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Giovanni Boccaccio is a great author who, like Dante and Petrarch, established the fundamentals of the Italian language. As is well-known, his masterpiece is the Decameron, written in Italian (Tuscan). In the middle of the 14^th century, the Black Death was devastating the whole of Europe. It was imagined that, while many were victimized, ten noble young men and women alternated storytelling in a segregated amenity over a period of ten days. The Decameron is a collection of stories told against the background of this historical crisis.
 
His great achievement, however, is not limited to the area of Italian language and literature. Together with his great friend Petrarch, the author became a precursor of the Renaissance. They rediscovered and eagerly introduced numerous works of Greek and Latin literature, a cultural heritage which had passed into oblivion up to that time. Boccaccio wrote various books in Latin, the language of science, among which Famous Women (De mulieribus claris) is enumerated.
 
As the Decameron is a collection of stories, the Famous Women is also a collection of brief biographies of 106 selected women. The apparent purpose of this work is to teach women about the distinguished deeds of their sex (or, on the contrary, shameful ones) and the humanity they should respect. Most of the selected women belong to the pagan Greco-Roman world. The female martyrs and saints are not included in this collection. Most of the Famous Women’s source-books are Ancient Roman texts. Investigating the source of each biography means tracing the activity of Boccaccio the humanist. It is quite interesting to find that the accounts of Agrippina the minor, Poppaea, and other Roman women include passages based on the works of Tacitus, namely the Annals and the Histories.
 
While the episodes of the Decameron are composed of vivid narrations and liberated from the prevalent morals in its contemporary period, in the Famous Women the author was so bound by a conservative view of women as to take it for granted that women are inferior to men in both physical and intellectual ability, although he adorns the various enterprises of the Women. Each biography seems to have been composed to a certain pattern: as a rule, it begins with an inquiry into the birthplace and lineage of a woman, followed by the specification of her brothers, sisters and husband in some cases. After the usual mention of her nobleness and exceeding beauty, the honorable (or dishonorable) deeds she performed are then added. Author’s comments sometimes follow.
 
The Famous Women, although not denying amusement, prefers to provide information rather than enjoyable readings. In this sense the work played the role of an encyclopedia or handbook. The author expected his readers to quote examples from his book so as to enrich their own composition or speech. Herein we can see the educational and cultural character of the Famous Women.
 

(Written by HYUGA Taro, Professor, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology / 2024)