Title: The Decameron Author: Giovanni Boccaccio Creation Date: 1353 Location: Florence Collection: Banned, Burned & Dangerous Books
Brief
Giovanni Boccaccio began writing the Decameron around 1349, in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death that killed somewhere between a third and a half of Florence's population in the summer of 1348. He had survived the plague. He had watched his chosen city collapse into a horror he describes with the precision of a journalist and the cadence of a poet: fathers abandoning children, physicians refusing the sick, bodies carted through streets by men recruited with the promise of extortionate pay, common graves dug in church courtyards because the churchyards were full.
The frame is a response to this annihilation. Ten young Florentines — seven women and three men — meet in the church of Santa Maria Novella and agree to leave the city for the hills of Fiesole. There they will organise their days with deliberate order and tell stories: one each, each day, for ten days. A hundred stories, ranging from farcical adultery to tragic love, from clerical hypocrisy to mercantile cunning, from cruelty to genuine tenderness — all held within a frame of flight and fellowship and narrative as a refusal of despair.
The book is the foundation of Italian prose fiction, the model for everything from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron to every subsequent story collection built around a framing narrative. It is also one of the most vivid accounts of epidemic panic ever written, and a sustained argument that art is not a luxury but a survival mechanism — that the capacity to tell and hear stories is precisely what makes a community worth sustaining. The Decameron was placed on the Roman Catholic Index of Prohibited Books in 1559. US Customs seized copies as obscene as late as 1927. Four centuries of prohibition could not extract it from the literary tradition it had helped to create.
The Banning
The Decameron was placed on the first Roman Catholic Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1559, under Pope Paul IV. The Index was the Church's instrument of control in the wake of the Council of Trent and the challenge posed by printing technology, which had made mass distribution of texts possible for the first time. Boccaccio's hundred tales — with their lascivious priests who seduce parishioners, adulterous nuns who mistake their lovers' breeches for their veils, and a clergy more interested in the pleasures of the flesh than the care of souls — were an immediate and obvious inclusion on any list of texts the Church wished to suppress.
The ban did not mean disappearance. The book was already too widely read and too deeply embedded in Italian literary culture to be destroyed. Instead, the Church spent a century negotiating terms for permissible editions. The 1573 Edizione dei Deputati, authorised under Pope Gregory XIII, secularised the offending clergy: priests became teachers or merchants, nuns became noblewomen, abbesses became matrons of respectable households. The erotic content was largely retained — revealing with inadvertent clarity that the primary objection was not sex itself but clerical sex, not the depiction of human appetite but the suggestion that the Church's own representatives shared it. The 1582 Salviati edition went further, excising descriptive details so aggressively that several tales became incomprehensible, their plots gutted of the material that made them stories. The Decameron remained on the Index until its abolition on 14 June 1966 — over four hundred years of formal prohibition. In the English-speaking world, censorship continued through other channels: US Customs seized copies as obscene into the 1920s, and Australia banned the book from 1927 to 1936 and again from 1938 to 1973.
The Fallout
The Church's decision to expurgate rather than destroy was itself a tacit acknowledgment of the book's literary stature and its centrality to Italian culture — making the censorship, paradoxically, more revealing than an outright ban would have been. By replacing clerical characters with secular ones while leaving sexual content substantially intact, the authorised editions exposed with documentary precision what the institution actually feared: not the fact of human appetite but the specific suggestion that clergy were as susceptible to weakness as any layperson, and considerably more hypocritical because they claimed otherwise.
The expurgated editions created, unintentionally, a new and subversive reading practice. Literate Italians compared censored and uncensored versions, and the gap between texts — priest changed to teacher, nun changed to noblewoman, abbot changed to merchant — was itself an implicit commentary on the Church's priorities. The censorship became legible as content: what was changed told the reader what the Church could not afford to have said. A century of careful editorial negotiation produced not purification but a parallel text that made the original's implications more visible, not less.
Boccaccio's influence on European literature was immeasurable and fundamentally unimpeded by prohibition. Chaucer drew on it directly for the Canterbury Tales. Marguerite de Navarre modelled the Heptaméron on its structure. Shakespeare adapted its tales for the stage. The framing device — multiple storytellers with distinct voices enclosed within a larger narrative — became foundational to Western fiction. The Church could place the book on a list. It could not extract it from the literary tradition it had helped to create, nor could it prevent the observation that four centuries of formal prohibition had accomplished nothing except to confirm, with each new edition of the Index, that the tales remained as dangerous as the day they were written.
