De casibus virorum illustrium

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Nimrod and the Tower of Babel . Illustrated page from the Glasgow edition

De casibus virorum illustrium ( Latin , loosely translated "From the fate of famous men") is a collection of biographies of famous men and women by the Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio , which he created and edited from 1356 until shortly before his death. The book describes in Latin in 56 moralizing biographies various historical and mythical personalities such as Adam , Alcibiades or Herod , but also women such as the pharaoh Cleopatra or the queen Zenobia . The choice of models for the figures ranged from the Bible and various Roman authors to Boccaccio's contemporaries. Some of the women's biographies he also took on in a modified form in his later work De mulieribus claris .

De casibus virorum illustrium is considered to be one of Boccaccio's late works, in which he had changed his earlier, life-affirming style to a moralizing style. The biographies describe famous people who have to deal with a stroke of fate at the height of their success and how they dealt with it. In this way, Boccaccio presents them as positive or negative role models for their own lifestyle. Since the work was written in the then universal language of Latin, it was quickly spread throughout Europe. The influence of the book can be found in many follow-up works, such as the Canterbury Tales and The Monks Tale , which partly adopted texts and were influenced by Boccaccio's moralizing style.

The work has also been translated several times, for example into Spanish in Toledo in 1511. A first German translation was published in Augsburg by Hieronymus Ziegler in 1544/45.

Web links

Commons : De casibus  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ MC Seymour: Chaucer's Early Poem “De Casibus Virorum Illustrium” . Penn State University Press, University Park and London 1989, pp. 3 . Online version
  2. ↑ Irmgard Bezzel: The library of the Gurk bishop Johann Jakob von Lamberg (1561-1630). A library of Romanesque prints from the 16th century. In: Börsenblatt for the German book trade - Frankfurt edition. Volume 89, (November 5) 1968 (= Archive for the History of Books. Volume 62), pp. 2919–2928, here: p. 2923.
  3. ^ Entry in the German biography, online edition