Giovanni Boccaccio; A Biographical Study
Giovanni Boccaccio; A Biographical Study
By Edward Hutton
20 Feb, 2020
Of the three great writers who open the literature of the modern world, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, it is perhaps the last who has the greatest significance in the history of culture, of civilization. Without the profound mysticism of Dante or th
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Of the three great writers who open the literature of the modern world, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, it is perhaps the last who has the greatest significance in the history of culture, of civilization. Without the profound mysticism of Dante or the extraordinary sweetness and perfection of Petrarch, he was more complete than either of them, full at once of laughter and humility and love—that humanism which in him alone in his day was really a part of life. For him, the center of things was not to be found in the next world but in this. To the Divine Comedy, he seems to oppose the Human Comedy, the Decameron, in which he not only created for Italy a classic prose, but gave the world an ever-living book full of men and women and the courtesy, generosity, and humanity of life, which was to be one of the greater literary influences in Europe during some three hundred years. Less