De claris mulieribus

De claris mulieribus, work by Giovanni Boccaccio, written about 1360–74. One of the many Latin works the author produced after his meeting with Petrarch, De claris mulieribus contains the biographies of more than 100 notable women. In it Boccaccio decried the practice of sending women without vocation to nunneries. He intended the book to provide female readers with models of female lives fully lived.