The Decameron

The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio is a novel written in the thirteenth century after the Black Plague. The book consists of 100 tales told over the span of 10 days by seven ladies and three gentlemen. These ten people all are from Florence, and they get together, having the idea to escape the Plague. They go from country house to country house to live in luxury and leave their anxieties in the city. Their plan was that each day one of them would be queen or king. The first day was under the rule of Pampinea and each day ten stories were told with topics that varied. Yet most made fun of the Catholic Church, religion, and male-female relationships. In the Decameron Boccaccio tries to defines the transformation of his society in response to this horrific pestilence. Proving that during the plague, society began to bring the saying “every man for themselves” into reality.
Boccaccio was fond of Greek philology and you see this in the title. Decameron mean ten day event in the Greek language, and in the story the setting has a time period of ten days. Within these ten days 100 stories are told ten stories per day, and it’s basically a story within a story. Boccaccio himself lived through the plague as it ravaged the city of Florence in 1348. This sparked the idea for writing the Decameron. Now the seven women and three men of the story escape the disease by fleeing the city to a villa on the outside. In his introduction, Boccaccio even gives us a graphic description of the effects of the epidemic on his city. In this time era, writers who weren’t monks usually wrote about Christian ideas. But Boccaccio was different. He wrote about real people, and their real lives. Some of his stories are love stories, some of them are horror stories, and some are funny, but all of them are the kinds of things that might happen to real people. He wasn’t one bit interested in Christian issues. Boccaccio’s skill as a dramatist helps him displayed vivid portraits of people from