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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Giovanni Boccaccio's "The Decameron," as translated by John Florio, is a seminal work of 14th-century Italian literature that transports readers into a world of humor, tragedy, and human emotion. Composed of 100 tales told by a group of ten young people seeking refuge from the Black Death, Boccaccio's narrative imbues a rich tapestry of themes, including love, wit, and moral lessons. The translation by Florio captures the exuberant language and lively style of Boccaccio, making this classic accessible to English-speaking audiences while preserving the essence of its original context steeped in socio-political upheaval, courtly life, and the blossoming of humanism. Giovanni Boccaccio, a precursor to the Renaissance, was acutely aware of his contemporary social environment'—a world ravaged by plague and transitioning from medieval to modern sensibilities. His personal experiences, including the loss of loved ones to disease and his admiration for classical literature, uniquely positioned him to explore the frailties and virtues of humanity through this collection of tales. Boccaccio's friendship with Petrarch also influenced his literary craft, embedding deeper philosophical reflections amidst the storytelling. "The Decameron" is a must-read for anyone interested in literature that deftly navigates the complexities of human nature and societal norms. This translation not only preserves Boccaccio's insightful commentary on life but also showcases storytellers' enduring power through humor and moral inquiry. As both an engaging narrative and a scholarly resource, it invites readers to explore the intricacies of 14th-century life while reflecting on timeless themes that resonate even today. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Decameron: The Original English Translation by John Florio
Table of Contents
Introduction
As plague darkens Florence, a band of companions discovers that storytelling can be both sanctuary and reckoning.
Composed by Giovanni Boccaccio in the mid-fourteenth century, in the aftermath of the Black Death, The Decameron gathers one hundred tales told over ten days by ten young Florentines who retreat to the countryside to escape the calamity. Their compact—each day, each teller, a new story—creates a luminous order against disorder. Boccaccio’s purpose is at once humane and artful: to console and to delight while probing how people live, desire, err, and persevere under pressure. This translation presents that vision in English, inviting readers into a carefully structured feast of voices, moods, and moral questions without foreclosing their answers.
The Decameron is a classic because it reinvented narrative for a world newly conscious of human choice and chance. Boccaccio fused the vitality of oral tale-telling with the emerging humanist attention to personality, consequence, and social texture. Its range—comic, tragic, pious, bawdy, shrewd—anticipated the modern short story and the novel’s social reach. The book’s influence radiates across centuries, shaping European prose fiction, informing frame narratives like The Canterbury Tales, and inspiring collections from renaissance salons to modern anthologies. Its enduring stature rests on agility: it entertains while scrutinizing the relations among fortune, ingenuity, appetite, and judgment in ways that remain fresh and unsettling.
This edition presents the book in the original English translation long attributed to John Florio, a celebrated linguist and translator of the early seventeenth century, renowned for bringing Montaigne into vigorous English. Florio’s Decameron, commonly ascribed to him by tradition, was produced when English prose was expanding its expressive capacities under Renaissance influence. His version helped naturalize Boccaccio’s Italian into idioms familiar to readers of Shakespeare’s generation, preserving the work’s swiftness and sparkle while giving it an English cadence. Encountering Boccaccio through this historically significant translation offers not only the tales themselves but also a picture of how the English language first welcomed them.
Florio’s translation carries the stamp of its age: quicksilver phrasing, courtly turns, and a relish for verbal play that suits Boccaccio’s mercurial shifts of tone. Readers may perceive archaisms and period decorum, but these features are part of the work’s transmission, revealing how Renaissance English mediated Italian wit, sensuality, and moral inquiry. Later translators have pursued different balances of clarity, fidelity, and modernity; Florio’s remains a landmark that connects the Decameron to the broader evolution of English prose. It is both literary artifact and living vehicle, offering an energetic, idiomatic channel through which the stories’ intelligence, humor, and pathos continue to move.
Boccaccio frames his collection with a simple, resonant premise: seven young women and three young men seek refuge together outside plague-stricken Florence and agree to regulate their days with song, conversation, and storytelling. Each day one of them presides, assigning a theme that guides the tales, and the group sustains this ritual for ten days. The frame lends the book an elegant architecture that balances variety with coherence. It also makes storytelling a civic practice: rules, turns, and themes distribute authority while sustaining fellowship. The result is a laboratory of narrative where style, situation, and voice interact to test values in a time of extremity.
