Cambridge Companion to Boccaccio

"This book is designed for multiple audiences: those who are coming to Boccaccio for the first time, or who may have only a passing acquaintance with his work, those studying his texts as undergraduate or postgraduate students, and those scholars interested in the production and reception of Boccaccio's works from the medieval to the modern day. Although our Companion is relatively simple in form - a collection of short chapters which each take on key aspects of Boccaccio's life and works - we hope to give a sense of the complex interrelation between his texts, the social and literary contexts which conditioned their composition, and their subsequent reception in the centuries since. Boccaccio was a writer who mastered all the medieval language arts and showed a keen interest in literary theory and the interpretation of texts. Equally at home writing poetry, prose, and letters, he also produced commentaries on classical and vernacular texts, wrote encyclopaedic collections of mythological and historical biographies, and avidly collected classical, patristic, and contemporary writings in his own autograph notebooks"--