Boccaccio’s Satiric Mirror

In this course, we read selected tales from Boccaccio’s Decameron, his collection of 100 tales composed in the early Italian Renaissance. Tales from The Decameron are characterized by their use of humor, irony, exaggeration, as well as ridicule—the full arc of satire—to expose and criticize the vices and obvious stupidities of human beings in the context of Renaissance social and political life.  What is fascinating is that Boccaccio in the fourteenth century provides us in the twenty-first century the satiric mirror that seems completely on target for today’s social and political world. Suggested book: The Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio.