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This volume contains twenty-one of the hundred novelle that compromise Boccaccio's masterpiece. The stories have been chosen to represent the most notable of the author's themes and the most characteristic and influential examples of his narrative technique. All are in new translations by Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella which successfully capture Boccaccio's variations in diction and sentence structure.

The contemporary responses include Petrarch's letters to Boccaccio after the completion of The Decameron, and the reactions of such Italian Renaissance figures as Leonardo Bruni, Filippo Villani, Giannozzo Manetti, and Ludovico Dolce, all newly translated for this edition. The modern criticism includes interpretations by Ugo Foscolo, Francesco De Sanctis, Erich Auerbach, Aldo D. Scaglione, Wayne Booth, Tzevetan Todorov, Robert J. Clements, and Marga Cottino-Jones. Thomas G. Bergin's important historical overview is published here for the first time, while Ben Lawton's study of Pier Paolo Pasolini's filming of The Decameron and a general essay by the editors were written specially for this volume.

Mark Musa is professor of Italian at Indiana University and a Gugenheim Fellow. He has translated Dante's Divine Comedy and La Vita Nuova and is the author of Advent at the Gates: Dante's Comedy. Peter Bondanella is professor of Italian at Indiana University, a NEH Younger Humanist and Senior Fellow, and the author of Machiavelli and the Art of Renaissance History and Francesco Guicciardini. The editors have also collaborated on two other works, The Portable Machiavelli and a complete translation of The Decameron.