De Casibus Virorum Illustrium

De Casibus Virorum Illustrium
On the Fates of Famous Men
Illuminated recto from Parisian edition (1467)
Author(s)	Giovanni Boccaccio
Language	Latin
Date	1355–1374
Provenance	Certaldo
Genre	De viris illustribus

De Casibus Virorum Illustrium (On the Fates of Famous Men) is a work of 56 biographies in Latin prose composed by the Florentine poet Giovanni Boccaccio of Certaldo in the form of moral stories of the falls of famous people, similar to his work of 106 biographies On Famous Women.

De casibus is an encyclopedia of historical biography and a part of the classical tradition of historiography. It deals with the fortunes and calamities of famous people starting with the biblical Adam, going to mythological and ancient people, then to people of Boccaccio's own time in the fourteenth century. The work was so successful it spawned what has been referred to as the De casibus tradition, influencing many other famous authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, and Laurent de Premierfait. De casibus also inspired character figures in works like The Canterbury Tales,The Monk's Tale, the Fall of Princes (c. 1438),Des cas de nobles hommes et femmes (c. 1409), and Caida de principles (a fifteenth-century Spanish collection), and A Mirror for Magistrates (a very popular sixteenth-century continuation written by William Baldwin and others).

Boccaccio wrote the core of his work from about 1355 to 1360 with revisions and modifications up to 1374. For almost four hundred years this work was the better known of his material. The forceful written periodic Latin work was far more widely read then the now famous vernacular Tuscan/Italian tales of Decameron. The Renaissance period saw the secular biography development which was spearheaded partly by the success of this work being a stimulus and driving force of the new biography-moral genre.