Volume 49, Number 7 · April 25, 2002
Boccaccio and the Ladies
By Tim Parks
Famous Women
by Giovanni Boccaccio,edited and translated from the Latin by Virginia Brown
Harvard University Press, 530 pp., $29.95
Professional critics who have made the study of Boccaccio their life's work often feel the need to apologize for the nature of his later writings. 'Its heavy-handed moralizing,' writes Virginia Brown, the translator of a new edition of his Famous Women, 'is as foreign to modern taste as it is possible to be.' 'Its vehement antifeminist tirades,' writes the translator of the most recent English edition of his Il Corbaccio ('The Ugly Crow'), 'its bewildering inconsistencies in moral outlook, and its unevenness of tone and style defy the critic to treat it as an organic unity.' The embarrassment betrays an underlying perplexity and regret. 'It is a surprise to many modern readers,' remarks Virginia Brown, 'to learn that Giovanni Boccaccio's most popular work, the collection of one hundred stories known as the Decameron, is by no means typical of his writings. Why, she implies, didn't Boccaccio write more of what we like and less of the rest?
Review, 5533 words
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