It was a city every bit as vicious as ancient Rome, as lofty as Athens, as uninhibited as Sodom and Gomorrah. Poets, soldiers, artists, popes, courtesans - all played their part in Florence's towering tragi-comedy.This drama was reflected and depicted by three men of genius: Dante, politician and poet; Giotto, artist, architect and wit; and Boccaccio, adventurer and writer. Dante held high office at the time when Florence's affairs - bitterly chronicled in his Divine Comedy - were at their bloodiest and most violent, and tried, unavailingly and tragically, to divert the city's disaster course. Giotto, whose concerns were paint and stone rather than politics, never suffered from Florentine savagery - his life and work reflect rather the city's liberality, magnificence, comedy; its lavish way of life and its passionate love of art. But it is left to Boccaccio, youngest of the trio, standing on the threshold of the Renaissance, to reveal in The Decameron Florence's rampant sensuality, from the elegant and luxurious to the outrageously bawdy.Drawing on contemporary anecdotes, and later Italian writers, Timothy Holme has written an absorbing account of the men and women of medieval Florence, and in particular of the three giants, Dante, Giotto and Boccaccio. Very different in temperament, their fortunes were closely entwined; Dante wrote of Giotto; Boccaccio hero-worshipped Dante; Giotto painted Dante; Boccaccio portrayed Giotto in his Decameron. And all three were involved in that extraordinary, turbulent city - the Florence of the Middle Ages.

    Here one learns that the most ancient treatise on education in France was written by a woman; and medicine was practiced regularly by women in the thirteenth century; that in the twelfth century the Order of Fontevraud gathered both monks and religious sisters under the authority of an abbess.This is a systematic study that provides a multitude of concrete examples. No aspect of feminine activity in the course of the medieval periods is neglected: administration of property, professions and commerce, the intellectual life, even politics; writers, educators, sovereigns, and those who enlivened the royal courts. Moreover, the author draws from the history of law and the history of events and social customs to sketch something never before attempted, an outline of the evolution of the power of women. This is a classic work without reference to which any inquiry into the questions addressed here must remain incomplete.

    Artz on the arts, as on philosophy, politics and other aspects of culture, makes lively and informative reading."—The Washington Post