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SATURDAY 21 FEBRUARY 2026 – 4.20pm for 4.30pm startCross Street Chapel, Cross Street, Manchester M2 1NL
The year 2025 marked the 650th anniversary of the death of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), author of the Decameron and a key figure in the tradition of Italian and European narrative prose.
To round off the celebrations in Italy and around the world, you are invited to a talk exploring Boccaccio’s reception in the North West.
Boccaccio and Bibliomania in Industrial Manchester
Giovanni Boccaccio’s ‘Il Decamerone’ (1348-53) is often described as the ‘human comedy’ in contrast to Dante’s earlier ‘divine comedy’. Yet it has also been described as a ‘mercantile epic’, focusing as it does on the everyday life of late medieval Italy, and especially the self-determining city-states run by the new class of civic merchants. This talk examines the reception of this mercantile epic in mercantile Manchester during the Industrial Revolution. For Boccaccio’s arrival and accommodation in the city’s libraries and reading rooms can be used as a prism through which to read fundamental changes in the social fabric of nineteenth-century Britain. With the emergence of the shock cities of the modern world, education and libraries became accessible to an ever wider social demographic. The arrival of Boccaccio to the industrial Northwest presents a particularly rich case study of this translation of cultural capital during the ‘age of the machines’.
Speaker: Talk by our Honorary President, Prof. Stephen J. Milner (Serena Professor of Italian Studies, The University of Manchester)
Venue: Cross Street Chapel - Cross Street, Manchester M2 1NL
Admission: members and our students of Italian FREE / non-members £ 3.00
The talk (in English) will be followed by a social gathering with a glass of wine and nibbles.
To better arrange seating and refreshments, it would be helpful if you could book in advance by emailing us at [email protected]
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Cross Street Unitarian Chapel, Manchester City Centre, Cross Street,Manchester, United Kingdom
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