Across its one hundred novellas, The Decameron pursues recurring concerns: the volatility of fortune, the cunning of survivors, the entanglements of desire, and the negotiation between appearance and reality. Boccaccio delights in ingenuity that outpaces power, yet he also reveals wit’s costs. Money, marriage, profession, and reputation provide the arenas where characters attempt to shape their fates. Institutions—secular and religious—are described with a clear eye, sometimes honored, sometimes satirized, rarely exempt from scrutiny. Beneath the bustle lies a durable sympathy for human fallibility. The book invites readers to watch people think on their feet, and to consider what governs our choices when rules falter.
The collection is remarkable for its capacious attention to women’s voices and agency. The brigata’s structure grants the female narrators authority and creative initiative, and many tales examine how women strategize within, and sometimes against, the social arrangements of their time. Desire appears neither as purely edifying nor merely comic, but as a powerful force that exposes constraint and possibility alike. Boccaccio’s humanism attends to embodied life—its hungers, pleasures, embarrassments, and dignities—without abandoning ethical reflection. The result is a tonal spectrum in which tenderness and irony coexist, and in which moral understanding arises through observation rather than formula.
As a work of narrative craft, The Decameron showcases invention in miniature. Boccaccio’s plots pivot swiftly, often within a single strong movement from problem to resolution, yet they accommodate psychological feints and social texture. The frame allows tales to comment on one another, establishing patterns of echo and contrast. Storytellers assess their material, respond to prior tales, and anticipate their audience, modeling a kind of literary criticism in action. This self-awareness, never merely academic, teaches readers how to read: to notice timing, to weigh motive, and to perceive the fine line between fortune’s blow and the stratagem that turns it aside.
The book’s legacy includes not only later collections but also an entire European novella tradition that fed into the rise of the novel. Its scenarios and narrative energies influenced storytellers from Chaucer to Marguerite de Navarre and beyond, and its worldly, flexible prose encouraged writers to trust ordinary speech as a vehicle for complex experience. Through the translation ascribed to Florio, the Decameron entered English letters with a vigor congenial to the age’s stage and page. That crossing enriched English narrative with Italianate rhythms of wit and sentiment, establishing a shared repertoire of types, turns, and moral challenges.
For contemporary readers, the book’s relevance is direct and poignant. Its premise—community forged in crisis—echoes recent global experiences of contagion and isolation, while its method—conversation ordered into art—suggests how culture can be both solace and critique. The Decameron confronts precarity without despair, embraces pleasure without naivety, and ponders responsibility without preachiness. Its portraits of negotiation across class, gender, and profession illuminate the improvisations of everyday life. Florio’s English, lively and layered, offers added historical perspective: we hear how earlier readers metabolized the same questions. The book remains a guide to living attentively when certainty wavers.
To approach The Decameron in this translation is to encounter a work at once foundational and freshly alive: a humane art that balances laughter with judgment, swiftness with reflection, and design with freedom. Boccaccio’s vision honors resourcefulness, exposes hypocrisy, and cherishes the consolations of company and craft. Florio’s idiom, while of its time, channels that vision with zest, letting English carry Italian wit without dulling it. The themes—fortune and prudence, desire and dignity, community and survival—continue to matter. They invite us to read not as tourists of the past but as participants in an ongoing conversation about how stories help us live.
Synopsis
The Decameron, in John Florio’s noted English rendering, presents a framed collection of one hundred tales told by a company of ten young Florentines. Set during the Black Death of 1348, the work organizes its stories across ten days, each directed by a rotating king or queen who assigns a theme. The narratives encompass love, fortune, wit, vice, and virtue, offering variety in tone and subject. Boccaccio’s frame provides order and rhythm—storytelling is interspersed with songs, dances, and conversation—while the translation makes the Italian text accessible to English readers. The book balances entertainment and moral reflection within a carefully structured design.
A brief proem addresses readers—especially women enduring lovesickness—stating the author’s intent to comfort and divert. This is followed by a stark account of the plague’s impact on Florence: social bonds fray, customs fail, and fear spreads. Against this backdrop, seven ladies meet in a church and resolve to leave the city for the countryside. They invite three young men to join them, forming a mixed company. With practical arrangements made, they plan a measured retreat aimed at preserving health and spirits. Their departure establishes the conditions for the narrative experiment: a communal order that contrasts with the disorder they leave behind.
