Giovanni Boccaccio's 'De casibus virorum illustrium' - an early humanist collection of biographies of famous men and women of world history in Latin - was one of the most widely read works of the great Italian author throughout Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. Based on a thorough re-examination of the text, which is almost forgotten today, this monograph offers the first comprehensive account of the history of its reception in Latin and the vernacular in Germany. In the process, more fundamental modes of German humanist reception can also be made visible in an exemplary manner.