Women in Trousers

Boccaccio's 'On Famous Women'

Nigel Bruce

Jul 31, 2023 • 1 min read

French miniaturist: "Boccaccio’s Vision of Petrarch" in Boccaccio’s De Casibus Virorum Illustrium (On the Fates of Famous Men) (1467). Glasgow, Glasgow University LIbrary) Boccaccio is on the bed and Petrarch is in the light.

After Petrarch wrote biographies of famous men, Giovanni Boccaccio went one better with 106 biographies of Famous Women (De Mulieribus Claris). The famous women included Pope Joan. Written in Latin, the book spans Eve, Venus, Minerva, Circe and Penelope, Medea, Flora, Isis, Sappho, and Cleopatra, all the way up to the time he began writing it (around 1361).

While some critics see misogyny everywhere in Boccaccio’s writing, others see this as an early celebration of famous women, an interesting departure from the usual “lives of the saints” approach. It influenced both Geoffrey Chaucer and Christine de Pizan but it is certainly less fun than his earlier work, Decameron (1348-52).

Below is a miniature of Pope Joan from around 1450.