BOCCACCIO, Giovanni.
£1,450 · Offered by Sokol Books
First edition outside Italy of Boccaccio s Il Corbaccio ( The Crow ), also known as The Labyrinth of Love, very finely printed. It is the only edition containing the page by page notes of the editor, the Florentine humanist and philologist Jacopo Corbinelli (1535-90), including numerous references to texts in ancient Greek, for which it is esteemed. It describes the dream of the protagonist, who has called on Death to end his life, made miserable by his unrequited love of a widow. In his dream the widow s husband appears to him to free him from the Labyrinth of Love into which he has fallen. The spirit of the husband warns the protagonist about the evils of women, describing his own experiences with his wife and alerting the protagonist to her many shortcomings. He invites the protagonist to take vengeance on women by writing down all that he has learned in his dream, which the protagonist promises to do. On waking, he finds that he is no longer troubled and finishes with an invective against female wickedness. The dedicatory letter to Vincentio Magalotti, a Florentine nobleman, describes how Corbinelli, who had arrived in Paris in 1568, found himself lonely and destitute, and how he was supported by the kindness of Magalotti s relative, Signor Mannelli, of another noble Florentine family. Corbinelli describes their sad discussions of the upheavals in France at the time caused by the Wars of Religion which would end with dinner and readings of Plutarch in French, or Pliny. Th
- Binding: Hardcover
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