In the Library
The Decameron
Giovanni Boccaccio, 1353
- Form
- Form Collection
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 21 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by John Payne
- Chapters
- Chapters 122
- Length
- Length 291k words
£1.99
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A kindly thing it is to have compassion of the afflicted
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If you like this, try
The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer
Chaucer borrows the same trick of storytellers passing the days with tales, but swaps Boccaccio's plague villa for a pilgrimage of English road companions.
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One Thousand and One Nights
Anonymous
This does the same thing with stories nested inside stories to outlast a crisis, but the frame is one woman talking for her life, not ten friends on holiday.
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Gargantua and Pantagruel
François Rabelais
Rabelais does the same earthy, appetite-driven comedy nearly two centuries later, but pushes the bawdiness into grotesque excess and turns the satire on scholars and priests.
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About the book
Seven young women and three young men flee plague-stricken Florence for a villa in the Tuscan hills and pass the days telling each other stories. Giovanni Boccaccio composed this prose collection between 1349 and 1353, in the immediate wake of the Black Death that opens the book with one of the most harrowing pieces of reportage in medieval Europe. Across ten days each of the ten storytellers delivers one tale, yielding a hundred in all: tales of merchants, friars, cuckolds, nuns, princes who survive shipwrecks, peasants who outwit kings, husbands who do not. Boccaccio gives the vernacular Italian of Dante a profane and worldly counter-music, alive to appetite, fortune, and the ridiculous fact of human bodies. The frame is quarantine; the storytelling is the cure.