Il Decameron di messer Giovanni Boccacci, cittadini fiorentino, Di nuovo ristampato, e riscontrato in Firenze con testi antichi, & alla sua vera lezione ridotto dal Cavalier Lionardo Salviati

£2,500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

The first edition of Florentine linguist Leonardo Salviati’s (1539-89) reviled reworking of the Decameron by Boccaccio, ‘cleaned up’ to avoid Church censorship. The Decameron was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1559, and again in 1564 ‘for its irreverent treatment of clerics and the church, and its questionable morality’ (Carter, p.893). While the contents of Boccaccio’s hundred tales were agreed by censors to be too unsuitably lascivious and immoral for a Counter-Reformation audience, the importance of the figure of Boccaccio and his writing to Tuscan culture and language, particularly in academic circles, led to efforts to rescue the work in some form by adapting it in line with the Church’s strict code. The present edition, Salviati’s, was the second attempt to do so. The first in 1573, prepared by Florentine academicians under the supervision of Cosimo de’ Medici, and also printed by the Giunti (at their own expense), was condemned by the Inquisition before it had left the presses, and was banned from sale on pain of excommunication (Carter, p.896). Salviati’s attempt was prepared with the approval of Giacomo Buoncompagni, the Duke of Sora, another Medici Duke, Francesco I, and at the urging of the Giunti printers, who, out of pocket after the 1573 edition, applied for the privilege to print another attempt as early as 1579. This edition appears with two imprints; the Venetian, as here, dated August 1582, and the Florentine a month or so later, in October/Nov

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