On Famous Women

— XVI —

no less blameworthy in it Referring to the Neapolitan edition, lying in the lack of an appropriate coloring and a movement suitable to a classic prose of the Trecento Trecento: The 1300s, a golden age of Italian literature dominated by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Because, just as every writer has their own style, so every century (especially the early ones of our language) has its own imprint, movement, and coloring—qualities which, even when reducing the spelling of that time to our own (a thing that becomes necessary if, due to the work of the copyists original: "menanti," professional scribes who often introduced errors while transcribing manuscripts, we cannot grasp the genuine spelling of the fourteenth-century authors original: "trecentisti"), can in some way be altered, but not removed; otherwise, they are ruined so much as to be unrecognizable. To better clarify these thoughts, I present the entire, beautiful Chapter XII regarding Thisbe, a maiden of Babylon, also included in full by Mr. Hortis in his fine book on the Latin works of the man from Certaldo original: "Certaldese," a reference to Giovanni Boccaccio, who was born in or associated with the town of Certaldo, adding in a note the reading he followed—not to blame him for having accepted the Neapolitan edition, even when it is clearly erroneous (since it was not his duty to track down and correct such errors), but rather to further establish that praising certain books simply because they were edited by famous men is in itself harmful, and a constant cause of damage to good literature original: "buone lettere," the humanities or literary arts.