Word: boccaccio
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...straitjacket of the Cultural Revolution. "The great spiritual wealth created by mankind was strange to them " it said. "They never heard of such names as Boccaccio, Michelangelo, Hugo and Mozart. Young people's minds were locked up in airtight cells. Now the prison has been smashed...
...gloves, and, according to Petrarch's annoyed report, presumptuously donned golden spurs when they rode to their visits attended by a servant. Their wives were permitted greater expenditure on clothes than other women, perhaps in recognition of the large fees doctors could command. Not all were learned professors. Boccaccio's Doctor Simon was a proctologist who had a chamber pot painted over his door to indicate his specialty...
...this is no novel. The village is real, a town called Montaillou, clinging to a mountainside in the Pyrenees in what is now southern France. The time is the beginning of the 14th century. The priest is Pierre Clergue, a clergyman who might have made Boccaccio blush. In French Historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's brillant reconstruction, the reader learns how the villagers thought, ate, hated and loved-and even what they said to one another in public and in private. Such rare detail has made this lively volume a surprise bestseller in Europe...
...dark forest straight out of Dante. Their lodging resembles a late medieval castle, but it may also be a metaphor for history: "... an inn of passage, where people unknown to one another live together for one night..." The guests are figments in the Western narrative dream of Chaucer and Boccaccio...
...sentiment−in this context a stunning banality−tips Tryon's hand. He is belaboring a tradition that goes back at least as far as Boccaccio and John Lydgate's 15th century monstrosity The Fall of Princes−26,000 lines of bad poetry on the miseries that beset rulers. Something in human nature cannot resist being told that the richest, most powerful and most beautiful are also the most miserable. The plain fact that this is often not true has never weakened the formula's appeal, and Tryon plays it for whatever it is worth...