ABSTRACT
Most of these works were available to Elizabethan readers in their original languages or in French and (for the Latin works) Italian translations (Mulryan 1974). Some were also translated into English: De casibus (in Lydgate’s version 1494, etc), Filocolo (1567), Fiammetta (1587), Ninfale fiesolano (1597; not in STC; see Wright 1957:108-12). The Decameron did not appear in a complete English translation until 1620, though imitations and translations of individual stories had appeared well before then. Boccaccio appealed to Elizabethan readers as an entertaining storyteller, as a writer on the theme of love, but also as a Latin moralist, one who was ‘at once learned, correct, and romantic in his attitude toward history, story material, the pastoral, and the pagan gods’ (Tuve 1936:148).
