While still a university student of church law in Naples, Boccaccio completed his Filocolo, a monumental romance that retells the famous medieval legend of Florio and Biancifiore. To rescue his source tale from "the fabulous parlance of the ignorant," Boccaccio created a marvelous Gothic literary microcosm, an encyclopedia of vernacular poetics, and the most ambitious prose fiction at that time in any European language.
Fabulous Vernacular:...