The Decameron
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The Decameron
Giovanni Boccaccio
Literature
James Mustich
Jul 29, 2018
The storytelling of Boccaccio’s Decameron takes place under a fierce deadline, as in another fabled compendium of tales, The Arabian Nights. Fleeing their native city to escape the ravages of the Black Death (the bubonic plague that claimed the lives of more than half of Florence’s denizens in the middle of the fourteenth century), Boccaccio’s elegant evacuees have retreated to a villa in the countryside. Having taken their bodies out of harm’s way, they devote their minds to a round-robin of story, telling one tale apiece on each of ten nights devoted to diversion. Many of the narratives in The Decameron are famously, and scandalously, ribald, and all the more life-affirming for their avowal of the pleasures of the flesh. The vitality of Boccaccio's writing exhibits for the first time in prose, really, the literary vigor of the Italian vernacular, roughly three decades after Dante had done the same in poetry by eschewing Latin in the composition of The Divine Comedy.
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DeAnn Rossetti
Oct 28, 2018
Wow, it has been a long time since I've thought of the great storytelling in the Decameron
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Megan Butland
Jan 29, 2019
Read as a teenager. Mind blowing.
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