The Earliest Lives of Dante

by Giovanni Boccaccio (Editor)

A conspectus of early biographies of Dante.

Library Binding

First published December 1, 1968

About the author

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313 - 1375) was an Italian author and poet, a friend and correspondent of Petrarch, and an important Renaissance humanist in his own right and author of a number of notable works including the Decameron, On Famous Women, and his poetry in the Italian vernacular. Boccaccio is particularly notable for his dialogue, of which it has been said that it surpasses in verisimilitude that of just about all of his contemporaries, since they were medieval writers and often followed formulaic models for character and plot.

Reviews

[Matthew Hatch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Boccaccio. He admits himself that this book is not a super accurate history, but he gets the bulk of it right.

I love his flowing, never-ending, run on sentence structure (like he does in the Decameron). He’s a genius so his style works.

It’s a quick read. I enjoyed his diatribe against marriage and his digressions on the etymology of “poetry”. I feel like I learned more about Boccaccio than I did about Dante.