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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9297162" data-attributes="member: 8461">After having been reading it off and on since December, I finally finished my copy of Giovanni Boccaccio's 1361-62 work <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Mulieribus_Claris" target="_blank">De Claris Mulieribus</a> ("On Famous Women").Presenting short biographies of over one hundred women from antiquity right up until Boccaccio's own time, there were quite a few entries which I'd never heard of, and many more whom I knew only in passing, making this quite informative. Though since Boccaccio also makes quite a few errors over the course of these entries, I'm equally glad that my copy had footnotes where subsequent historians and translators point out things which he got wrong.That said, for all that he's shining a spotlight on women of history who might have otherwise been overlooked, this book is really, really a product of its time. While not all of the women he writes about were virtuous figures (since he's writing about famous women, whose fame might have been for good deeds or ill), the virtue that he praises them for is often chastity, where the reason he finds them worthy of remembrance is because they never got married, never got remarried, killed themselves after being raped, killed their rapist, etc. Between that and the overt praising of chastity as a Christian virtue, it's celebration of womanhood seems extraordinarily backhanded by today's standards. Doubly so for the fact that he characterizes some of the most impressive deeds performed by the women therein as being indicative of them having a "manly spirit" that overcomes the "inherent weakness of their sex."Where the book was more fun was in the entries for mythological figures, since Boccaccio flat-out rejects that they were mythological, being a staunch <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euhemerism" target="_blank">euhemerist</a>, believing that all mythology is derived from real people and events. Thus, he confidently tells us that (for example) that Medusa was a real woman, whose beauty was so great that men would stop and stare at her whenever they saw her, so captivated it was like they'd turned to stone. Many of these are hilarious.That said, it's notable that Boccaccio goes out of his way to avoid rationalizing any Biblical figures in this way. In fact, not withstanding Eve herself, he doesn't talk about anyone from the Bible at all, probably to avoid being brought up on charges of heresy.</blockquote>

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