This volume presents fifty-five stories, newly translated, of the hundred novelle that comprise Boccaccio’s masterpiece. Winner of the 2014 PEN USA Literary Award for Translation This Norton Critical Edition includes: · Fifty-five judiciously chosen stories from Wayne A. Rebhorn’s translation of The Decameron. · Introductory materials and explanatory footnotes by Wayne A. Rebhorn, along with three maps. · Biographical works by Filippo Villani and Ludovico Dolce along with literary studies by Francesco Petrarca, Andreas Capellanus, and Boccaccio. · Eleven critical essays, including those by Giuseppe Mazzotta, Millicent Marcus, Teodolinda Barolini, Susanne L. Wofford, Luciano Rossi, and Richard Kuhns. · A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography.

This volume presents fifty-five stories, newly translated, of the hundred novelle that comprise Boccaccio’s masterpiece. Winner of the 2014 PEN USA Literary Award for Translation This Norton Critical Edition includes: · Fifty-five judiciously chosen stories from Wayne A. Rebhorn’s translation of The Decameron. · Introductory materials and explanatory footnotes by Wayne A. Rebhorn, along with three maps. · Biographical works by Filippo Villani and Ludovico Dolce along with literary studies by Francesco Petrarca, Andreas Capellanus, and Boccaccio. · Eleven critical essays, including those by Giuseppe Mazzotta, Millicent Marcus, Teodolinda Barolini, Susanne L. Wofford, Luciano Rossi, and Richard Kuhns. · A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography.

Boccaccio's Decameron recasts the storytelling heritage of the ancient and medieval worlds into perennial forms that inspired writers from Chaucer and Shakespeare down to our own day.

Marie de France’s beautiful poems of courtly love, enchantment, and mystery are now available in a Norton Critical Edition. Winner of the 2016 Northern California Book Award for Translation of Poetry. Honorable Mention for the 2015 Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize For Translation of a Literary Work. Marie de France was a medieval poet who was probably born in France and who lived in England during the twelfth century. Prominent among the earliest poets writing in the French vernacular, Marie de France helped shape the style and genres of later medieval poetry. This Norton Critical Edition includes all of Marie’s lais (short narrative verse poems); selected fables; and a generous excerpt from Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, a long poem based on a well-known medieval legend. Each text is accompanied by detailed explanatory annotations. For comparative reading, two lais, “Bisclavret” and “Yönec,” are accompanied by Marie’s facing-page originals. "Backgrounds and Contexts" is thematically organized to provide readers with a clear sense of Marie’s inspirations. Topics include “The Supernatural,” “Love and Romance,” “Medical Traditions,” “Fable Sources and Analogues: Similar Themes,” and “Purgatory and the Afterlife.” Ovid, Chaucer, Andreas Capellanus, Boccaccio, Aristotle, and Bede are among the authors included. From the wealth of scholarly work published on Marie de France, Dorothy Gilbert has chosen excerpts from nine pieces that address issues of history and authorship as well as major themes in the lais, fables, and Saint Patrick’s Purgatory. The contributors are Thomas Warton, Abbé Gervais de la Rue, Joseph Bedier, Leo Spitzer, R. Howard Bloch, E. A. Francis, Jill Mann, and Jacques Le Goff. A selected bibliography is also included.

Marie de France’s beautiful poems of courtly love, enchantment, and mystery are now available in a Norton Critical Edition. Marie de France was a medieval poet who was probably born in France and who lived in England during the twelfth century. Prominent among the earliest poets writing in the French vernacular, Marie de France helped shape the style and genres of later medieval poetry. This Norton Critical Edition includes all of Marie’s lais (short narrative verse poems); selected fables; and a generous excerpt from Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, a long poem based on a well-known medieval legend. Each text is accompanied by detailed explanatory annotations. For comparative reading, two lais, “Bisclavret” and “Yönec,” are accompanied by Marie’s facing-page originals. "Backgrounds and Contexts" is thematically organized to provide readers with a clear sense of Marie’s inspirations. Topics include “The Supernatural,” “Love and Romance,” “Medical Traditions,” “Fable Sources and Analogues: Similar Themes,” and “Purgatory and the Afterlife.” Ovid, Chaucer, Andreas Capellanus, Boccaccio, Aristotle, and Bede are among the authors included. From the wealth of scholarly work published on Marie de France, Dorothy Gilbert has chosen excerpts from nine pieces that address issues of history and authorship as well as major themes in the lais, fables, and Saint Patrick’s Purgatory. The contributors are Thomas Warton, Abbé Gervais de la Rue, Joseph Bedier, Leo Spitzer, R. Howard Bloch, E. A. Francis, Jill Mann, and Jacques Le Goff. A selected bibliography is also included.

“This book has been more helpful to the students—both the better ones and the lesser ones—than any other book I have ever used in any of my classes in my more than a quarter century of university teaching.” —RICHARD L. KIRKWOOD, University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire This Norton Critical Edition includes: • The medieval masterpiece’s most popular tales, including—new to the Third Edition—The Man of Law’s Prologue and Tale and The Second Nun’s Prologue and Tale. • Extensive marginal glosses, explanatory footnotes, a preface, and a guide to Chaucer’s language by V. A. Kolve and Glending Olson. • Sources and analogues arranged by tale. • Twelve critical essays, seven of them new to the Third Edition. • A Chronology, a Short Glossary, and a Selected Bibliography. About the Series Read by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format—annotated text, contexts, and criticism—helps students to better understand, analyze, and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) experimented with such a wide variety of genres that critics have tended to focus more on the differences among his works than on their underlying similarities. However, a more comprehensive examination of his corpus reveals that concealed beneath this striking diversity of subject and genre there is a coherent mythology, a virtual catalogue of innovative myths designed to more accurately reflect his cultural experience and better address the needs of his age. Exploring the most significant of these myths, /emBoccaccio's Naked Muse/em presents a writer who cast himself as the apostle of a new humanistic faith, one that would honour God by exalting his creation. Tobias Foster Gittes argues that Boccaccio did not simply reproduce Golden Age schemes in his works. Rather, he subtly altered and adapted them in order to produce a model of human beatitude more suited to his conviction that cultural achievement and human dignity are indissolubly linked. Gittes critiques common conceptions of Boccaccio's passivity, or his readiness to speak dismissively of his own work and to cast himself as a victim of vicious critics. Instead, Gittes shows that Boccaccio deliberately assumed this posture of passivity to align himself with a series of martyrs who, like him, had willingly suffered torments in the interest of cultural advancement. By venturing outside the Decameron to the Latin works, and outside the usual textual and intertextual readings of Boccaccio to more broadly cultural and anthropological material, Boccaccio's Naked Muse offers fresh insights on this hugely significant literary figure and his lifelong campaign to transform mythological traditions into a gift for all humanity.

Winner of the 2014 PEN USA Literary Award for Translation This Norton Critical Edition includes: - Fifty-five judiciously chosen stories from Wayne A. Rebhorn's translation of The Decameron. - Introductory materials and explanatory footnotes by Wayne A. Rebhorn, along with three maps. - Biographical works by Filippo Villani and Ludovico Dolce along with literary studies by Francesco Petrarca, Andreas Capellanus, and Boccaccio. - Eleven critical essays, including those by Giuseppe Mazzotta, Millicent Marcus, Teodolinda Barolini, Susanne L. Wofford, Luciano Rossi, and Richard Kuhns. - A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography.