Lineages
Every great book stands on older ones. Homer gave Virgil his wanderings and his war; Virgil walked Dante through Hell. Bring any book to the centre: what it draws on is to its left, what draws on it to its right.
Of its time
It draws on
Two of Boccaccio's tales come straight from Apuleius, the fuller's wife (V.10) and the lover hidden under a tub (VII.2), both stories of wives outwitting their husbands.
Its heirs
Like Boccaccio, Chaucer sets his stories inside a frame of people telling tales to pass the time: ten young Florentines escaping the plague, a company of pilgrims on the road to Canterbury. About a quarter of the tales have a parallel in the Decameron, patient Griselda's among them.
The wager on Imogen's fidelity, and Iachimo's sly description of her bedroom offered as proof, come from a tale told on the second day of the Decameron (II.9).
Helena, the physician's daughter who cures the King and is given the reluctant Bertram as her husband, is Boccaccio's Giletta of Narbonne, from the ninth tale of the third day; so is the bed trick by which she wins him.
Of its places
The whole web
Every line in the atlas, by place or by time. Tap a work to bring it to the centre.