The Decameron

Another in my series of the Corona Files

The Decameron seems like the right book for the right time. Composed in 1348 the premise involves a group of young people who have fled the Black Death to a secluded villa outside of Florence. They’re bored; they’ve eaten through their quarantine snacks; they’ve binge-watched the latest Netflix. And, because they don’t know about social distancing, they sit around together and come up with a plan to entertain each other. For each of the days of lockdown one of the members will share a story.

The author, Giovanni Boccaccio, is himself a young man. The plague, ravaging all of Europe and his hometown, has claimed the lives of Boccaccio’s father, step-mother, and many of his close friends. I’m wondering if he is self-soothing by writing the tales that number The Decameron (one hundred).

The book is structured as a frame story—meaning that the setting, the prescribed situation of death hanging over their heads, the end of the world as it were, is the frame, and the stories are not linked or sequential to one another. There are silly stories, some a bit off (ahem, sexy), some are object lessons. They were meant to entertain and take one’s mind off the situation outside their door.

Throughout runs the common medieval theme of Lady Fortune, and how quickly one can rise and fall through the external influences of the “Wheel of Fortune.”  Boccaccio had been educated in the tradition of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which used various levels of allegory to show the connections between the literal events of the story and the Christian message. Boccaccio borrowed and expanded upon known tales from Persia, the Orient, and from other places, ones that had been in the milieu for a while. He just played around a bit with some of them. The Decameron is a source for several stories in Geoffrey Chaucer more famous Canterbury Tales written decades later. The tales also influenced Shakespeare.

Words Without Borders has put out a call for your Decameron submissions, tales from the Covid-19 pandemic. In the midst of all the quarantine boredom, why not challenge yourself and your friends to email between yourselves stories. Chase the wolf away from your door.

A Tale from the Decameron (1916) by John William Waterhouse.