CUNY Academic Commons

Giovanni Boccaccio created The Decameron in a time period back when women were seen as inferior to men, and quite frankly anyone else in society. They were seen as individuals holding lower social positions than […]

In “The Prince”, Machiavelli believes that good laws and good rulers are derived naturally from a good military. He talks about the topic of war as an almost necessary thing to go through for the development of […]

While reading Angela da Foligno’s memorial, I noticed that a lot of what she said in her steps of repenting her sins showed guilt, pain, and she seemed kind of remorseful. For instance, in steps 8 and 10, she t […]

The Decameron is a collection of stories or novellas by the 14th-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio. In this series of stories, women outwitting men is something that happened pretty often. Two of these […]

Poem 129 had a lot to do with love, more specifically the way Petrarca’s2 deep and profound love for Laura makes him feel. He conveys his emotions, ideas, and fears with very descriptive language. Continuously […]

In Dante’s series of poems, he incorporates paganism views and spins them to fit into his views of Christianity. Paganism is a term initially used in the fourth century by early Christians as a way to depict […]