Why It Was Feared
The Decameron was feared because it told the truth about the clergy in a form that made the truth entertaining, memorable, and entirely immune to refutation through argument. Boccaccio's priests, monks, abbots, and nuns are not presented as monsters or as deliberately wicked — they are human beings governed by the same appetites as everyone else, and the comedy arises from the gap between their professed vocation of celibacy and self-denial and their actual conduct, which is indistinguishable from that of the merchants and lovers around them. The friar who seduces a woman while preaching chastity, the abbess who stumbles into the dormitory wearing her lover's breeches on her head instead of her veil — these are not theological polemics. They are comedies of human nature, devastating precisely because they are affectionate rather than hostile.
The Church understood instinctively that affection was more dangerous than hostility. A polemic could be answered with a counter-polemic. A heretical tract could be condemned for its theological errors. But a comedy that made the reader laugh with the sinning priest, that invited sympathy for the lustful nun, undermined the institution's moral authority at a level where argument was useless. The reader does not conclude that the clergy are evil. The reader concludes, more simply and more devastatingly, that the clergy are human — and this conclusion, that those claiming spiritual authority were in their private lives no different from those over whom they claimed it, was more destructive to ecclesiastical power than any formal theological challenge Luther or Calvin would later mount.
The formal structure compounded the danger. The tales are not opinions delivered as argument but stories told by young people for entertainment, without the moralising framework medieval literary tradition required. No gloss, no authorial condemnation. The tales are offered as experience rather than instruction, as life observed rather than life corrected. The Index could prohibit the book; it could not prohibit the observation that gave the book its power.
The Reading
The City of the Dead
Florence, June 1348. The plague arrived from the East and announced itself with swellings in the groin and armpit — the buboes — followed by dark spots appearing across the skin, then death, usually within three days. No physician understood it. No remedy helped. The sick died, and those who tended them died, and those who merely passed close to the sick in the street sometimes died. The contagion was so virulent it seemed to pass not only from human to human but from the clothes of the dead to those who handled them, from animals that touched infected garments to any person who touched the animal.
What the epidemic did to the city's social bonds mattered as much as what it did to the city's bodies. Neighbours stopped visiting neighbours. Servants refused to enter rooms where the sick lay. Families split apart — brothers abandoned brothers, and what was more terrible, parents abandoned children, leaving them to die untended because the alternative was to die with them. The dead lay in streets and doorways until carters collected them, men from the lowest classes recruited with the promise of extortionate pay to do what no one else would do. Churches could not absorb the funerals — masses were said briefly or not at all, bodies deposited in common pits dug in the floors of churches and in open ground beyond the walls, layered with earth the way one layers cheese in a lasagne.
The laws of the city had ceased to operate not because anyone repealed them but because the men who enforced them were dead. The customs that governed the treatment of the dead — the washing, the winding, the procession, the prayers, the proper burial in consecrated ground — had been abandoned not because people wished to abandon them but because the sheer volume of death made them impossible. What had been sacred became logistical. What had been a funeral became a disposal problem. A hundred thousand Florentines died, or something near that number. The count was uncertain because the institutions that would have kept count had themselves collapsed.
The Agreement
In this city, in the church of Santa Maria Novella, on a Tuesday morning, seven young women gathered after services. They knew each other; they were from the same Florentine social stratum — educated, propertied, articulate, accustomed to a world that had ceased to exist. Pampinea, the eldest and most decisive, raised the question directly: what were they doing here, in a city of death, following routines that had lost every support that once gave them meaning? Their families were dead or scattered. Their servants had fled. The institutions that structured their days — the markets, the festivals, the social rounds — had dissolved. Why not leave?
There was a discussion about propriety — women of their class should not travel without male escort, should not set up a household without men to manage its exterior relations — but three young men arrived at the church, and the practical problem resolved. They agreed to go to a villa in Fiesole, in the hills above the city, to stay until the plague passed or until the world reassembled itself, and to organise their days so that idleness and despair did not take hold.
The structure they imposed was almost monastic in its regularity: morning mass, then the gardens and the cool of the loggia; midday rest during the heat; afternoon storytelling, governed by a queen or king elected each day who set the theme and maintained order; evening dancing, music, supper, conversation under the stars. They were doing what monasteries have always done: imposing order on chaos through the rhythm of the regulated day. The difference was that their order was self-chosen, their rules their own, their governance rotated democratically, and their principal communal activity was not prayer but narrative — the telling and hearing of stories that were by turns comic, tragic, bawdy, tender, cynical, and wise. Where the monastery offers God as the ordering principle of community, the villa in Fiesole offered storytelling. The implication — never stated but impossible to miss — was that narrative can do what prayer does, that the act of sharing stories creates bonds as strong as the bonds created by shared worship, and that a community founded on the exchange of human experience may be more resilient than one founded on obedience to divine authority.
