Boccaccio: The Man and His Works by Vittore Branca
Published 1975 · 341 pages · 310,198 words · about 20 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Biography
How hard is Boccaccio: The Man and His Works to read?
Boccaccio: The Man and His Works scores 47 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 65 out of 100
- Philological and cultural-historical vocabulary; requires some background in medieval studies.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Abstraction: 68 out of 100
- Cultural-historical and literary-critical arguments at high scholarly level.
- Information density: 78 out of 100
- Extraordinarily rich with archival and philological detail.
- Narrative indirection: 12 out of 100
- Direct scholarly argument.
- Symbolic density: 12 out of 100
- Analytical throughout.
- Ironic distance: 100 out of 100
- Earnest scholarly commitment.
- Resolution withholding: 100 out of 100
- Each argument is clearly resolved.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Combines biography, philological analysis, and literary criticism.
How Boccaccio: The Man and His Works is regarded
Boccaccio: The Man and His Works holds a literary regard score of 85 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.