In their villas outside Florence, the group institutes a courteous regimen. Each day a sovereign is chosen to guide conduct and select a storytelling theme. Days are divided between gardens, music, meals, and, in the afternoon, a round of tales told in sequence. The first day, with no fixed subject, sets the tone of variety. Stories introduce resourceful characters, religious figures, merchants, and lovers, mixing humor with cautionary episodes. The company concludes each session with a song, and gentle debates clarify what counts as decorum. The frame emphasizes moderation, companionship, and narrative as a civilized pastime amid crisis.
The second day turns to fortune’s reversals, tracing escapes from peril and unexpected elevation from low estate. The third day celebrates ingenuity, charting how clever stratagems secure desires or avert loss. The fourth day, chosen to consider love’s misfortunes, adopts a graver mood, presenting calamities that befall lovers through chance, error, or constraint. These thematic shifts create a measured progression: the storytellers explore how chance and wit shape outcomes, and how human aims meet external pressures. Each tale remains self-contained, while the day’s governing idea guides selection and sequence, maintaining variety within an evolving conceptual arc.
After somber narratives, the fifth day offers counterbalance, focusing on lovers rescued from adversity through perseverance, timely help, or favorable turns. The sixth day narrows the lens to brief encounters of repartee and sharp replies, highlighting how quick speech can restore honor, avert danger, or confer advantage. These tales often hinge on a single phrase or gesture, underscoring language as a tool of survival. Social range broadens as servants, artisans, nobles, and clerics appear in differing lights. The company’s orderly routine continues, with songs and exchanges that reinforce the frame while the themes lead from ordeal to redress.
The seventh day addresses domestic stratagems, especially wives who elude jealous or domineering husbands by wit and planning. The eighth day generalizes the topic to tricks and practical jokes among many ranks and professions, emphasizing ruses, disguises, and timely deceptions. Clergy, merchants, and officials feature prominently, and the stories examine conduct within recognizable urban settings. Humor often tempers the sharper edges of trickery, yet outcomes also serve as caution. The sequencing sustains momentum: private households give way to broader civic spaces, and the brigata’s governance preserves decorum as they observe how social rules are played with, tested, and reaffirmed.
The ninth day relaxes constraints, returning to free choice and producing a mosaic of subjects and tones—from anecdotal to elaborate, from playful to reflective. This variety prepares the approach to the tenth day, which concentrates on greatness of soul, generosity, and exemplary conduct. Acts of courtesy, magnanimity, and wise governance take precedence, gathering the collection’s ethical strands. The narratives elevate public virtues without abandoning narrative interest. The day’s formal closure, accompanied by song and measured festivity, completes the movement from fortune and wit through trial and remedy to conscious models of noble action, readying the frame for its conclusion.
Between tales, the frame supplies commentary, music, and pastoral respite. The narrators articulate purposes of delight and instruction while sketching a broad social panorama: courts, convents, workshops, markets, and seaports. Recurring ideas include the interplay of Fortune and human ingenuity, the civilizing and disruptive powers of love, and the practical ethics of speech, secrecy, and timing. Realistic detail anchors settings, and dialogue registers diverse voices. The countryside’s order contrasts with the city’s turmoil, situating storytelling as an antidote to fear. Through this alternation, the book links private recreation with public insight into customs, institutions, and everyday negotiation.
As the tenth day closes, the brigata brings its project to an end and prepares to return to ordinary life, having sustained their health and morale. The work concludes by reaffirming storytelling as consolation and counsel, especially for those constrained by circumstance. Across its ten days, the book presents a measured view of human activity: resourcefulness and desire tempered by prudence, folly revealed through example, and public virtues set alongside private aims. Florio’s translation preserves the framed sequence and thematic clarity for English readers. The Decameron offers a coherent design in which ordered leisure yields portraits of conduct under pressure.
Historical Context
The narrative of The Decameron is set amid the catastrophic outbreak of plague in Florence in 1348, a thriving commune of some 90,000 to 120,000 inhabitants before the pestilence. Florence lay along the Arno in Tuscany, governed by guild-based republican institutions that balanced merchant interests and civic ritual. Its dense neighborhoods, market squares, and parish networks became vectors for disease and panic. Boccaccio stages the frame in the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella, then moves the action to villas outside the walls. The time is compressed into ten days of storytelling within roughly a two-week retreat, against a precise summer landscape of gardens, song, and regulated leisure beyond the devastated city.
