Comparison between Boccaccio & Dante's Work

Introduction

The purpose of this study is to expand the boundaries of the author's knowledge by exploring some relevant facts related to the comparison of Boccaccio's work with Dante. Boccaccio was an Italian poet and writer of prose fiction, largely influenced by Dante and his close friend Petrarch, and with those two is considered one of the three great writers of the Italian trecento (i.e., 14th century). His Decameron is one of the seminal works of world literature, and the most important work of prose fiction to come out of the Italian Middle Ages.

In this paper, the author will examine how is Boccaccio's description of love, death, fate, and honor the same as, and different from, that described by Dante. The author will explain the difference by giving examples from the Boccaccio's Decameron.

Discussion & Analysis

Comparison between Boccaccio & Dante's Work

The Decameron is the most widely read and highly acclaimed work of Giovanni Boccaccio. Consisting of 100 short stories or novelle told within a frame story set in Florence during the Black Death of 1348, The Decameron is famous for its humor, its vitality, its realism, and its variety of tone and subject. The text is universally revered as the most significant contribution to prose fiction from the European Middle Ages, and influenced the development of narrative for centuries (Wallace, pp. 12-19).

Boccaccio's interest is in lively storytelling. He spends little time on the psychology of his characters, but rather shows us what they are like by what they do. Nor are his tales didactic in the sense of much medieval literature. Although Boccaccio greatly admired Dante's Divine Comedy with its moral thrust, in many ways his Decameron seems particularly intended to answer Dante: The 100 tales specifically echo the 100 cantos in the Comedy, and in addition Boccaccio specifically alludes to Canto V of Dante's Inferno, where the adulterers Paolo and Francesca refer to the book they were reading (apparently the French prose Lancelot) as their "Galeotto," the go-between in Lancelot and Guenevere's love affair. Dante's implication seems to be that reading for pleasure may be morally precarious. Boccaccio subtitles his book "Prince Galeotto," (Wallace, pp. 12-19) asserting thus that his book is to be read for pleasure, and that such reading is appropriate, even, as in the case of the 10 members of his brigata (the young narrators of the tales), restorative both physically and emotionally.

What for ...