Over the past several months, I’ve been reading the Decameron, a delightful, fourteenth century collection of tales shared by a group of young friends enjoying the countryside while escaping the horrors of their plague-ridden city.
This book is a classic in medieval studies, and I’m so glad I finally got around to reading it. Essentially, ten friends go into the country for ten days and every day they each take a turn telling a story, leaving the reader with a total of 100 short stories. This makes the book wonderful for reading a bit at a time between the regular tasks of a hectic life. The stories are both entertaining and divulge a glimpse of the day to day life of a variety of fourteenth century characters. Boccaccio brilliantly uses his stories to make social commentary in a lighthearted manner. This commentary, in itself, gives great insight into the workings of an educated medieval mind.
Boccaccio also uses great nuance to create the characters of the ten friends. A good deal can be learned about each of the friends, not only through their actions and interactions, but also by the nature of the stories each of them tells. Because they each tell only one story per day, it takes a bit of extra attention to coalesce the stories throughout the 400+ page book into each individual’s personality, but it is well worth the extra effort; giving more depth to each character and a greater understanding into their interactions with one another.
Although the Decameron was considered scandalous by certain contemporaries of Boccaccio, to the modern eye, any part that may be considered indelicate works only to bridge the divide between modern and medieval culture by accentuating our similarities.