The book’s tales roam far beyond Florence, evoking a lattice of late medieval places and routes. The youth flee toward the hills near Fiesole and Settignano, a plausible sphere of suburban villas owned by merchant families. Stories then traverse a Mediterranean world familiar to Tuscan traders: Naples and Amalfi to the south; Pisa, Siena, Lucca, and Venice to the north and east; and further, to Cyprus, Crete, Tunis, and Alexandria. This spatial canvas mirrors the everyday geography of Florentine commerce and diplomacy. The setting is thus both intensely local—Florence in 1348—and expansively international, reflecting the social imagination and travel horizons of fourteenth-century Italian urban elites.
The Black Death of 1347–1351, caused by Yersinia pestis, arrived in Europe via maritime routes from the Black Sea, where Genoese outposts like Caffa experienced outbreaks in 1346. By October 1347 it reached Messina in Sicily, then spread rapidly along Italian coasts and inland trade arteries. Mortality estimates vary, but many regions lost between one-third and one-half of their populations. Contemporary observers described buboes, fever, pneumonia, and swift death. Urban density, inadequate sanitation, and high mobility magnified contagion. Boccaccio’s frame situates the tales precisely at the Florentine apex of the pandemic in 1348, using the plague’s social dislocation as both historical backdrop and existential catalyst for the storytelling retreat.
In Florence, civic records and chronicles, notably by Matteo Villani, attest to the plague’s onset early in 1348, its peak in spring and summer, and the collapse of basic services. Burial customs gave way to mass interments; guild courts and markets faltered; and kinship obligations fractured. Boccaccio’s preface famously catalogs these breakdowns—abandoned sickbeds, unattended funerals, and shifting mores—before the brigata gathers at Santa Maria Novella. Their decision to withdraw to the countryside aligns with documented patterns of elite flight from infected parishes. Within the fiction, the retreat provides a controlled microcosm of society that contrasts with chaos inside the walls, preserving memory and civility through ordered speech and song.
Patterns of response to the pestilence included confinement, spontaneous processions, faith healing, and, for the affluent, temporary removal to rural villas. Civic authorities attempted ordinances on cleanliness and movement, although enforcement weakened as officials died or deserted. Food supplies and artisanal labor chains were disrupted, creating shortages and windfalls. Boccaccio distills these realities into a social experiment: ten youths draft rules, rotate responsibilities, and regulate pleasure through storytelling, meals, and dances. Their decorum is a historical counterpoint to Florentine disorder, modeling prudence and measure in crisis. The frame thus converts a demographic disaster into a laboratory of social renewal, while never concealing the catastrophe that impelled it.
Florentine politics in the preceding decades were marked by factional strife between Guelphs and Ghibellines and by institutional reforms consolidating merchant rule. The Ordinances of Justice (1293) curtailed magnate violence and privileged guild members in office-holding. In 1342 the city briefly accepted the signoria of Walter of Brienne, the Duke of Athens, whose authoritarian rule provoked a broad revolt and his expulsion in July 1343. This recent memory of civic overreach and its overthrow informs the book’s skepticism toward tyrannical or corrupt officials. Judges, notaries, and podestà appear in the tales as figures to be tricked or corrected, mirroring a political culture wary of concentrated power and legalistic abuse.
The 1340s saw a financial crisis that directly affected Florentine society. The great banking houses of the Peruzzi and Bardi failed in 1345–1346, partly due to King Edward III of England’s default on massive loans contracted during the early Hundred Years’ War. Credit networks seized, and many merchant families saw fortunes curtailed or wiped out. Boccaccio, whose father Boccaccino was a merchant connected to the Bardi sphere, knew the volatility of trade and finance. The Decameron’s merchant tales—bills of exchange, maritime risk, sharp dealing, and dizzying reversals of fortune—reflect the precariousness of credit economies. They also valorize practical intelligence as the decisive capital when money and status prove unstable.
