How The Decameron drew on Metamorphoses
A documented line of influence: Giovanni Boccaccio demonstrably engaged Ovid’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Metamorphoses
Ovid · 8
Ancient RomeThe influenced
The Decameron
Giovanni Boccaccio · c. 1351
MedievalRelevance
5/10
On The Decameron’s page
- Boccaccio learned his trade on Ovid in Naples, and contemporaries called him "the Italian Ovid"
- Reading the Metamorphoses first tunes your ear to what the Decameron does with love — the same ironic, transforming desire, now dressed in plague-time Florentine clothes
- Not the closest source (Apuleius and the fabliaux are nearer), but the Ovidian love-and-change matter is woven through the framing and the tales
On Metamorphoses’s page
- Boccaccio was nicknamed "the Italian Ovid" — and he earned it before the Decameron, reworking Ovidian myth in his vernacular romances
- Ovid's great matter of love and transformation runs underneath Boccaccio's hundred tales: desire that changes the people it seizes
- The closer tale-sources are Apuleius and the fabliaux, but the ironic, knowing posture toward love — the lover-physician, the cure that wounds — is pure Ovid