The Decameron, Volume II
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Literature lovers interested in the origins and narrative traditions of the European short story
- Learners who need a public-domain English text for comparative reading or translation practice
- Readers interested in late medieval Italian society and secular culture
- Readers who enjoy frame narratives and short-story collections that can be read in sections
Not a good fit for
- Readers expecting modern fast-paced plots or a single long narrative
- Readers with no interest in medieval religious, gender, and ethical contexts
- Beginners who need authoritative scholarly annotations or a detailed introduction
Reading tips
- Read Volume I first or learn about the frame narrative background, then read three to five stories a day in this volume's order.
- Prepare a brief table of characters and story themes, noting categories such as love, wit, and satire for easy review.
- If the English is difficult, read alongside a Chinese translation story by story, focusing on the dialogue and plot turns.
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
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- 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
FAQ
Do I need to read Volume I before this volume?
What reading level is the English suitable for?
Is the content suitable for teenage readers?
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.
