tales from the decameron of giovanni boccaccio

This is why periodizers hesitate over whether or not The Decameron is in fact a medieval work. But Boccaccio himself, in writing a comic prose work that has, according to the scholar Robert Harrison, been called “a mercantile epic,” did much to prepare the way for our world. The late medieval personae and settings are different from the postmodern ones: clergy in place of technocrats, princes in place of corporations, and a network of land and sea routes where fiberoptic cables now run. In Boccaccio’s presentation-and he was a merchant’s son-the 14th century, like the 21st, is a chaotic, non-national ( pre- in his case, post- in ours), globalized world linked by commerce and cosmopolitanism, though divided by religion, language, wars, and, yes, plagues. Still, the late Middle Ages, insofar as I can understand them, present a fascinating panorama, at once impossibly distant and uncannily close to postmodern times.

I can’t, however, pronounce expertly on its time: I’m not a historian, not a medievalist. I read this book- The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio’s mid-14th-century compendium of 100 tales told over 10 days by 10 refugees from the Black Plague in a villa near stricken Florence-in the spring and early summer of 2020 for the same reason everyone else did: its relevance to the illness of our time.

Tales from the decameron of giovanni boccaccio