Abstract

Boccaccio's Decamerone shows an interesting case of employ of a literary piece belonging to the narrative cycle of Barlaam and Josaphat, a didactic and admonitory corpus with ethical and religious tenets, broadly spread around the european Middle Age. The literary history of such a romance goes far from its christian shaping and varnish, being in origin a buddhist story involved in a knotty textual circulation, together with other tales which have been diffused from India to ancient Persia, and through the Islamic world until Byzance and onwards.