The Decameron

Stories Against the Plague

Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, composed around 1350, is one of the founding monuments of European literature — the work that, more than any other, established prose fiction as a serious secular art and influenced everyone from Chaucer to Shakespeare to the modern short story. It is a vast, vital, endlessly inventive collection of one hundred tales, and its frame is as memorable as its contents: as the Black Death ravages Florence, killing a third or more of the population and unraveling the social order, ten young men and women — seven women and three men — flee the dying city for a country villa, where, to keep despair at bay, they pass ten days telling stories, ten tales each. The plague gives the whole work its poignancy and its urgency: these are stories told in the shadow of death, a deliberate turning toward life, wit, and pleasure in the face of catastrophe.

Boccaccio’s opening description of the plague in Florence is one of the great pieces of writing in the book — unflinching, vivid, devastating in its account of social and moral collapse, of bodies in the streets and bonds dissolving. Against this darkness, the storytelling that follows reads as an act of defiance and survival: an assertion that human beings, even amid horror, will tell stories, will laugh, will celebrate love and cleverness and appetite. This frame, the contrast between the plague and the tales, gives The Decameron a depth and resonance beyond mere entertainment, and it has spoken with renewed force to readers in our own age of pandemic.

A Hundred Tales of Human Life

The tales themselves range across the whole spectrum of human experience, but their dominant key is earthy, witty, and worldly. Boccaccio delights in stories of clever lovers and outwitted husbands, of resourceful women and foolish men, of merchants and monks, kings and peasants, saints and scoundrels. Many are bawdy — frankly, cheerfully sexual in a way that can still surprise readers who expect medieval literature to be pious — and they celebrate human ingenuity, desire, and appetite rather than condemning them. Boccaccio’s morality is generous and humane; he is fascinated by how people get what they want, by the play of fortune and wit, and he extends a warm, amused sympathy to the full range of human folly and cunning. Alongside the comedy are tales of tragedy, romance, adventure, and pathos — the famous, heartbreaking story of patient Griselda; tales of generosity and noble love; stories of fortune’s wild reversals.

What unites them is a vision of human life as fundamentally worldly and various, governed by wit, luck, and desire rather than by divine providence. This secular, this-worldly spirit was genuinely new, and it is part of why The Decameron feels so startlingly modern. Boccaccio takes human appetite and intelligence as his great subjects and treats them with a relish and a lack of moralizing that anticipate the Renaissance and beyond. The collection is also notable for the prominence and agency it grants its women, both as tellers and as the resourceful heroines of many tales.

Reading the Decameron Today

A practical word about how to approach the book. The Decameron is very long — one hundred tales plus the frame, running to many hundreds of pages — and it was never really designed to be read straight through. The tales follow conventions, and over a continuous reading the repetition of structures and motifs, and the inevitable unevenness across a hundred stories, can wear on the reader. The collection rewards sampling and dipping far more than a marathon: read the brilliant frame, then graze among the tales, returning over time. Treated this way, as a treasury to explore rather than a novel to finish, it is inexhaustibly delightful.

Translation matters, too. Boccaccio’s Italian is rich, playful, and rhetorically elaborate, and a good modern translation — such as Wayne Rebhorn’s award-winning version — makes an enormous difference, rendering the wit and energy in living English rather than stiff antiquarian prose. With the right translation, the tales feel immediate and funny rather than remote.

A Foundational Classic

The Decameron’s influence is almost impossible to overstate. Chaucer borrowed from it for The Canterbury Tales; its tales were retold and adapted across Europe for centuries; it helped establish the very idea of a framed story collection and of prose fiction as an art form worthy of serious attention. To read it is to encounter the headwaters of the European storytelling tradition, the source behind countless later works.

But its appeal is not merely historical. The Decameron endures because it is genuinely entertaining — funny, sexy, surprising, humane — and because its central gesture, the telling of stories as a refuge from death and a celebration of life, is perennially moving. Earthy, witty, generous, and astonishingly alive for a book nearing seven centuries old, it remains one of the great pleasures of world literature for any reader willing to wander among its hundred tales.

It is, in the end, a book about the consolations of narrative itself — about why human beings tell stories at all, and what storytelling does for us when the world is at its darkest. That is a question every age renews, and Boccaccio answered it once and for all.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.3/5 — A founding masterpiece of European storytelling: one hundred earthy, witty, humane tales framed by the Black Death. Long and best sampled rather than read straight through, but brimming with vitality and astonishingly modern in spirit. A foundational and genuinely delightful classic.

For more landmark storytelling, see The Canterbury Tales, Don Quixote, and One Hundred Years of Solitude.