What would you do if a deadly pandemic began ravishing your country? Alright, don’t answer that. I know what most people would do now. Wallowing in misery while staring at a cell phone for eighteen hours everyday isn’t the best response you could come up with. Following Qanon wasn’t too bright either. Take it from Giovanni Boccaccio. During the Black Death he sat down and wrote a classic collection of short stories known as The Decameron. It turned out to be so good that it influenced some seriously big names in literary history like Chaucer and Shakespeare. There are a few of us who still read it now. What is interesting about this book is that Boccaccio captured a certain kind of response that some young people in Italy had to the plague. If people had been reading this book in 2019, you might imagine that the American response to Covid-19 would have been a healthier one.
As The Decameron opens, ten young Florentines, seven women and three men, decide to leave the miseries of the city and go out to the Tuscan countryside where they settle in a chateau. While the urban Black Death is thoroughly miserable, the group seeks happiness in escapism by gathering for a span of ten days in a garden with a fountain. Each succeeding day, a new person is given a crown of laurel to wear and, as king or queen, takes a turn at directing the entertainment. Every person tells a story each day and that amounts to 1000 stories for those of you too lazy to do the math. They also have fun singing, dancing, playing music, eating, and enjoying the natural scenery of Tuscany’s countryside. Note that their response was one of participation and creativity, not passive submission to mindless fluff entertainment.
On each day, a different theme is chosen. On the first day, they tell stories relating some sort of religious moral. These get boring pretty quickly; Christianity has never been a reliable source of excitement. Things pick up on the second day when slightly shocking tales of horny monks, priests, and nuns begin to capture their imagination. From then on, there are a lot of stories about adultery or illicit sex, a few about crime, and a handful of grotesque narratives involving cannibalism or jealous husbands getting revenge by murdering their wives’ lovers or even, sometimes, their wives. In one such story, later adapted for a poem by John Keats, a husband cuts off his spouse’s lover’s head so she puts it in a clay pot and grows basil out of it. Another adulterous wife is given her dead lover’s heart in a goblet so she cries into it, fills it with wine, adds some poison, and drinks it all down. Other stories are a little more upbeat. One interesting section is all about tricks that husbands and wives play on each other to either conceal or reveal a sexual affair. The book ends with stories of generosity and heroism.
You can make a few inferences about medieval Italian society if you follow the repeating motifs in these tales. One is that people who get buried alive or thrown into wells always get rescued. Maybe this is a riff on Christian symbolism. The rescued men are often victims of betrayal and get their revenge in the end. Regarding religion, church authorities are chronically scummy, dishonest, and hypocritical. They seduce women, often through trickery, and extort money. They often care more about hedonistic pleasures than the ordinary citizens who, themselves, are often preoccupied with sex, not much different from today’s sleazy evangelicals. But these medieval Italians are religious despite their disgust for the church. Both husbands and wives have affairs outside their marriages and the story tellers make it clear that they all approve of adultery. The women are especially vocal about a wife’s right to cheat on her husband because, according to them, one man does not have enough potency to be able to satisfy one woman. Hence, having a string of lovers is the only way for a wife to keep herself happy. From what I have experienced, the world of Southern Europe hasn’t changed much since Boccaccio’s time when it comes to sexuality. And why should it?
While these stories have simple themes and their meanings are easy to grasp, this is not the easiest book to read. True to Latin Mediterranean writing styles (yes this includes all you classic French writers, and I do mean the likes of you, Marcel Proust), it is an understatement to say that this writing is wordy. And by wordy, I really mean wordy. Some dialogues involve two people taking turns delivering speeches that run on for two or three pages at a time before turning the conversation over to the other person. This happens, for instance, in the story where a man traps a nude woman on a tower to starve and almost die of sunburn in revenge for a trick she played on him. When people argue, they don’t talk this way; they interrupt each other, cut each other off, and devote very little attention to listening. When Boccaccio’s couples argue, it can be a trial for the reader. This is the worst thing about reading this book. My other major criticism is that some of the stories only work because the characters are incredibly stupid, sometimes so stupid that it is hard to willingly suspend your capacity for disbelief. After one man gets told about a stone that makes people invisible, he believes he has found it and proceeds to act as if he were invisible while everybody laughs at him. He is not the dumbest one in this collection either. Some of Boccaccio’s humor also does not translate well into the 21st century American mind.
The Decameron is long and dense with unnecessarily detailed prose. This is literature for people with a lot of time and a lot of patience. In a lot of ways it really shines by capturing the joie de vivre of ten young story tellers from Florence who seek affirmation for life during a dark and terrible time. It is saturated with the thrills of carnal indulgence and the Pagan celebration of nature that characterized this turning point from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Yet these story tellers never lose sight of the tragic side of life. Boccaccio’s response to the Black Death was one of optimism and renewal. Maybe if we learn from him, our world will see another Renaissance. We are about due for some positive change.
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