Boccaccio believes that the story in decameron is well-founded. The works describe and praise secular life, praise love as a noble source of wisdom, praise the value of free love, and affirm people's intelligence and wisdom. The works also reveal the cruelty of feudal emperors, the sins of Christian churches, the hypocrisy of priests and nuns, and so on. Boccaccio grew up in Florence. He yearned for democracy and freedom since he was a child and expressed dissatisfaction with the dark rule of the church. When I grew up, I took part in political activities many times and opposed feudal autocracy. Decameron is a powerful weapon against feudalism and the church. After decameron was written, Boccaccio was persecuted and attacked by feudal forces, and was often cursed and threatened by people sent by the church. He was so angry that he even wanted to burn all his works, including decameron. Fortunately, his good friend Petrarch, a famous Italian democratic poet, tried to convince him that decameron has been handed down to this day.

Boccaccio's best work is decameron. 1348, a catastrophic plague broke out in Florence. More than half of the residents died and the city was empty. As soon as the plague subsided, Boccaccio began to write decameron, which lasted five years and was completed in 1353.

There is a wedge in this story set, which tells the story of Florence plague in 1348. Three young people and seven girls met in Novella church and took refuge in a villa in the country for two weeks. Besides enjoying the scenery, singing and dancing, they also held a story meeting. /kloc-for 0/0 days, each of them told a story every day and took turns to be the "queen" in power. In 10 days, they told 100 stories, hence the name "decameron".

Stories in decameron come from a wide range of sources, and Boccaccio draws extensively from historical events, medieval legends and oriental folk stories (such as The Complete Works of Seven Philosophers and One Thousand and One Nights, etc.). ). But Boccaccio transplanted the plots of these stories to Italy and reconstructed and recreated them with humanistic ideas.

Criticizing the corruption of the church is a common feature of Italian Renaissance humanist writers. But compared with the pioneer Dante, Boccaccio's thought went a step further and his criticism was sharper.

In many stories, Boccaccio criticized the Catholic Church and religious theology, mercilessly unveiled the sacred veil of the church, and exposed various dark activities of monks, such as extravagance and waste, extortion, buying and selling clergy, suppressing heresy and so on. It is worth noting that in the first two stories of decameron, Boccaccio satirized the corruption and depravity of the church with a sharp pen. An evil and shameless notary boasted in his last confession and was canonized by the church after his death. A Jew secretly visited the headquarters of the Holy See and heard that all popes, bishops and priests were greedy, shameless, lewd and bought and sold people. Rome has become a "melting pot of all evils" and "Christianity is full of evil and darkness". These two stories set the tone for the whole work.

But Boccaccio not only mocked the evil deeds of monks, but also criticized their hypocrisy and treachery. In many interesting stories, he vividly revealed that the monks blamed evil thoughts in the hearts of believers, just to scare them away, so that this group of hungry wolves in black robes could take advantage of it and seduce good women. The priests condemned the usurer, saying that the usurer would be sent to hell after his death, just to let others spend their ill-gotten wealth quickly to fill their wallets.

Boccaccio not only attacked the personal qualities of monks. His criticism is much deeper. He got to the bottom of it, without mercy, and pointed the finger at the Vatican and religious teachings. In some stories, he shows the hypocrisy of monks, full of benevolence and morality, but at heart he is a thief and prostitute, and a complete hypocrite. Its root lies in the canon of the church, which is hypocritical and anti-human. Boccaccio's criticism of the church expressed the dissatisfaction of the ordinary class in the city with theocracy at that time.

The love story between men and women plays an important role in decameron. Boccaccio told many vivid and interesting stories, which showed that it was a sin to advocate love in the Middle Ages. The asceticism of advocating God's love and the happiness of the kingdom of heaven violated the laws of nature and stifled human nature. "Of all the natural forces, the power of love is the most unconstrained and hindered." True love is far from evil, but reasonable, humane, noble and precious. Therefore, God's love can never replace love, and people have the right to enjoy love and secular happiness.

