Tales Of Yore

About the Book

Ten days of storytelling adapted for young readers from the fourteenth century original. One hundred wonderful, lusty tales. Shipwrecks, abductions, tricks played by wives on their husbands, tricks played by husbands on their wives, secret meetings in the dark, cheating merchants, tricks played on the clergy, or by the clergy on their parishioners. Each has a message as valid today as it was six hundred years ago.

About the Author

We don’t know much about the author of the stories on which this book, Tales of Yore is based. Giovanni Boccaccio was born in 1313 in Italy and studied banking and the law. Neither suited him. What he liked best was literature, especially poetry. In Florence his literary reputation grew to the point that the rulers sent him on diplomatic missions, first to the Papal court, which was then in Avignon, and later to Rome. The plaque or “Black Death” of 1347–1349 which swept through Europe, provided the setting in which the stories of The Decameron’s one hundred lovely stories are told. Some of these tales reappear in the writing of Chaucer and Shakespeare. Boccaccio died in 1375 but his work has lived for more than six centuries.