Boccaccio’s Decameron

In Boccaccio’s Decameron, seven Florentine women and three men and leave their city, struck by the great plague of 1348, to tell tales in hillside villas; the hundred (and one) stories they relate over ten days form one of the most influential collections of short narratives in world literature. The devastation wrought by the plague is the backdrop to a deliberate re-imagination of civil society through the regime established by the tale-tellers, and through the interactions of the characters in the tales they tell. Each Day’s group of stories, on a subject prescribed by the Queen or King of the day, is an ordered macrotext within the collection as a whole: the Day’s themes emphasize how Fortune (II), love (III, IV-V, VII), verbal wit and trickery (I, VI, VII, VIII-IX), and moral virtue (X) shape human affairs.