Word: boccaccio
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History and legend are filled with plagues, most horrific of which was the Black Death which scourged Europe in the middle of the Fifteenth Century. When Boccaccio's characters fled Florence in 1438 and spent their exile telling the stories of the Decameron, they thus escaped a swift, nauseous blight which, so the tales run, made dark convulsions of men's faces, twisted tortures of their bodies...
...would save other youth from similar distress, and devoted his life to elucidation. With this end always in mind, his studies ranged from ten years' medical practice to wide reading of philosophy, history, and fiction, recorded in his six volumes of annotated quotations-Taine, Swinburne, Flaubert, Strauss, Voltaire, Boccaccio, Whitman...
...devout but too-refined lady infected with medievalism is married to a rich banker. Finding in his library a copy of Boccaccio's stories made doubly suggestive by "piquant illustrations," she reads them greedily. This, as first act rhetoric has drilled the audience to expect, produces a potent effect on the cool bride; she becomes coy, passionate, kittenish. The dialogue is a rigid translation from the Italian; like the direction and the acting, it is excessively clumsy...
...hitherto obtainable only in editions costing from $50 to $500"). It republished My First Thirty Years by Gertrude Beasley, with assurance that these charming revelations had been admired by H. L. ("Hatrack") Mencken and suppressed both here and abroad. Two Worlds, braving the mails, offered thitherto unpublished work by Boccaccio; some confessions by Poet Arthur Symonds; a new unnamed work by famed and juicy James Joyce, author of Ulysses; a "dark surmise" concerning Philosopher Nietzsche and his sister--and an unknown story by Lewis ("Alice-in-Wonderland") Carroll...
...term "pander," as you should have recalled, is derived from the proper name "Pandarus." Need I add that Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Shakespeare all represent Pandarus, a son of Lycaon and leader of the Lycians in the Trojan war, as an unmitigated pimp, who procured Cressida for the dissolute Troilus? To a scholarly mind your use of pander in place of "agent" and without the connotation of lasciviousness is intolerably careless. Thomas Cook & Son are no more panders than is a magazine such as TIME. Neither attains to the requisite taint of immorality...