Boccaccio’s formative years in the Angevin Kingdom of Naples (c. 1327–1341) exposed him to a cosmopolitan court and bustling ports. Under King Robert of Anjou (r. 1309–1343), Naples hosted jurists, poets, and diplomats; after his death, Joanna I (r. 1343–1382) inherited a realm roiled by faction and the 1345 murder of her husband, Andrew of Hungary. Courts, merchants, and mariners intersected in this environment. The Decameron repeatedly returns to Neapolitan settings, manners, and legal stratagems, translating courtly savoir-faire and streetwise cunning into narrative energy. The king’s patronage culture, with its ceremonies and client networks, lies behind the book’s fascinated attention to favor, reputation, and the choreography of social advancement.
The economic horizon of the book is the late medieval Mediterranean system knit by Italian maritime republics. Venice and Genoa ran convoys to the Levant and North Africa; Tuscan firms placed agents in Tunis and Alexandria under Mamluk rule, exchanging woolen cloth and metals for spices and sugar. Cypriot and Cretan ports under Lusignan and Venetian control linked routes to the Aegean and Black Sea. Fondaco systems housed foreign merchants, facilitated by treaties and consular courts. The Decameron’s itinerant traders, shipmasters, and adventurers mirror this infrastructure, moving goods, letters of credit, and news with agility. The cosmopolitan settings legitimize wit and adaptability as indispensable tools for survival and gain.
The Avignon Papacy (1309–1377) reoriented ecclesiastical power toward southern France, intensifying perceptions of nepotism, simony, and fiscal extraction. Pope Clement VI (r. 1342–1352), contemporaneous with the Florentine plague, granted indulgences generously, financed crusades, and offered spiritual dispensations that many viewed skeptically. The curia’s bureaucracies operated between Avignon and Rome. The Decameron thematizes clerical vice in exemplary episodes: the fraudulent confessor Ser Ciappelletto, the opportunistic friar, and the tale of Abraham the Jew, who, witnessing churchmen’s corruption in Rome, bizarrely concludes the faith must be divine to endure such shepherds. These fictions transpose widespread criticisms of ecclesiastical practice into pointed social observation.
Popular religious movements and scapegoating marked the plague years. Flagellant confraternities marched through towns in 1348–1349, sometimes inciting disorder; Clement VI condemned and sought to curtail them in 1349. Across the Rhineland and parts of Iberia, anti-Jewish violence erupted in 1348–1349, while papal bulls attempted to protect Jewish communities. Italy saw fewer pogroms but not none. Boccaccio’s narrative emphasizes prudence over fanaticism and rarely endorses miraculous cures. He records the diversity of responses—hedonism, strict asceticism, and flight—without sanctifying any. The result is a pragmatic, almost civic ethic: communities persist through measured rules, mutual entertainment, and charity, not through panic or extremism that magnify suffering and injustice.
Florentine social regulation before and after 1348 included sumptuary laws and marital controls. Statutes in the 1320s–1330s fined extravagant dress, restricted fabrics and jewelry, and sought to stabilize household economies. Guardianship structures and dowry practices channeled women’s property through male kin. The Decameron places seven women at the heart of the brigata and grants female protagonists intelligence and initiative—managing estates, engineering marriages, and outwitting jealous husbands. While still bounded by patriarchy, the tales document the ingenuity required to navigate legal and moral surveillance. The prominence of clever women mirrors the tension between civic restrictions and actual social competence, especially acute when plague and economic shocks upended conventional household hierarchies.
The urban elite’s practice of villeggiatura—seasonal retreat to rural villas—provides the frame’s social logic. Hills around Florence, notably Fiesole, hosted estates with gardens, fountains, orchards, and halls suitable for music and dance. Labor by contadini maintained these spaces even as city life faltered. The brigata’s rules—limits on sorrowful talk, rotational leadership, careful use of time—codify an aristocratic ideal of otium tempered by responsibility, a recognizable practice among merchants-cum-gentry who balanced business in town and repose outside the walls. The countryside is not escapist fantasy but an organized, staffed environment, making the group’s small republic of manners a plausible response to urban contagion and civic collapse.
Several tales pivot on the contested seas of the eastern Mediterranean. In 1344 a papally sponsored crusading fleet seized the harbor of Smyrna from the Aydinid emirate, inaugurating years of raids and counterattacks that entangled Genoese, Venetians, knights, and local powers. Piracy and privateering were common along routes to Cyprus and the Levant under Lusignan and Venetian influence. Such instability informs narratives of shipwreck, captivity, and disguise, notably Alatiel’s odyssey across multiple ports and courts. These episodes reflect a world where legal jurisdiction shifts with the shoreline, and survival depends on language skills, quick bargains, and the favor of rulers rather than on fixed protections or stable maritime peace.
