Ioannis Boccatii de Certaldo insigne opus De claris mulieribus

History has been celebrated and commended by Cicero in a brief but proper and evident testimony, who reports it to be the witness of times, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, and the messenger of antiquity. I have not deemed it necessary to delay you longer in reviewing its benefits, lest someone object to me the same thing which a certain rhetorician, wishing to recount the praises of Hercules, was forced to hear from Antalcidas, the leader of the Lacedaemonians. Who disparages him? To this, because these few words of Cicero hide more in their recesses than they show on the outside. For if they are looked into more deeply, they seem to contain whatever can be said about history, so that there is no need for it to be extended more widely through amplification. Therefore, for the sake of your convenience and name, we offer you this excellent work of Boccaccio, On Famous Women, purged of innumerable errors, so that you may also enjoy this, that it reviews famous women mixed with base ones, so that one may become more illustrious than the other, and it may appear more evidently. In this book, you will discover how the worst outcomes follow from base pursuits, and at the same time it will provide a taste of the raw and ancient age, in which it seemed magnificent to many kings and queens to be mad and to perpetrate any crime. For it expresses the forwardness of the human race, and by what ambition, cruelty, and immense impudence it is agitated, and how vain and senseless man is if he is not tempered by the modesty of laws, nor cultivated by good institutions, customs, laws, and thus by a better mind and propitious God. But if the rashness of women has feared nothing, what is to be conjectured about men, who are by nature more fierce and intractable? What will we not attempt, and to what madness will we not rush, disturbed by our creeping malignancy, if we are left unbridled to ourselves? Let us observe, therefore, how, through great labor and sweat, the cultivation of the exercises and honest studies of good men, in a milder humanity—if we do not decline the helms, and they perform their duty—the world will grow. Here also, many secret and hidden senses of certain poetic fables are reported, which took their occasion from the event of the thing performed, to which the poets applied rhetorical artifice, so that we might provide a huge matter of exercising talent in this short book. Impute the roughness and difficulty of the style to the times and the age, not to the studies of Boccaccio. But nevertheless, it bears a certain venerable gravity, because the style is not exquisite nor painted, but solid, containing more strength and things than vain allurement.

Farewell and enjoy, and hold me, a student of your name, commended.