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this, the lady took Jeannette into her confidence, only to find that she was more adamant than ever. So she acquainted her husband with what she had done, and although both of them thought it a grave step to take, they mutually decided to let him marry her, preferring their son to be alive with an unsuitable wife than dead without any wife at all. And after a great deal of further heart searching, they announced their consent. This made Jeannette very happy, and she thanked God from the depths
Those two days, she says, are rather tedious, because they are days given over to prayer and fasting, Friday to commemorate the Passion of Our Lord, and Saturday out of reverence to His Mother, and also because the ladies are wont to wash their hair on Saturdays, so as to remove the dust and grime of the week’s endeavours. One other reason Neifile gives for desisting from storytelling on Saturday afternoons is that the approach of Sunday should be honoured by resting from one’s labours. So much
means to trifle with a man’s affections, and to hold a man of learning up to ridicule; and if you should escape with your life, you will have good cause never to stoop to such folly again. ‘But if you are so anxious to descend, why do you not throw yourself over the parapet? With God’s help, you would break your neck, and so release yourself from the pain you seem to be suffering, at the same time making me the happiest man alive. That is all I have to say to you for the present. Now that I have
lodge overnight at a cottage, where one of them goes and sleeps with their host’s daughter, whilst his wife inadvertently sleeps with the other. The one who was with the daughter clambers into bed beside her father, mistaking him for his companion, and tells him all about it. A great furore then ensues, and the wife, realizing her mistake, gets into her daughter’s bed, whence with a timely explanation she restores the peace. As on previous occasions, so also on this, the company was heartily
from Dante’s Paradiso (XVII, 133–4): ‘Questo tuo grido farà come vento/Che le piú alte cime piú percuote’ (‘This cry of yours will do as does the wind/Which strikes most powerfully upon the highest summits’). In what follows, B. mounts a spirited and reasoned defence of vernacular narrative prose, which before the appearance of the Decameron had never achieved recognition as a serious poetic genre. It is unnecessary to surmise that the various errors of which B. claims to have been accused by his