De mulieribus claris

Incompletely illustrated manuscript of the book (around 1425) in the Houghton Library, Harvard University

A page from a manuscript of an anonymous French translation of De mulieribus claris made in 1401 . The illumination (by Colin d'Amiens?) Shows (left) King Herod the Great with his wife Mariamne before their execution. Geneva, Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire, Ms. 191, fol. 221r (around 1465/1470)

De mulieribus claris ( Latin , translated "From famous women") is a book by the Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio , which was written from around 1361, apparently revised and expanded by him several times until his death in 1375 and published for the first time in 1374. It tells in 106 short biographies of famous women of history in Latin . It was first published in German in a translation by Heinrich Steinhöwel in 1473/74 under the title Von den synnrychen learn wyben . It was also the first illustrated edition of a Boccaccio text.

Further translations into German were published in Augsburg in 1479 and in Strasbourg in 1488, a French translation in Paris in 1493 and a Spanish in Saragossa in 1494. A translation of the Latin text into Italian was made before 1397 by Donato Albanzani, probably for Niccolò d'Este. A first translation into English can be found in the Canterbury Tales , where the biography of Zenobia became part of The Monks Tale . The translations have been supplemented by a number of reprints of the Latin edition. The large number of reprints and translations that have survived from the 14th to the 16th centuries suggest that the book was very popular and widespread.

Boccaccio himself describes his work as the first book that deals exclusively with women.

The selection of women, about whom Boccaccio wrote his biographies, concerns both mythological figures ( Eva , Juno , Ceres , Medea etc.) as well as historically transmitted women ( Cleopatra , Nero's wife Poppaea Sabina , Sempronia , daughter of Gracchus etc.). It was made after the Christian-ethical model character of the person whom Boccaccio saw embodied in her. This corresponds to Boccaccio's self-image in his last creative period. Some of the biographies are based on life descriptions of his earlier work De casibus virorum illustrium .

literature

• Irena Dubois-Reymond, Wolfgang Augustyn: Women, Famous (Giovanni Boccaccio) . In: Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte , Vol. X (2010), Sp. 641–656.

Web links

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

• Digitized version of the book in Latin and German on www.archive.org

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Summary of the story of Guyda Armstrong's book on Heliotropia.com
2. ↑ Albanzani, Donato in "Dictionnaire Biografico". Retrieved May 8, 2017 .