The Merchant's World
The stories ranged with extraordinary freedom across the entire territory of human experience. Day One was unthemed, and the first tale set the fundamental subject with devastating economy: Ser Ciappelletto, a wicked man dying far from home, made a deathbed confession so convincingly pious that the local people canonised him as a saint. The gap between appearance and reality, between the story a society tells about itself and what actually happens beneath that story's surface, was the obsessive subject — announced in the first pages with a narrative whose implications were both comic and deeply unsettling. If a man this corrupt could die in the odour of sanctity, what did sanctity mean?
Day Two featured adventures of fortune and misfortune — merchants and travellers buffeted by the world's unpredictability, shipwrecked and robbed and deceived and rescued, surviving by wit and luck and sheer endurance rather than by virtue or divine favour. The fundamental worldview was established here: fortune is indifferent, virtue is no guarantee of reward, and the capacity to adapt to circumstances is worth more than the capacity to be good. This was the worldview of the merchant class — the world of bankers and traders and men who measured success in florins rather than prayers — and it represented a decisive break from the medieval tradition in which Providence governs outcomes and the righteous are eventually rewarded.
Day Three, under Neifile's governance, featured tales of people achieving through ingenuity what convention, propriety, or social position would deny them — which was almost always the object of their desire, whether sexual, financial, or social. The message was consistent across all three days and would remain consistent across all ten: the world does not arrange itself according to moral principle, and those who wait for justice to arrive on its own schedule will wait forever. Better to be clever. Better to be quick. Better to understand the world as it is, rather than insisting that it ought to be otherwise.
Ghismonda
Day Four was the dark day, the hinge of the collection. Filostrato, the most melancholic of the three young men, set the theme: love that ends unhappily, in death or disaster.
The story of Ghismonda was the most formally tragic tale in the entire hundred. A young woman, widowed early and confined to her father's house, took a lover below her social station — Guiscardo, a man of talent but no birth — after her father, Tancredi, refused to remarry her. When Tancredi discovered the affair, he killed Guiscardo and sent Ghismonda her lover's heart in a golden cup.
She poisoned herself over the cup rather than survive the grief and the humiliation. But before she died, she delivered a speech to her father that stands as one of the great set pieces in pre-modern European literature. She defended her right to love whom she loved, grounding that right not in convention or divine sanction but in natural law — in the argument that nobility of character outweighs nobility of blood, and that her body and its desires were hers to govern. The speech was remarkable: a woman defending her sexual autonomy through rational argument, claiming for herself a dignity her social position did not automatically grant and that her father had attempted to revoke through violence. Her death was not submission but defiance. She chose when and how she would die, and she made her father watch, and the watching was itself a form of punishment no court could have imposed.
The tale inaugurated a tradition in European fiction — the woman who refuses to accept that her desires are not her own — that would not reach full expression for another five centuries.
Wit Against Power
Day Five turned to love that ended well, often through complications so elaborate and so improbable that they bordered on farce before resolving, sometimes at the last possible moment, into happiness that felt earned precisely because it had been so thoroughly endangered. Dioneo, the most irreverent of the young men, who had been granted from the opening day the licence to tell whatever story he wished regardless of theme, regularly tested the group's tolerance with a bawdiness that would have embarrassed the others if they admitted how much they enjoyed it. His tales were the safety valve — the comic relief that reminded the group desire, for all its capacity to produce tragedy, was also absurd, and that laughter at the body's imperatives was as valid a response as weeping.
Day Six celebrated wit and clever speaking — stories in which the right word at the right moment saved a reputation, won an argument, deflected a blow. These were tales of language as power, reflecting the conviction that the ability to speak well is not ornamental but essential, a tool for navigating a world in which brute force is always available and intelligence is the only reliable counterweight. Chichibio the cook, who ate one leg of a crane meant for his master's table and then argued, with desperate improvisational brilliance, that cranes have only one leg — a claim he appeared to prove by showing his master a flock of cranes standing on one leg in a marsh — demonstrated with perfect economy that wit can defeat power and the right word at the right moment can rewrite reality itself.
