SALON LUITPOLD | Dichter des Decamerone, Zeuge einer Krisenzeit: Das Leben des Giovanni Boccaccio | Mit Franziska Meier

In the organizer's words:

On the 650th anniversary of Giovanni Boccaccio's death on December 21, 2025

In cooperation with C.H. Beck Verlag

Giovanni Boccaccio is known as a pioneer of the Renaissance and world-famous for his Decameron with its revealing erotic stories. However, his life is surrounded by mysteries and his work is riddled with strong tensions. In her brilliant biography, literary scholar Franziska Meier portrays him as a troubled contemporary of a crisis-ridden century at the beginning of the modern era.

Pandemic, climate change, banking crisis, national debt and the political shift towards oligarchy: Giovanni Boccaccio (1313 - 1375) was a seismograph of all these upheavals in his time. Part sensualist, part moralist, tradition-conscious and forward-looking, he reacted to the contradictions of a world in upheaval with his multifaceted work. Franziska Meier reconstructs his childhood and school years in Florence and the consequences of his illegitimate birth. We experience him in Naples, where King Robert of Anjou resides, in Florence, the proud, wealthy commune that began to falter politically and economically, at the courts of unscrupulous autocrats in Romagna and in the solitude of his retirement home in Certaldo. Above all, however, Franziska Meier portrays him as a brilliant storyteller and outstanding poet, as a friend of Petrarch and admirer of Dante, as a scholar and biographer whose work belongs to world literature.

Franziska Meier is Professor of Romance Literature and Comparative Literature at the Georg August University of Göttingen and a member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities.