The Decameron
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers interested in European classical literature and the origins of the short story
- Readers who want to understand early Renaissance narrative style through an English translation
- Readers who enjoy short story collections and fragmented reading
- Literature students using it as supplementary reading for Western literary history
Not a good fit for
- Readers who hope to read all one hundred stories of The Decameron in one go
- Readers who prefer modern fast-paced novels
- Readers with weak English reading skills who do not want to read while looking up words
Reading tips
- Start with a few short stories from Day 6 to get familiar with the narrative style, then skip-read the remaining four days according to interest.
- After every two or three stories, briefly note the themes and character types for easy cross-comparison.
- Read alongside the first five days' edition or a story summary to build a sense of the whole book's structure.
- When encountering allusions with unfamiliar cultural background, mark them and keep reading; there is no need to verify every word.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- 28
- 29
- 30
- 31
- 32
- 33
- 34
- 35
- 36
- 37
- 38
- 39
- 40
- 41
- 42
- 43
- 44
- 45
- 46
- 47
- 48
- 49
- 50
- 51
- 52
- 53
- 54
- 55
- 56
- 57
- 58
- 59
- 60
- 61
- 62
- 63
- 64
- 65
- 66
- 67
- 68
- 69
- 70
- 71
- 72
- 73
- 74
- 75
- 76
- 77
- 78
- 79
- 80
- 81
- 82
- 83
- 84
- 85
- 86
- 87
- 88
- 89
- 90
- 91
- 92
- 93
- 94
- 95
FAQ
Does this book contain all the stories of The Decameron?
Can someone with poor English read this book?
Why is skip-reading recommended rather than reading in order?
Comments
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About the author
Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) was an Italian writer and poet, a pioneer of Renaissance humanism, and, together with Dante and Petrarch, one of the three great literary figures of his age. His masterpiece, The Decameron, is set against the Black Death in Florence and consists of one hundred stories told in turn by ten young men and women who have fled to the countryside; its themes range over love, wit and human affairs, and its vivid language had a profound influence on European narrative literature. He also wrote works such as Filocolo and Fiammetta, as well as studies on Dante. This collection holds eleven of his works, mostly different editions of The Decameron and related writings, reflecting the humanist concerns of a period of transition from the Middle Ages to the modern era.
