ABSTRACT
One of the last works that Francesco Petrarch wrote was a short story in Latin which he claimed to have translated from the Italian of the final tale of Boccaccio’s Decameron—the novella of the patient Griselda, who accepted every cruel test her husband, Gualtieri, tried her with to assure her worthiness as a wife. In Petrarch’s version Griselda was a humble peasant and Gualtieri the esteemed Marquis of Saluzzo, a prince loved by all for his wise rule. Tellingly, he claimed that he was translating the tale because it was so very useful as a lesson on how to treat a wife that it needed to be in Latin to gain the wider circulation that the universal language of learned men merited.
