Dictamina boccaccio biography

  • Rhetorical exercises modelled on Dante's epistles to Cino da Pistoia and Moroello Malaspina, Boccaccio's dictamina also betray an apulean re-use.
  • Boccaccio was a poet and a reader, an author and an editor, an orator and a glossator, a merchant and an ambassador, a politician and a priest.
  • Once viewed as a precious record of Boccaccio's youthful life, these letters are now considered dictamina (rhetorical letter-writing exercises), and their.

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    Florence in Transition: Volume One: The Decline of the Commune

     

    I

    THE COMMUNAL PAIDEIA AND THE EMERGING HUMANISM OF THE EARLY TRECENTO

    The social and political organization of Florence in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was communal and essentially an outgrowth of the ferment and struggle of the late Middle Ages. Created by medieval man, it represented an exciting adaptation to a changed environment. The methods of dealing with legal and extralegal questions had their roots in Italian feudalism, the new law schools, the divergent theologies, mystical expectation, chivalric codes, the expanding field of public administration, and the business practices of that age.1

    During the earliest part of the era, politics was infused with religious sentiment. A sacramental tie was considered to exist between the city-state and God&#x;s cosmos. The polis was spoken of reverentially as the mystic body of Christ while in otherwise mundane documents the communal tre

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    Allusions to Virgil in Boccaccio's Epistole

    ALLUSIONS TO VIRGIL IN BOCCACCIO’S EPISTOLE* Adir Fonseca Jr. 1. Introduction The number of extant epistles written bygd Giovanni Boccaccio is ganska limited. We have, in total, twenty-eight of his letters, of which twentyfive were originally composed in Latin, and three in volgare – including Boccaccio’s famous Epistola consolatoria a Pino de’ Rossi1. Judging by the many reply letters addressed to Boccaccio, though, we may presume that this number actually only corresponds to a small fraction of Boccaccio’s large (but now mostly lost) epistolary production. The sum of extant letters written bygd Petrarch to Boccaccio, for instance, bygd far surpasses that of Boccaccio to Petrarch. Particularly in the heading of Boccaccio’s Epistola 15, which has been transmitted through a manuscript from Petrarch’s library (Bibliothèque Nationale, MS Lat. ), we find the copyist’s annotation that this was one of a thousand («una ex mille») letters from Bocca

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    Dictamina

    The four epistles ascribable to are in two different parts of the Zibaldone Laurenziano XXIX 8. Crepor celsitudinis, Mavortis milex extrenue and Nereus amphytritibus are part of the same palimpsest  and are in ccrr; the Sacre famis is instead in cc. 65 r-v. Rhetorical exercises modelled on Dante’s epistles to Cino da Pistoia and Moroello Malaspina, Boccaccio’s dictamina also betray an apulean re-use. The first letter, addressed to the Duke of  Durres, and that of the Sacre famis, addressed to, as was the Nereus amphytritibus, an unknown recipient, give a chronological and geographical contour to the epistles. In particular, the topological specification apud busta Maronis Virgilii “at Virgil’s sepulchre”, repeated in both, sets these two letters within the tradition of  ecfrastic epigraphy, already put to fruit for

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