Medieval Storytellers: Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Ramon Llull

Great Storytellers of the Middle Ages

The End of the Feudal Era

The fourteenth century marked an important milestone in the evolution of humanity and literature. The feudal world was coming to an end, the new bourgeois class began to consolidate, and writers had developed national languages sufficiently to engage with the classics. This century belongs to Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Don Juan Manuel.

Ramon Llull

Ramon Llull is a great prose writer in Catalan. Born in Palma de Mallorca, he was educated in the refined world of the court until, after an apparition of Christ, he devoted himself to the study of philosophy and languages, writing books in defense of the Catholic faith and to convert unbelievers. From his widespread production, Blanquerna and Felix stand out from a literary point of view.

Blanquerna

Blanquerna is an allegorical narrative that contains many of Llull's experiences and concerns. Its protagonist, Blanquerna, passes through a number of situations—secular, religious, bishop, pope—to finish in what is considered the most perfect state: the hermit. Inserted in this work is the Book of the Friend and the Beloved, a mystical prose poem inspired by the Song of Songs.

Felix

Felix is a set of dialogue lessons through which the young Felix learns from the lips of sages and hermits to know the world, God, angels, and heaven. It also inserts the Book of Animals.

Geoffrey Chaucer

Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales in verse, with prose passages. It begins by describing the meeting at an inn of several pilgrims of the most varied conditions who decide to entertain themselves on the way to the abbey of Canterbury through stories.

• Throughout the book, the author describes the appearance, activities, and discussions of these pilgrims in pictures full of life and color.
• He fits the theme and language of the stories to the peculiarities of each narrator.
• The originality lies more in the context of the stories than in the stories themselves.

Giovanni Boccaccio

Boccaccio was the son of a Florentine merchant, which explains why he received a good education. In court, he loved a young girl who eventually left him. He was a friend of Petrarch and a student of Dante's work, although he maintained a great spiritual distance from both.

In Fiammetta, he tells of his youthful love affair, although with a reversal of roles: the young man is abandoned by his mistress. In Corbaccio, following another disappointment in love, he harshly criticized feminine vices and wiles.

His most important work is the collection entitled Decameron. With this work, he took a significant step toward realism and the unabashed secularism of the Renaissance.