Boccaccio Research Paper

Boccaccio was an Italian author and poet, an important Renaissance humanist in his own right and author of a number of notable works including On Famous Women, the Decameron and his poems in the vernacular. Boccaccio grew up in Florence, but it was in Naples that Boccaccio began what he considered his true vocation, poetry. Works produced in this period include Filostrato, a later source for Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Filocolo a prose version of an existing French romance, and La caccia di Diana a poem in octave rhyme listing Neapolitan women.
Boccaccio returned to Florence in early 1341, avoiding the plague in that city of 1340. Although discontented with his return to Florence, Boccaccio continued to work, producing Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine, also known as Ameto, a mix of prose and poems in 1341, completing the fifty canto allegorical
As many as 25% of all villages were depopulated, mostly the smaller communities, as the few survivors fled to larger towns and cities. The Black Death hit the culture of towns and cities disproportionately hard. Some rural areas, for example, Eastern Poland and Lithuania, had such low populations and were so isolated that the plague made little progress. Larger cities were the worst off, as population densities and close living quarters made disease transmission easier. Cities were also strikingly filthy, infested with lice, fleas and rats, and subject to diseases related to malnutrition and poor hygiene. According to historian John Kelly, "(w)oefully inadequate sanitation made medieval urban Europe so disease-ridden, no city of any size could maintain its population without a constant influx of immigrants from the countryside." (p. 68) The influx of new citizens facilitated the movement of the plague between communities, and contributed to the longevity of the plague within larger