Giovanni Boccaccio (1313 ??1375), Italian writer, poet and author of the Decameron, a collection of novellas involving the Black Death. It is acknowledged as a world masterpiece. He is considered a Renaissance humanist, a cultural movement which was replacing medieval scholasticism with the revival of interest in ancient Greek and Roman thought and literature. Boccaccio and his great friend Petrarch were leaders of the Renaissance humanist movement.