Talk:Summary of Decameron tales

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I've started to expand this article. If anybody has any additional commentary, please feel free to add it.--67.169.251.248 10:03, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

Hi I take it you are User:Cassmus now. Nice work so far, hope your able to finish, 100 tales is a lot when you have to work through each one. You might also consider looking at Wikibook's as this is the perfect content for Wikibooks, but good for Wikipedia also. -- Stbalbach 15:11, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

This page has surpassed the recommendations for an article size and I've only added the first six days. I'm probably going to add the rest of the content, though. Does anyone have any opinions of whether the days should be broken up into seperate pages or kept together? --Cassmus 09:48, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Kept together IMO. Many pages exceed the 32k limit, it's a guideline. --Stbalbach 14:32, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Definitely not a page per story, you could split this into first 5 days and last 5 days. Thanks for doing this. So many stories... --Chinasaur 04:39, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

OK. Let's keep it together for the sake of convenience.--Cassmus 09:52, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm finished with my complete rewrite of the article. Changes and critiques are welcomed. I included source information because 1) it is personally fascinating, and 2) It is a common misconception that stories included historical figures are true and including source information often diffuses this belief. In my opinion only VIII, 6 has any probability of being true, although other tales have been suggested by scholars.--Cassmus 08:27, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

There are a lot of random grammatical errors and ambiguities in some of these summaries. Do they come straight from the book or can I start cleaning it up? Sammka 22:52, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Arabian Nights

I'm currently reading Arabian Nights and the similarities to the Decameron are somewhat striking. They were tales from the 8th and 9th centuries and collected and written down in the 13th century when they were organized into a nested series of stories within a frame tale (a wife tells one story a night for 1000 nights)-- almost exactly like the Decameron with its frame tale of 100 stories in 10 days. Can anything be said about these two works and influences? -- Stbalbach 23:27, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Frame tales originated in India before the time of Christ and gradually spread west through the centuries. They were popular because of their inherent structure and flexibility. Each new culture that came in contact with a collection of stories would usually create its own culturally relevant frame narrative to contain the stories they heard. Thus, ancient India used a parrot as a narrator in one frame tale; ancient Arabia created Shahrazad, and Europeans created the Decameron and The Seven Wise Masters. Frame tales made their way to Europe through trade, natural Arab migration to Spain, Sicily, and Constantinople, and through returning armies from the Crusades. Through time various narrators would retain the stories they liked or understood, while dropping ones they didn't and adding new ones they heard from other places. There are many versions of Arabian Nights and other frame tales. Rare is the frame tale like the Decameron for which there is one version. A modern frame tale is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Tales of a Wayside Inn.--Cassmus 07:54, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Great. I've copied what you written here to Frame story as it needed some background history. -- Stbalbach 14:05, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Floris and Blancheflour

According to Floris and Blancheflour -- Boccaccio tells a version of the same tale in his "Filocolo" in the Decameron. - it seems like the 5th day would fit this story well - but I can't make a match. Any ideas which Decameron story "Filocolo" refers to? --Stbalbach 14:10, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Summary of Decameron tales should be just that - a summary of Decameron tales

Due to the growing length of this article, I stripped out most of the background information on the Decameron. It is most likely that users will be directed to this page from the Decameron main page anyway. (I mean, do we really see someone doing a search on "Summary of Decameron tales" or on "Decameron"?) Therefore, I'm thinking that we should get to the meat of this article (the summaries) rather than summarizing the main article. Instead, I put the main article template at the top of this article to direct them where to find the background info. Portia1780 (talk) 20:04, 25 November 2007 (UTC)