Early Lives of Dante

The earliest accounts of Dante Alighieri's life, composed by those who moved in the same Florentine world. Giovanni Boccaccio, author of The Decameron, wrote his biography of Dante around 1363, barely a generation after the poet's death, drawing on memories and documents now lost to time. This edition also includes Leonardo Bruni's corrective response, written when he felt Boccaccio had romanticized Dante by over-emphasizing his lifelong devotion to Beatrice. Together with accounts by the Florentine chroniclers Giovanni and Filippo Villani, these texts offer a remarkable window into how Dante's immediate successors understood the man behind the Divine Comedy. What emerges is not simply facts, but the beginning of a literary mythology. Boccaccio revered Dante as a prophet; Bruni presented him as a statesman and man of letters. The tension between these impulses would shape Dante's reception for centuries. For anyone curious about how great writers become immortal, these early lives reveal the exact moment when the father of Italian literature began his transformation from Florentine exile into legend.