I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History #: Love and Sex in the Time of Plague

A Decameron Renaissance

I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History #: Love and Sex in the Time of Plague
Guido Ruggiero
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Hardback
h235 x 156mm - 320pg
25 Jun 2021 US
International import eta 10-30 days
9780674257825
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As a pandemic swept across fourteenth-century Europe, the Decameron offered the ill and grieving a symphony of life and love. For Florentines, the world seemed to be coming to an end. In 1348 the first wave of the Black Death swept across the Italian city, reducing its population from more than 100,000 to less than 40,000. The disease would eventually kill at least half of the population of Europe. Amid the devastation, Giovanni Boccaccio' s Decameron was born. One of the masterpieces of world literature, the Decameron has captivated centuries of readers with its vivid tales of love, loyalty, betrayal, and sex. Despite the death that overwhelmed Florence, Boccaccio' s collection of novelle was, in Guido Ruggiero' s words, a ? symphony of life. ? Love and Sex in the Time of Plague guides twenty-first-century readers back to Boccaccio' s world to recapture how his work sounded to fourteenth-century ears. Through insightful discussions of the Decameron' s cherished stories and deep portraits of Florentine culture, Ruggiero explores love and sexual relations in a society undergoing convulsive change. In the century before the plague arrived, Florence had become one of the richest and most powerful cities in Europe. With the medieval nobility in decline, a new polity was emerging, driven by Il Popolo? the people, fractious and enterprising. Boccaccio' s stories had a special resonance in this age of upheaval, as Florentines sought new notions of truth and virtue to meet both the despair and the possibility of the moment.

Abortion in Early Modern Italy
Being a Jesuit in Renaissance Italy: Biographical Writing in the Early Global Age
Love and Sex in the Time of Plague: A Decameron Renaissance
Milan Undone: Contested Sovereignties in the Italian Wars
Niccolo di Lorenzo della Magna and the Social World of Florentine Printing, ca. 1470-1493

An insightful and provocative analysis of how love and sex were actually ' lived' in the Rinascimento. Ruggiero is not only a leading historian, but also a literary critic at the top of his game. His book is well-timed, eerily current in fact. Almost seven centuries after Boccaccio wrote of the horrors a pandemic inflicted on Florence, individual responses remain, in fact, fairly identical: fear of the neighbor, anxiety about the future, escape to the countryside, dread from physical touch, and searches for pleasant, escapist ways to fill the day. -- Valeria Finucci, author of The Prince' s Body: Vincenzo Gonzaga and Renaissance Medicine A dazzling new contribution to the history of emotions. Desire, passion, love, sex and all their perils come to life in Ruggiero' s analysis of Boccaccio' s celebrated Decameron, giving us an imaginative reconstruction of the complex cultural world of courtship, honor, and marriage in fourteenth-century Tuscany. -- Joanne M. Ferraro, author of Venice: History of the Floating City Guido Ruggiero, leading cultural historian of the Italian ' Rinascimento' and pioneer in the study of sexuality in the early modern period, now offers us an extraordinarily valuable reading of Boccaccio' s Decameron. From his rich and innovative perspective, the ' hundred novelle' unfold in the shadow of the devastating Black Plague of 1348 and in a longer-term transition in Florence from medieval feudalism to economically-driven republicanism. Students and scholars of Boccaccio' s masterwork may or may not finally agree with all of Ruggiero' s bold conclusions, but anyone who comes to grips with them will be the wiser for it. -- Albert Russell Ascoli, author of A Local Habitation and a Name: Imagining Histories in the Italian Renaissance
Guido Ruggiero is Professor of History and Cooper Fellow of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Miami. His many books include The Renaissance in Italy, Machiavelli in Love, The Boundaries of Eros, and Binding Passions.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9780674257825
Published: 25 Jun 2021
Published In: United States
Imprint: Harvard University Press
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Format: Hardback
Height: 235mm
Width: 156mm
Pages: 320

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