Early woodcut of Griselda in De mulieribus claris.

In 1360 Boccaccio began work on De mulieribus claris, a book offering biographies of one hundred and six famous women, that he completed in 1374. The tale of patient Griselda (X, 10) was the source of Chaucer's "The Clerk's Tale." However, there are some scholars that believe Chaucer may not have been directly familiar with the Decameron, and instead derived it from a Latin translation/retelling of that tale by Petrarch. Among the other women cited by Boccaccio the following recur in Shakespeare's characters or allusions: Ceres, Procris, Hecuba, Cassandra, Helen, Dido, Lucretia, Portia (wife of Brutus), and Cleopatra. In Shakespeare's "King Henry VIII" Queen Katherine of Aragon professes to have followed a dutifulness to her husband Henry VIII comparable to Griselda's (2.4.16-47). Picture and data courtesy of the Yorck Project, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License (Wikipedia).