The Decameron: A Norton Critical Edition / Edition 1

by Giovanni Boccaccio, Peter E. Bondanella, Mark Musa

Overview

This volume contains twenty-one of the hundred novelle that comprise Boccaccio’s masterpiece.

The stories have been chosen to represent the most notable of the author’s themes and the most characteristic and influential examples of his narrative technique. All are in new translations by Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella which successfully capture Boccaccio’s variations in diction and sentence structure.

"Contemporary Reactions" includes Petrarch’s letters to Boccaccio after completion of The Decameron and the responses of such Italian Renaissance figures as Leonardo Bruni, Filippo Villani, Giannozzo Manetti, and Ludovico Dolce, all of which have been translated for this edition.

"Modern Criticism" includes interpretations by Ugo Foscolo, Francesco De Sanctis, Erich Auerbach, Aldo D. Scaglione, Wayne Booth, Tzvetan Todorov, Robert J. Clements, and Marga Cottino-Jones.

Thomas G. Bergin’s important historical overview is published here for the first time, while Ben Lawton’s study of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s filming of The Decameron and a general essay by the editors were written specially for this volume.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393091328
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	07/17/1977
Series:	Norton Critical Editions Series
Edition description:	Abridged
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Peter E. Bondanella is Professor of Italian Emeritus at Indiana University, an NEH Younger Humanist and Senior Fellow, and the author of Machiavelli and the Art of Renaissance History and Francesco Guiccardini.

Mark Musa is Professor of Italian Emeritus at Indiana University and a Guggenheim Fellow. He has translated Dante’s Divine Comedy and La Vita Nuova and is the author of Advent at the Gates: Dante’s Comedy.

Editorial Reviews

"Wayne A. Rebhorn succeeds in retaining the quiddities of Giovanni Boccaccio’s original Decameron while rendering a medieval Italian text intelligible to the modern reader of English. His scrupulously detailed translation infuses the text with fresh energy and delicately preserves Boccaccio’s titillating use of language."

Heliotropia

"Probably the dirtiest great book in the Western canon. . . . Rebhorn’s translation of The Decameron is a thoughtful piece of work, with populist intentions. . . . If you want the true, mixed, fourteenth-century book that Boccaccio wrote, choose Rebhorn."

The New Yorker - Joan Acocella

"Probably the dirtiest great book in the Western canon. . . . Rebhorn’s translation of The Decameron is a thoughtful piece of work, with populist intentions. . . . If you want the true, mixed, fourteenth-century book that Boccaccio wrote, choose Rebhorn."

The New Yorker - Joan Acocella