Transmission and regulation profoundly shaped the book’s later life. In the Counter-Reformation, Boccaccio’s work entered the Index of Prohibited Books (1559) and reappeared in expurgated form in Florence (1573) under Medici oversight, with ecclesiastical advisors such as Vincenzo Borghini guiding cuts and euphemisms. This climate affected translations and adaptations. In England, the Star Chamber Decree (1586) tightened print licensing; yet Italianate court culture flourished under James I. John Florio (1553–1625), a courtier and lexicographer, produced an early modern English version published in 1620, navigating decorum and censorship. The book’s mingling of piety, erotic wit, and social critique thus reached new audiences through carefully managed, historically contingent mediation.
As a social critique, the book exposes the fragility of lineage and office when luck and prudence govern outcomes. Merchants, widows, apprentices, and courtiers demonstrate that competence, not birth, secures survival in plague-torn and commercially volatile environments. By rewarding practical reason, eloquence, and negotiated reciprocity, the tales unsettle rigid hierarchies that underwrote oligarchic rule in Florence. The brigata’s elective governance, rotating sovereignty, and consensual rules model a civic ethos—discipline without tyranny, pleasure without license—that rebukes recent authoritarian experiments like the Duke of Athens. The work interrogates the ethics of credit, hospitality, and justice, arguing that social bonds, not coercion, sustain common life.
The book also indicts institutional hypocrisy, particularly within ecclesiastical and legal spheres, at a moment when the Avignon Papacy’s fiscal and political strategies bred cynicism. By dramatizing false sanctity and casuistical confessions, it urges lay discernment and measured skepticism. Gendered social control—sumptuary law, guardianship, and marital surveillance—is countered by capable female actors whose wit secures equitable outcomes. Cross-cultural exchanges, including fair dealings with Jews and Muslims in trade, challenge xenophobic scapegoating intensified by plague. Through comic justice and exemplary reversals, the work presses for equity under contingency, critiquing a society that too often confuses authority with virtue and that punishes ingenuity while rewarding empty titles.
Author Biography
Introduction
Giovanni Boccaccio (early 14th century–1375) was an Italian writer, poet, and scholar whose work helped shape European prose fiction and Renaissance humanism. Best known for the Decameron, a hundred-story collection framed by the Black Death in Florence, he also composed influential Latin treatises and Italian poems that bridged medieval traditions and emerging humanist ideals. His corpus includes Filostrato, Teseida, De mulieribus claris (On Famous Women), De casibus virorum illustrium (On the Fates of Famous Men), Genealogia deorum gentilium (Genealogy of the Pagan Gods), and Trattatello in laude di Dante. Through stylistic innovation, classical learning, and advocacy of the vernacular, Boccaccio became a central figure of early Italian literature.
Education and Literary Influences
Boccaccio was born in Tuscany, with sources naming Certaldo or Florence as his birthplace. Raised in a merchant environment, he spent formative years in Naples at the court of the Angevin king, where exposure to courtly culture and substantial libraries deepened his commitment to letters. Intended for commerce and, at times, the study of canon law, he turned decisively toward literature while in Naples. That cosmopolitan setting—frequented by scholars, poets, and diplomats—gave him access to classical authors and contemporary currents of thought. The experience shaped his early experiments in romance, allegory, and epic, and fostered a lifelong engagement with both Latin and the Tuscan vernacular.
His literary orientation was decisively influenced by Dante Alighieri and, from mid-century onward, by his friendship with Francesco Petrarch. Dante’s Commedia provided a model for moral scope, linguistic ambition, and civic purpose; Boccaccio later praised and lectured on Dante’s poem. Petrarch encouraged rigorous Latin scholarship and philological care, guiding Boccaccio’s humanist pursuits. Classical authors—especially Ovid and Virgil—supplied mythological frameworks, narrative patterns, and stylistic resources that recur throughout his works. He also drew on romance traditions and contemporary novella forms. The result was a hybrid style: learned yet accessible, morally reflective yet playful, comfortable in both classical allusion and the living rhythms of everyday Tuscan speech.