Day Seven explored the tricks wives play on husbands, a theme the female storytellers navigated with irony so dry it could cure leather, each tale a small masterpiece of domestic intelligence in which women outwitted men not through superior strength but through superior attention to detail, superior understanding of how the world actually operated beneath its official surface. The women in these tales were not rebels and not victims — they were pragmatists, operating within constraints they had not chosen and could not change, finding in the space between what was permitted and what was desired a theatre of operations in which their intelligence, being consistently underestimated, became their most reliable weapon. Day Eight expanded the field of trickery in every direction: men tricking women, women tricking men, friends tricking friends — a world where everyone was working an angle, where no one's innocence could be assumed, where cleverness was the only reliable virtue and being outwitted the only reliable punishment. Day Nine discarded thematic constraint entirely, the stories ranging as far as the tellers' imaginations could carry them, as if the group sensed the end approaching and wanted to explore every remaining territory before the return.
The Hundredth Story
Day Ten was the last, and its theme was magnificence — liberality, generosity, greatness of spirit. The stories moved through exempla of men and women who gave without calculating return, who forgave when forgiveness was neither expected nor deserved, who acted with a nobility that transcended their station.
The day ended with Dioneo's story of Patient Griselda — the hundredth tale, the last word of the collection, and its most troubled. A marquis named Gualtieri tested his wife's obedience through escalating cruelty: taking her children and pretending to have them killed, setting her aside and pretending to remarry, reducing her to poverty and humiliation — before restoring everything after a decade of suffering. No judgment was delivered on either of them — not on the marquis, not on Griselda. The discomfort was the point. Petrarch translated it into Latin. Chaucer brought it into English. Each subsequent version reached different conclusions about what had happened between those two people, and each struggled with the same silence at the heart of it: no answer had been given.
It was the last story. The tenth day was over; the hundred tales were told. What the tellers had chosen to leave as their final word was not resolution but a question — about endurance, about whether patience was a virtue or a surrender, and whether there was any way to tell the difference from where Griselda stood.
The Return
The ten days ended. The group had told a hundred stories. They returned to Florence, which had changed — the plague was passing, survivors were rebuilding, the markets were reopening, and the city was becoming again something that resembled a city rather than a charnel house. A voice turned, at the end, to its proper audience — the women of Florence who had endured the plague confined within their houses while men moved freely through courts and markets and piazzas and foreign cities, finding distraction wherever the world would allow. For them: a hundred stories. A hundred ways of holding the world at the right distance, of seeing it clearly enough to laugh at it and weep over it and understand it a little better than before.
The plague was still present in the frame, as it was still present in the city. The survivors returned to a world that had not fully healed and might never fully heal — too many dead, too much lost, too many of the assumptions that organised Florentine life exposed as fragile. But the argument sustained across a hundred tales and ten days of ordered storytelling was that these ten companions had spent their time in Fiesole practising the most essentially human activity available to them: turning experience into narrative, transforming the raw material of desire and grief and comedy and cruelty into stories that could be shared, examined, laughed at, and mourned over.
The stories they told were not about the plague. They were about love, cunning, sorrow, revenge, desire, death, luck, endurance, and the intractable oddness of human behaviour under every conceivable circumstance. They were about everything except the plague, which was precisely what the plague required them to be about — because the alternative to storytelling was silence, and silence was the plague's dominion, and the deeply human refusal to be silent, the stubborn insistence on filling the air with voices and tales and laughter even while the city below burned with fever, was the only form of resistance available to creatures who had no cure and no explanation and no power over their own survival, but who had, still, the capacity to sit in a garden in the Tuscan hills and tell each other stories until the long darkness passed.
This post is part of Books They Tried to Destroy, a series on the Banned, Burned & Dangerous canon — works that frightened states and survived them.
Editions
The Decameron — trans. Wayne A. Rebhorn (W. W. Norton, 2013) Buy on Amazon The scholarly gold standard. Rebhorn's complete, lively translation won the 2014 PEN USA Literary Award for Translation. Includes an extensive introduction on Boccaccio's historical and cultural milieu. The edition to read if you want all one hundred tales.
The Decameron: A Norton Critical Edition — trans. Wayne A. Rebhorn (W. W. Norton, 2015) Buy on Amazon Fifty-five judiciously chosen novelle from Rebhorn's translation, with contextual materials and modern criticism. The best entry point if you want scholarly apparatus alongside the text.
The Decameron — trans. G. H. McWilliam (Penguin Classics, 2003) Buy on Amazon
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