Pecorone
Il Pecorone is a collection of Italian novels from the Trecento . The work was written by Giovanni Fiorentino , who, according to his own statement in the preface, began it in 1378. It was first printed in 1554.
The Pecorone contains fifty short stories of various lengths, some of which are based on real historical events of the time, and are loosely linked by a framework plot based on the example of Boccaccio's Decamerone .
In this framework story it is told that a young Florentine nobleman named Auretto (the name is a very obvious anagram of autore , i.e. "author") has fallen in love with Saturnina , a nun from the Forli convent. In order to gain access to the community, he poses as a cleric of the same order and is soon afterwards appointed chaplain of the monastery. The exercise of this office enables him to regularly meet Saturnina alone. In order to pass the time in an innocent way, the two decide to take turns telling each other a novella at each of these meetings .
Although Giovanni Fiorentino does not come close to his role model Boccaccio in the artful linking of the individual stories with one another, nor in the linguistic elegance, his work is one of the most important testimonies of Italian novelists.
The first novella of the fourth day, which then served as a model for Shakespeare's play " The Merchant of Venice ", and which itself goes back to a story that can be found in Dolopathos , achieved particular fame . This shows the motif of the pledged pound of meat, which a Venetian merchant, Messer Ansaldo , promised a usurer, referred to in the novella as a Jew of Mestri , to secure a loan of ten thousand ducats.
criticism
The literary scholar Elisabeth Frenzel , who cites the work in her volume Motives of World Literature as an example of the motif of the Fernidol brought home , judges there that the novellas lack originality and that the Fernidol motif has already been used up at this point in literary history, to make the framework appear fresh.
swell
- Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, Il Pecorone , 2 vols., Milan 1804
- Thomas Roscoe, The Italian Novelists , Vol. 1, London 1836
Individual evidence
- ^ Elisabeth Frenzel: Motives of world literature. A lexicon of poetry-historical longitudinal sections . 5th edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-520-30105-9 , pp. 152 .