Literary Career
Boccaccio’s earliest substantial writings emerged from the Neapolitan milieu. Filocolo is a prose romance that reworks a popular love story with extended digressions and learned ornament. Filostrato narrates the love of Troiolo and Criseida in a supple ottava rima that would echo in later European literature. Teseida, an ambitious vernacular epic, adapts classical matter to a courtly narrative and also exploits ottava rima with confidence. Works such as Ameto (also called Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine), Amorosa visione, and Ninfale fiesolano blend allegory, pastoral, and civic pride, revealing a writer experimenting across genres and forging a vernacular capable of sustaining elevated, narrative, and lyrical aims.
The Decameron, composed in the late 1340s and early 1350s, stands as his masterpiece. Framed by a group of young Florentines who withdraw from plague-stricken Florence, the collection presents one hundred tales over ten days. The stories range from farce to tragedy, from mercantile cunning to romantic fidelity, and from critiques of clerical failings to celebrations of wit and virtue. Its Tuscan prose is vivid and flexible, capturing speech, gesture, and social nuance with unprecedented realism. The design—frame narrative, daily themes, and alternating tellers—produces structural variety while inviting reflection on Fortune, prudence, desire, and the fragile bonds that hold communities together.
The Decameron circulated widely in manuscript, attracting admiration for its artistry and controversy for its frank treatment of desire, power, and clerical hypocrisy. Its influence radiated through Europe. Petrarch translated the tale of Griselda into Latin, making it accessible to a broad scholarly audience. Geoffrey Chaucer drew upon Boccaccio more than once: Filostrato informed Troilus and Criseyde; Teseida contributed to The Knight’s Tale; the Griselda story entered The Canterbury Tales via Petrarch’s Latin. Later readers, translators, and dramatists adapted many Decameron narratives, establishing the novella as a durable form and contributing building blocks for Renaissance theater and subsequent narrative traditions.
In mid-career and later, Boccaccio devoted substantial energy to Latin scholarship. De casibus virorum illustrium gathers moral exempla of rises and falls, reflecting on Fortune and ethical responsibility. De mulieribus claris offers a sequence of women’s lives from myth and history—one of the earliest such collections in the West—balancing praise with moral admonition. Genealogia deorum gentilium systematizes classical mythology and its interpretations, serving as a key resource for Renaissance readers. He also wrote the Buccolicum carmen, a set of eclogues, and produced works on Dante, notably Trattatello in laude di Dante and later commentaries, which joined biography, critique, and cultural advocacy.
Alongside writing, Boccaccio undertook public service for Florence, including diplomatic missions to Italian courts and to the papal court at Avignon during the 1350s. These assignments broadened his intellectual networks and facilitated manuscript exchange. In the early 1370s he was invited to deliver public lectures on Dante in Florence, marking a significant institutional recognition of vernacular poetry. His Dante commentaries, though interrupted by illness, helped inaugurate a scholarly tradition of public exposition on the Commedia. Across these roles, Boccaccio moved between civic duty, humanist scholarship, and literary production, embodying the emerging figure of the learned layman active in both letters and public life.
Beliefs and Advocacy
Boccaccio’s convictions align with early humanism: a commitment to classical learning; faith in eloquence as a vehicle for moral inquiry; and belief that literature, in Latin and in the vernacular, could refine judgment and civic sensibility. He esteemed Dante as a national poet and argued for the cultural dignity of the Tuscan language. Through biographies, mythography, and exempla, he sought to transmit ancient knowledge to contemporary readers. His correspondence and friendship with Petrarch reinforced philological rigor and ethical purpose. At the same time, his prose remains attentive to ordinary experience, suggesting that wisdom emerges not only from books but also from lived social reality.
These commitments surface throughout his works. The Decameron dramatizes human resourcefulness and vulnerability under Fortune, leveling attention across social classes and exposing hypocrisies without denying compassion or grace. De mulieribus claris records women’s achievements within a moralizing framework, encouraging reflection on fame, virtue, and agency. De casibus treats the instability of power and the need for prudence. His Dante writings defend poetic excellence and vernacular expression as instruments of ethical instruction. By combining erudition with narrative pleasure, Boccaccio championed a learned culture that was also public-facing—accessible, engaging, and capable of shaping behavior as well as taste.
