Boccaccio's Decameron

The Decameron is a collection of 100 tales by the Florentine writer Giovanni Boccaccio, written in the Tuscan vernacular around 1349 to 1353, just after the Black Death struck Florence in 1348. The book opens with a harrowing description of the plague. Then it introduces ten young people, seven women and three men, who leave the city for a country villa and pass the time by telling one story each on each of ten days, for 100 tales, with a ruler chosen for each day to set the theme. The title comes from the Greek for 'ten days'.¹

The tales are about love, wit, fortune and the follies of the Church and the middle class, in comic, tragic and bawdy modes. Famous ones include the villainous Ser Ciappelletto, who tricks a priest into thinking him a saint, the story of Federigo's falcon, and Griselda, the patient wife tested by her husband. Boccaccio drew on French fabliaux, Eastern tales and local gossip. He wrote them as prose in a long and balanced Italian style that served as a model for later writers, though in later life he is said to have regretted its racier parts and preferred to be known for his Latin scholarship.¹

The Decameron spread widely in manuscript and print, and later it was banned in places and bowdlerized. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is a story collection in the same frame-tale tradition, and he may have known the book. Shakespeare drew on it for All's Well That Ends Well and Cymbeline, and Keats on it for Isabella. Pasolini filmed it in 1971. It remains the founding work of Italian prose and a key early European account of the plague.¹