![]() ![]() ![]() They not only served as financial advisers to the Angevin king of Naples, but also lent money across Europe to such figures as the English king Edward III. ![]() The strength and far-reaching influence of Italian commerce can be measured by the success of the Bardi banking house, which employed Boccaccio’s father. He cultivated a court culture that perhaps served as a practical model for Boccaccio’s literary valuing of courtliness in the Decameron. Robert d’Anjou, the king of Naples during Boccaccio’s day, was a powerful figure in Italian politics and an important patron of the arts. Naples was, furthermore, a highly important center for trade and a cultural crossroads that undoubtedly served as an important resource for Boccaccio’s wide-ranging tales in the Decameron. The intellectual currents were running high, with a vibrant university culture in Naples and Bologna and a new enthusiasm for Ancient Greek and Roman culture that was aided by the rediscovery of many lost texts of the ancient world. In the Decameron, Boccaccio’s young story tellers escape death literally and literarily by fleeing to the countryside.īoccaccio lived in a period of transition, when a new and powerful mercantile class had emerged as economic prosperity took cities like Florence by storm. (Wikimedia Commons) Such works portraying the inexorable universality of death were a common motif in urban centers throughout medieval Europe. The Dance of Death, or Danse Macabre, by Michael Wolgemut, 1493. ![]()
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