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"Incorporating the most recent research by scholars in Italy, the UK and North America, this collection of essays foregrounds Boccaccio's significance as a pre-eminent scholar and mediator of the classical and vernacular traditions, whose innovative textual practices confirm him as a figure of equal standing to Petrarch and Dante. Situating Boccaccio and his works in their cultural contexts, the Companion introduces a wide range of his texts, paying close attention to his formal innovations, elaborate voicing strategies, and the tensions deriving from his position as a medieval author who places women at the centre of his work. Four chapters are dedicated to different aspects of his masterpiece, the Decameron, while particular attention is paid to the material forms of his works: from his own textual strategies as the shaper of (his own and others') literary legacies, to his subsequent editorial history, and translation into other languages and media"-- "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"--
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