#boccaccio

Boccaccio´s Visit to Dante´s Daughter

Artist: William Bell Scott (British, 1811–1890)

Date: n. d.

Medium: Oil on canvas

Netflix: some wet abs should do the job lol

MYSTERIA ECCLESIAE — The Decameron

The Decameron is a collection of one hundred novels written by Italian Renaissance writer Giovanni Boccaccio between 1348 and 1353. The individual stories are written in the form of narratives by ten people, three men and seven women, who fled Florence to the countryside to escape the plague and pass the time by telling stories for ten days. The individual stories are often humorous, satirical, or romantic to the point of being erotic. The work is critical of medieval asceticism and mocks the church. It places greater emphasis on the individual. Despite its popularity, the book was later banned by the church for its anti-church stance and was one of the first books to be included in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list of banned literature. In some cases, it was burned along with other books. It is one of the most important works of the Italian Renaissance, which influenced and inspired a number of other authors, including Geoffrey Chaucer with his book The Canterbury Tales.

TRIVIA

— Giovanni Boccaccio did not only chose the Black Death as a literary element for his book, he lived through the plague himself and drew his descriptions directly from what he saw in 1348 Florence. Because of these detailed descriptions, the Decameron serves as a valuable source for historians and natural scientists alike. Especially those of the symptoms and the progression of the disease – swellings in the groin and armpits, the dark patches of a sepsis on the skin, killing the infected within three days, the spread of the bacteria through clothes tossed onto the streets – have been used both to determine the course of Boccaccio's and of future pandemics. Just as his psychological insights into the behaviour of people within a plague: from turning to God to downplaying its severity to a complete denial, asking for the election of new officials, blaming marginalised groups, the nobility self-isolating, while the care of the sick rests mainly in the hands of the poor. Being born into a merchant family himself, in a time where the nobility was gradually replaced by a wealthy bourgeoisie, Boccaccio also weaved much of that power struggle and his criticism into the work. The stories told by the noble protagonists, whose flight from the city he portrays as a privilege of the rich and as cowardice, tell stories of people of all social strata, favouring the new mercantile values (practicality and wit) over old noble virtues. To address a broader middle class audience, Boccaccio also wrote in the Italian vernacular (Tuscan) instead of Latin, becoming the first (known) author to write an Italian text in prose, a genre previously reserved for Latin and Greek alone. Even when banned, the 100 novellas have therefore been widely received, and one of them, the ring parable, even set the foundation of Gotthold Lessing's play “Nathan the Wise” in 1779.