The Cambridge History of Italian Literature. Peter Brand and Lino Pertile, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Instructor Log In. Historical Context for The Decameron by Boccaccio.
Explore our selection of fine art prints, all custom made to the highest standards, framed or unframed, and shipped to your door. Pay by Credit Card. Pay with PayPal. Click for Delivery Estimates. Search The Public Domain Review. Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. And for that reason, in my judgment, anyone interested in doing something other than serving God is an ass. In Florence, despite all that human wisdom and forethought could devise to avert it, as the cleansing of the city from many impurities by officials appointed for the purpose, the refusal of entrance to all sick folk, and the adoption of many precautions for the preservation of health; despite also humble supplications addressed to God, and often repeated both in public procession and otherwise, by the devout; towards the beginning of the spring of the said year [] the doleful effects of the pestilence began to be horribly apparent by symptoms that shewed as if miraculous.
Medium Books. Theme Stories. This is a lesson Boccaccio grasped over years ago: illness often leads us to draw away from others, but at the same time people endure misery when completely isolated. The Decameron reminds us that we need the support of others to make it through a public health crisis.
Rather than letting ourselves be seized by an epidemic of fear, we should try to occupy ourselves with common pleasures such as playing games, enjoying music and sharing stories.
These activities not only improve our sense of wellbeing but also connect us with others. Some of the lessons from 14th-century Tuscany seem to have been relearned in 21st-century China.
During the long days and nights of enforced isolation when some Chinese cities were in lockdown due to the coronavirus, residents sought new ways of connecting with others. Online book clubs and cooking forums sprang up. DJs live-streamed sets and people turned their apartments into impromptu nightclubs. Such activities remind us of the importance of connection when we are socially isolated.
They certainly make for a better experience than following the example of one man who was isolated during the Covid outbreak in China. He passed his days running an ultra-marathon by circling his tiny apartment. They agree on a routine. In the morning and in the evening, they will take walks, sing songs, and eat exquisite meals, with fine wines, golden and red. In between, they will sit together and each will tell a story on a theme set for the day: generosity, magnanimity, cleverness, etc.
They will stay together for two weeks. Two days must be devoted to personal obligations, and two to religious duties. That leaves ten days. Ten tales times ten days: at the end, they will have a hundred stories. That collection, with various introductions and commentaries, is the Decameron. Boccaccio wrote the book between and , when the values of the Middle Ages valor, faith, transcendence were yielding to those of the Renaissance enjoyment, business, the real.
The Middle Ages were by no means over. They gather in ideal fields. Birds sing; jasmine perfumes the air. It is a sort of paradise, and that is what it is based on: Eden. Social relations, too, are idealized, and imbued with the conventions of medieval courtly love. The Decameron has not just one frame—the young people in the countryside—but two. In the outer one, Boccaccio speaks to the reader directly. As in the songs of the medieval troubadours, love ennobles you.
Boccaccio was not a noble; he was one of the nuova gente , the mercantile middle class, whose steady rise since the twelfth century the nobles feared and deplored. Giovanni was born illegitimate, but Boccaccino acknowledged him. When the boy was thirteen, Boccaccino moved from Florence to Naples to work for an important counting house, and he took his son with him, to learn the business: receive clients, oversee inventory, and the like.
Boccaccio did not enjoy this work, and so his indulgent father paid for him to go to university, to study canon law. The Decameron is, unostentatiously, a very learned book. He also began to write: romances in verse and prose, mostly.
He later said that he had never wanted to be anything but a poet. In Naples, he became one, of the late-medieval stripe. These were the happiest years of his life. When he was in his late twenties, they came to an end. Boccaccino had business reverses. He and Giovanni returned to Florence, which, at that time, was the capital of Italian mercantilism. The young man no doubt recoiled, and then, eventually, he acclimated.
Indeed, on the evidence of the Decameron, he came to love this rough-and-tumble world. The majority of the tales are about people of the merchant class, and the skill they most feature is the one most prized by that class, ingegno: cleverness, wit, thinking on your feet.
Only on four of the ten days is cleverness the declared theme, but many stories told on the other days are also about that. Boccaccio still liked gentlefolk, especially highborn ladies, with cheeks like roses, but it is in their commentaries on the tales—and, for the most part, only then—that the Decameron becomes boring. The proles are what give the book its richness and humor and vital force. A famous tribute to ingenuity is the story of Peronella, told by Filostrato.
Peronella spins wool for a living, and her husband is a stonemason. She is pretty, and soon she has a lover, Giannello. There is a barrel in the house, and Peronella tells Giannello to hide in it. When the husband enters, she begins loudly berating him:. Why have you come back home so early like this? It seems to me, seeing you there with your tools in your hands, that you want to take the day off. If you carry on like this, how are we going to live?
Where are we supposed to get our bread from? Calm down, the husband says. See that barrel over there? Well, he just sold it for five silver ducats. Call off the deal, Peronella says. She has sold the barrel for seven ducats, and the man who bought it is right now inside the barrel, checking its condition. Out pops Giannello, claiming that the inside of the barrel needs to be scraped if he is to buy it.
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