Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375)

I find it hard to rate this because like 75% of it is funny stories and they're *really* funny. The translation (the Penguin Classics edition) does a really great job of conveying subtle jokes in the original. The funny stories are really clever, extremely bawdy and made me laugh out loud many times. If the book was just that I would have no hesitation in describing it as one of my favourite books ever.

The problem is that the author is a sexist - I assume about as much so as most other male medieval authors - which sometimes comes out in gross discordant ways. Most stories aren't really affected or you can play the 1 or 2 sexist comments off as tongue in cheek but a few make uncomfortable reading in that they emphasise violence against women as if in a "justified" way. So one story is a typical "fool" story where people play a prank on a man... and then at the end of the story he beats up his wife, with a description of the pain she suffers, and she didn't even have anything to do with the prank. Which obviously completely sours the story. The worst is VIII, 7 (which the translator emphasises his disgust of in the footnotes) where a widow a man is trying to woo pretends to be interested but leaves him out in the cold all night instead. So he takes revenge in a horrific fashion where she nearly dies and the injuries she suffers are written about in grotesque and disturbing detail. It's also the longest story in the book (!).

There's also some stories which are tragic romances or fairy/folk tale style retellings of things like nobles suffering and then later being restored to their rightful place. That style is... OK. They don't really stand out but they're still well told.

Obviously it's sort of a ridiculous thing to want but if the book had the worst offenders for sexism cut I would wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone. As is, I still think it's definitely worth reading but you probably want to read the quick summary of the story which introduces each one and skip any which have obvious dodgy plot points. In fact, this approach is endorsed by the author in his epilogue!… (more)

Review of Volume 2
Pretty much the same as Volume 1.
The surmise is quite simple, 10 people in plague riven Florence decide to decamp to the country and isolate themselves from the contagion. To while away the time, on each day they each tell a story. This volume held 6 days and so 60 stories, without the details of how they arrived here. The discussion on ending the isolation was remarkably short, after a total of 15 days away from the city.
I'm fairly sure that I've read some of these stories before in different guises. The one about the students and the miller's wife & daughter for certain was familiar, as was the king who takes a low born wife and takes their children away before turning her out.
Based on completing this, I still think that Chaucer did it better.… (more)