HIST-308 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Geoffrey Chaucer, Petrarch
15 Mar 2020
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Document Summary
In the introduction, boccaccio gave an account of the plague as he experienced it. In the main part, 10 young florentines flee from the city to hide in the countryside. Bored, they decide to tell stories to one another in a systematic fashion: 10 x 10. Quarantined for 10 days, the youths agree to tell 10 stories to each other per day. 10 x 10 gets us 100, which is the number of short tales found in the text: recurring themes. In addition to their numerical structure, the 100 stories also organized by way of recurring themes: fortune and grace. Even in boccaccio there might be a theme of divine grace and predestination: folklore and literature. Much of the content of boccaccio"s text was drawn from italian folklore. He was not claiming to invent every story out of whole cloth. This is a bit too medieval since the notion of authorial individuality is mostly absent: folkloric vulgarity.
