Word: boccacio
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...attends your garage sale, you must eat her eggplant. From Boccacio to Baio, all the most essential player-qua-pimps know this...
THERE'S AN OLD TRICK in English literature; I don't know if it has a name, but generally it's an overused gimmick that's been done well a couple of times. Boccacio first used this trick in the Decameron, upon which Chaucer modeled Canterbury Tales. The idea is to get some people together in a place where they will reveal themselves through some telling story or action. Usually a new perspective breathes life into this old hack's trick. But in Philadelphia, Anyone? the perspective seems almost as old as its technique...
...population," as some people became fanatically pious engaging in flagellation, magic or witchcraft while others "gave themselves up to drunkeness and debauchery." He quoted a medieval source which spoke of "drunkards and whoremongers following their lasts with the sword of the pestilance hanging over them." Langer called this "the Boccacio effect, a common human reaction to the threat of impending death...
Aside from the classics in the gift, there are outstanding works by the early church fathers, the humanists, and such famous medievalists and early moderns as Dante and Boccacio...
...modest Proposal after the pattern of Swift is very amusing. It is enlivened with sketches portraying the dismal fate of the Harvard Undergraduate if the Proposal is ever taken seriously. A drawing on page 20 reveals some of the difficulties involved in the production of the Decameron. The whole Boccacio household is pressed into service to find some dirt for the use of the head of the family. We are not told what connection this has with the Reading Period, but the inference is obvious...