Title: The Decameron Author: Giovanni Boccaccio Creation Date: 1353 Location: Florence
Summary
During the Black Death of 1348, ten young Florentines — seven women and three men — flee plague-ravaged Florence for a country villa, where they spend ten days trading stories: one tale each per day, one hundred in all. Boccaccio called the collection the Cento Novelle. The stories sweep across every social rank — kings and peasants, clergy and merchants, lovers and fools — moving between bawdy farce, tragic romance, and tales of wit that outwit fortune. The frame narrative carries as much weight as any individual tale: the brigata's orderly retreat into beauty and storytelling proposes that civilisation is not a fixed inheritance but something human beings must actively reconstruct, day by day, through imagination, laughter, and the will to speak well. The collection arcs from fortune and disaster on Day One toward magnanimity and noble conduct on Day Ten — a quiet argument that humanity can redeem itself through art.
Why This Book Matters
The Decameron is the foundational work of European prose fiction — the text that established the short story as a literary form and proved that Italian vernacular, not Latin, could carry serious literature. Boccaccio took the raw material of oral tradition — fabliaux, novelle, exempla — and shaped it into a self-conscious art form with structure, psychological nuance, and social edge. Written in the immediate aftermath of a plague that killed perhaps a third of Europe, the collection responds to catastrophe not with religious resignation but with human vitality, humour, and frank desire. Its influence radiates outward: Chaucer adapted several tales directly, Shakespeare drew on it, and the entire European novella tradition is unthinkable without it. Petrarch, Boccaccio's friend and the century's other great literary mind, translated one tale into Latin — his highest compliment. The Decameron is where the modern story begins.
Historical Context
Boccaccio composed The Decameron in the years immediately after the Black Death of 1348, which killed perhaps half of Florence's population. His prologue remains one of the most vivid eyewitness accounts of the plague in all of European literature — precise, horrified, and unflinching. The collection is rooted in the mercantile culture of 14th-century Florence, a city of bankers, traders, and ambitious craftsmen where intelligence and initiative counted for more than inherited rank. The Catholic Church, which had conspicuously failed to explain or prevent the catastrophe, is a recurring target: corrupt friars, lustful nuns, and cynical clergy move through the tales with cheerful regularity. Boccaccio's frankness about sexuality and clerical hypocrisy alarmed later authorities — the collection was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1559 — though by then it had already shaped two centuries of European literature.
Literary Significance
Boccaccio's prose established the norms of Italian literary writing, doing for narrative what Dante had done for poetry: demonstrating that the vernacular could sustain the full weight of literary ambition. His technique — stories nested inside a frame narrative, tone modulated from farce to tragedy and back, the brigata's commentary steering interpretation — became the template for Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron, and Cervantes's embedded tales in Don Quixote. The collection's tonal range is remarkable: doomed love sits beside bedroom farce, and Boccaccio moves between registers with a suppleness that anticipates the novel by three centuries. His female characters are often the sharpest and most inventive figures in any given tale — a pointed choice for a 14th-century writer that has drawn sustained critical attention. The book is also a milestone in the history of prose rhythm: Boccaccio's long, balanced sentences became a model across Europe.
Research Notes
Included to bridge the medieval and Renaissance periods and to represent the Italian prose tradition alongside Dante's poetry. The Decameron is sometimes set aside in favour of later Renaissance works, but its role in the development of European narrative fiction is foundational — Boccaccio shapes what comes after more than almost any other writer of his century. Two English translations are worth knowing. Wayne Rebhorn's 2013 Norton edition is the most complete and fully annotated, with excellent introductory material on the tales' sources and cultural context. G. H. McWilliam's Penguin Classics version remains a reliable and readable alternative. The collection can be sampled freely — individual tales hold up as self-contained stories — but the frame narrative gives the whole project its meaning and ambition. Readers who skip straight to favourite tales miss Boccaccio's argument about what storytelling is for.
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.
This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →
Two translations are recommended. Wayne A. Rebhorn's W.W. Norton edition (2013) is lively, complete, and beautifully annotated — the best current English version. G.H. McWilliam's Penguin Classics translation is also excellent and has been the standard for decades.
Trans. Wayne A. Rebhorn. The most lively and complete current English translation.
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