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.

Continue reading