13occaccio's 'Revenge or the Old (9row 3 notes 64 Index 76 Introduction If Giovanni Boccaccio had encountered the deadly widow in black when he was ten years younger, he might have laughed oft'the humiliating incident and dressed it up for a rollicking episode of the Decameron, instead of laying the lady bare in a vitriolic satire under the name of the Old Crow. According to the most logical interpretation of his personal account, how­ ever, he was a greying man of forty-two; the bloom of youth had withered within him; and by the end of 1355, when he wrote the bitter denunciation, his "inimical Fortune" had dealt him a series of nasty blows. Since the publication of the Decameron, new material responsibilities had complicated his life; his diplomatic missions for the government of Florence were marked by some cruel disappointments, -in particular the defection of his beloved Petrarch to the Republic's arch-enemy, the hated Visconti. His old, undependable friend, Niccola Acciaiuoli, a glittering star at the court of Naples, had used his influence to have his own secretary, Zanobi da Strada, crowned poet laureate by the emperor, while Boccaccio himself had cul­ tivated the Muses for years in the footsteps of Dante and P('trarch, without the recognition he deserved.