This article accompanies the fable
Women in Trousers


Boccaccio’s On Famous Women

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 and Isis though Sappho, Semiramis 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 Pisan but it is certainly less fun than his earlier work, The Decameron (1350-53).

Below left is a woodcut used to illustrate the earliest print edition of Boccaccio's book, around 1487. At right is a German woodcut from around 1493.