By Gary Topping–
Ever since the onset of the corona virus, when health officials began recommending closure of businesses, cancellation of large gatherings, and voluntary quarantines, I have been thinking about Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. It is a collection of one hundred linked stories created in response to a similar, but so far much more severe, pandemic, the Great Plague of the fourteenth century. If you are looking for a productive and entertaining way to while away your own confinement these days, read on.
Boccaccio (1313-75) was what was known as a humanist living in the great Italian Renaissance city of Florence. Humanists were literary people who had become aware of the Latin works of the classical era, like the writings of Cicero and Virgil, and wished to emulate their linguistic and stylistic excellence. Boccaccio, whose best friend was the poet Petrarch and whose literary hero was Dante, went ever further than most humanists and mastered the Greek language as well—an uncommon achievement at the time.
Boccaccio’s description in his Introduction of the ravages of the Plague in northern Italy is truly scary, and uncomfortably similar to the circumstances of the corona virus: businesses closed down, houses vacant, people quarantining themselves in their homes, and farmers dying along country roads or wherever they happened to succumb, leaving crops unharvested and animals unfed. Not only was the almost nonexistent (by modern standards) health care system overwhelmed, but the surviving priests were swamped with the number of funerals and burial plots inadequate to the number of corpses that had to be interred, forcing a resort to mass graves.
In the midst of all this, a group of seven wealthy young Florentine noblewomen, so Boccaccio reports, decided after Mass one morning to flee the pestilential city to one of the sumptuous rural villas of which each owned several. On the spur of the moment, they invited three wealthy young noblemen who happened along to join them. (Whether or not the ensuing events actually occurred, these seem to have been real people, for Boccaccio felt constrained to invent pseudonyms for them to protect their privacy.) The plan was to rotate each day from one villa to another in flight from the Plague, and to devote their afternoons to telling stories, each of the ten telling one story a day for ten days, thus accumulating one hundred stories.
Those stories, in my judgment, comprise one of the great literary monuments of western culture. Much more accessible and entertaining than Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales which appeared only a few decades later, they are often hilarious and irreverent to the point of ribaldry (I don’t recall any that would actually earn an X-rating, but many are deep in the “R” territory). Corrupt clerics are a favorite subject (medieval Christians did not need a Martin Luther to tell them about this), as are lovers, faithful and unfaithful, and social classes and character types of a diversity that rival Shakespeare’s.
To the modern reader, one of the significant features of the book is that women are to the fore in every way: they are the intended readers, they are seven of the ten storytellers, and they are frequent characters in the stories. At first glance, this does not appear to be the case. As they plan their retreat, one of the women, Filomena, admonishes the others to “Remember that we are all women, and any young girl can tell you that women do not know how to reason in a group when they are without the guidance of some man who knows how to control them. We are fickle, quarrelsome, suspicious, timid, and fearful. . . .” Well, don’t believe that for a minute; Boccaccio himself did not. True, they do invite the three men to join them, but as things work out, both among the storytellers and the characters of the stories, the women outdo the men every time in cleverness and competence.
If The Decameron sounds appealing for your own quarantine reading, grab a copy and dive right in. The stories are linked by themes prescribed by the “king” or “queen” elected each day by the participants, but they also stand alone. The edition I have includes a summary of each day’s stories, so find one that looks interesting and go for it! Fair warning: you’ll be hooked immediately!
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles.