In a story, the author described the young Simon as "stupid" and "like an idiot", but under the inspiration of love, he was transformed into a decent man, "smart" and "outstanding". Many twists and turns and touching examples in this story and other stories show that love can inspire people's wisdom and has great power to purify people's hearts.

People's character and sentiment tend to be noble and perfect.

On the road to love and happiness, the protagonists in Boccaccio's novels encounter various obstacles, such as feudal hierarchy, money, power and other unexpected disasters, but love can finally overcome all these, or at least win morally. This is the greatness of love. Among contemporary writers; No one eulogizes the happiness of human life more thoroughly and enthusiastically than Boccaccio; He praised the nobility of love and laughed at marriage based on economic relations.

Decameron also attacked feudal privileges and inequality between men and women. Boccaccio was convinced that a person's nobility depends not on his birth, but on his intelligence. Even the groom who serves the king is no less handsome and clever than the king. Many stories describe that in the struggle for happiness, people from humble origins often beat feudal lords and nobles with their wisdom and perseverance. Boccaccio revealed such a truth: "Poverty will not destroy people's noble quality". Sages often appear in poor families, but "nobility makes people lose their ambition". Children in imperial families only match pigs with sheep. He also rejected the stereotype that medieval monks demonized women as evil representatives, praised women as a wonderful creation of nature, and advocated that women should enjoy equal status with men.

Decameron also embodies the idea of man's all-round development. In Boccaccio's view, people should receive a good education, be versatile, develop harmoniously, be healthy, handsome, smart and brave. This is the ideal of people in the Renaissance.

Decameron is a work of great value in the history of world literature. With rich life knowledge and excellent artistic generalization, Boccaccio portrayed different classes such as kings, nobles, knights, monks, businessmen, scholars, artists, farmers and craftsmen by telling stories, summarizing life phenomena, describing nature, describing details and depicting psychology, showing a broad picture of Italian social life and expressing humanism and free thoughts in the early Renaissance. Italian critics compare Boccaccio's decameron with Dante's Divine Comedy, calling it Renqu.

Decameron is a story collection, but it is not an ordinary story collection. Boccaccio creatively combined these stories into a rigorous and harmonious narrative system in the form of story meetings. As an introduction, the Great Plague attracted 10 young men and women, and pointed out that natural disasters led to the degeneration of social order and interpersonal relationships, which discredited the background of the whole work. This introduction, the author's preface and postscript, 10 men and women's activities in the villa, is a big framework, which skillfully contains and connects the 100 stories told by the protagonists. This 100 story, except for the first and ninth days of the first day, all the eight-day stories are unfolded under the same theme, which makes the frame structure seamlessly connected. And the characters in the story often tell stories. In this way, the small frame in the big frame and the story in the story can not only clearly express the author's feelings and ideas, but also have fascinating artistic charm, which is huge, active, complex and orderly.

The language of decameron is also very distinctive. It takes literary classics as a model and absorbs the characteristics of folk spoken language. Its language is refined, fluent, playful and vivid, and its description of events and characters is delicate and vivid.

Decameron laid the foundation for the development of Italian artistic prose and created the artistic form of European short stories.

Boccaccio's last work is the legendary raven (1356? )。 The author borrows the dreamy form of medieval literature, cursing that love is the result of sensuality and denouncing women as the root of all evil. This is obviously a retrogression in his literary creation. Under the long-term threat and siege of the church and the old forces, Boccaccio even wanted to burn decameron and other works. This is a sign that the contradiction between the old and the new has shaken him.

After the publication of decameron, it was quickly translated into European languages and became very popular. Chaucer's Tales of Canterbury, England and Seven Days' Talks on Naba are imitations of decameron. De Vega, Shakespeare, Lessing, Goethe, Pushkin, Keats and so on. I also drew creative materials from the story of decameron.