The Decameron

Description

Beautiful collector's edition of the famous Decameron: one hundred fables and fairy tales with the universal wisdom of great literature... With a new foreword. The Decameron tells a story of ten young Florentines who have fled from the Plague to live in Naples. The one hundred allegorical tales are shared through the voices of these people as they spend their nights entertaining the company with tales from the erotic, sensual, and bawdy to the intellectual, philosophical and tragic. The narrative's fundamental theme is of struggle between life and death in the face of the Black Death and the various ways life continues in spite of traditional moral attitudes and beliefs. Hardback, Deluxe edition, printed on silver, matt laminated, gold and silver foil stamped, embossed

Dr Susanna Barsella (Foreword) graduated from The Johns Hopkins University and is Professor of Italian for the Modern Languages and Literatures Department and the Center for Medieval Studies at Fordham University, NYC. Dr Barsella's main area of research is in Italian Medieval literature with a specific interest in the literature of Early Humanism. She has published on Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Michelangelo and the idea of work from antiquity to the Middle Ages. Dr Barsella's interests also embrace twentieth-century literature with publications on Pirandello, Gadda and twentieth-century poetry. Her books include In the Light of the Angels: Angelology and Cosmology in Dante's Divina Commedia (Olschki, 2010); Niccolo Acciaiuoli, Boccaccio e la Certosa del Galluzzo: Politica, religione ed economia nell'Italia del Trecento (as co-editor, Viella, 2020); and The Decameron Ninth Day in Perspective (co-edited with Simone Marchesi, University of Toronto Press, 2022). She has served as a member of the Council of the Dante Society of America and as Treasurer and Vice-President of the American Boccaccio Association. She is currently a co-organizer of the ABA-ENGB (American Boccaccio Association - Ente Nazionale Giovanni Boccaccio) Summer School in Latin Paleography.