Gilbert is now able to present the…
September 1566 CE
This year sees the English translation of Boccaccio's earlier prose romance, The Most Pleasant and Delectable Questions of Love.
In this year appears also the first volume of the Palace of Pleasure, William Painter's collection of sixty tales based on classical and Italian originals.
Painter, educated at St. John's College, Cambridge, had been ordained in 1560 and the following year had become a clerk of the ordnance in the Tower of London (apparently using the position to amass a fortune out of public funds).
In one of the tales appears the “bed trick” used in Boccaccio's mid-fourteenth century Decameron, wherein a man who thinks he is bedding a young maiden is tricked into sleeping with his wife.