Giovanni Boccaccio wrote the Decameron in the mid-fourteenth century as a collection of stories that detail experiences of Florentines during an outbreak of the Black Death. He relayed these stories within the narrative framework of a party of young women and men, known as the brigata, who told the stories to each other after fleeing to the countryside to avoid the plague. The women narrators of the brigata outnumber the men seven to three. The brigata are depicted in the John William Waterhouse painting, A Tale From the Decameron, painted over 400 years after Boccaccio wrote the Decameron.

The historical reactions to widespread death and pestilence in Boccaccio’s work reflect modern anxieties. At times the work satirizes people’s futile attempts to escape their fate, whether they turned to superstition, religion, or indulgence. The traits ascribed by Boccaccio to the plague in the Decameron are those of an unstoppable force of nature, not affected by human attempts at alleviating the spread or symptoms. According to some interpretations, the inability for the characters in the Decameron to fight the plague and its unbearable effects upon the human body reflect the same effects of love and lust. (2)

Boccaccio knew that literature could have profound effects on an increasingly wide swathe of readers, and he also knew the anxieties that power produced among many of the aristocracy and members of the church. Boccaccio scholar Judith Serafini-Sauli describes women’s relationships to literature during this period in Italy as “thorny” and “not easy to trace” due to a wariness in aristocratic men concerning the growth of women readership among the wealthy mercantile population as book circulation expanded. The dedication in the Decameron to ‘idle ladies in love,’ sometimes translated as ‘amorous ladies,’ signifies not only Boccaccio’s acknowledgement of his female audience but could have also been his attempt to question societal expectations of women’s relationship to reading and literature during this period. Another aspect of the licentious nature of the Decameron for Bocaccio’s female readership was how much of the Decameron revolves around lovers and how he did not shy away from eroticism. (3)

Boccaccio’s work functions as not only a literary classic, but also a major historical insight into the plague and its effects on society. Through his focus on an expanding Florentine mercantile bourgeoisie, particularly a growing female readership, Boccaccio used the plague to speak directly to an emerging group of Florentines while pointing out the hypocrisies in the aristocracy and clergy. His satirical characterization of passion and plague in the Decameron was a transgressive and creative reimagining of one of the largest population losses in history.

A testament to his work’s longevity, this image of Boccaccio is from Amsterdam and was created by an

unknown artist for Académie Des Sciences Et Des Arts by Isaac Bullart in 1682.

Sources and Further Reading: 

(1) John William Waterhouse, A Tale from the Decameron, 1916. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Waterhouse_decameron.jpg

(2) Jessica Levenstein, “Out of Bounds: Passion and the Plague in Boccaccio’s Decameron,” Italica, Vol 73, No 3 (Autumn 1996), 313-335.

(3) Judith Serafini-Sauli, “The Pleasures of Reading: Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’ and Female Literacy,” MLN, Vol 126, No 1 (January 2011), 29-46.

(4) Elzevier. Unsigned portrait of Giovanni Boccaccio, Italian writer and poet, from the book Académie Des Sciences Et Des Arts by Isaac Bullart,  Amsterdam, 1682. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jean_Bocace.jpg