Final Years & Legacy
In his final decades, Boccaccio balanced scholarship, civic service, and mentoring of younger humanists, while contending with ill health. He continued revising and compiling Latin works, cultivated contacts for textual exchange, and maintained his role as a cultural mediator. In the early 1370s, his public lectures on Dante in Florence confirmed his authority as interpreter and advocate of the Commedia, although illness curtailed the series the following year. He spent much of his later life in Tuscany, particularly in Certaldo, where he died in the latter part of 1375. Contemporary admirers and civic authorities recognized his learning, and fellow humanists esteemed his example.
Boccaccio’s legacy is extensive. The Decameron became a cornerstone for European prose fiction, shaping plot devices, character types, and narrative framing from the Renaissance onward. His tales fed the work of Chaucer and, indirectly, later dramatists and storytellers. De mulieribus claris influenced biographical writing about women; Genealogia deorum gentilium remained a reference for mythographers and artists. His Dante advocacy inaugurated traditions of public literary commentary in Italy. Today, Boccaccio stands as a founding figure of narrative realism, a mediator between classical heritage and vernacular culture, and a witness to the moral and social complexities of an age reshaped by commerce, plague, and civic ambition.
The Decameron: The Original English Translation by John Florio
The Induction of the Author to the Following Discourses
Gracious Ladies, so often as I consider with my selfe, and observe respectively, how naturally you are enclined to compassion; as many times doe I acknowledge, that this present worke of mine, will (in your judgement) appeare to have but a harsh and offensive beginning, in regard of the mournfull remembrance it beareth at the verie entrance of the last Pestilentiall mortality[1], universally hurtfull to all that beheld it, or otherwise came to knowledge of it. But for all that, I desire it may not be so dreadfull to you, to hinder your further proceeding in reading, as if none were to looke thereon, but with sighes and teares. For, I could rather wish, that so fearefull a beginning, should seeme but as an high and steepy hil appeares to them, that attempt to travell farre on foote, and ascending the same with some difficulty, come afterward to walk upon a goodly even plaine, which causeth the more contentment in them, because the attayning thereto was hard and painfull. For even as pleasures are cut off by griefe and anguish; so sorrowes cease by joyes most sweete and happie arriving.
After this briefe mollestation; briefe I say, because it is contained within small compasse of Writing; immediately followeth the most sweete and pleasant taste of pleasure, whereof (before) I made promise to you. Which (peradventure) could not bee expected by such a beginning, if promise stood not thereunto engaged. And indeed, if I could well have conveyed you to the center of my desire, by any other way, then so rude and rocky a passage as this is, I would gladly have done it. But because without this Narration, we could not demonstrate the occasion how and wherefore the matters hapned, which you shall reade in the ensuing Discourses: I must set them downe (even as constrained thereto by meere necessity) in writing after this manner.
The yeare of our blessed Saviours incarnation, 1348, that memorable mortality happened in the excellent City, farre beyond all the rest in Italy; which plague, by operation of the superiour bodies, or rather for our enormous iniquities, by the just anger of God was sent upon us mortals. Some few yeeres before, it tooke beginning in the Easterne partes, sweeping thence an innumerable quantity of living soules: extending it selfe afterward from place to place Westward, until it seized on the said City. Where neither humane skill or providence, could use any prevention, notwithstanding it was cleansed of many annoyances, by diligent Officers thereto deputed: besides prohibition of all sickly persons enterance, and all possible provision dayly used for conservation of such as were in health, with incessant prayers and supplications of devoute people, for the asswaging of so dangerous a sicknesse.
About the beginning of the yeare, it also began in very strange manner, as appeared by divers admirable effects; yet not as it had done in the East Countries, where Lord or Lady being touched therewith, manifest signes of inevitable death followed thereon, by bleeding at the nose. But here it began with yong children, male and female, either under the armepits, or in the groine by certaine swellings, in some to the bignesse of an Apple, in others like an Egge, and so in divers greater or lesser, which (in their vulgar Language) they termed to be a Botch or Byle[4]. In very short time after, those two infected parts were growne mortiferous, and would disperse abroad indifferently, to all parts of the body; whereupon, such was the quality of the disease, to shew it selfe by blacke or blew spottes, which would appeare on the armes of many, others on their thighes, and every part else of the body: in some great and few, in others small and thicke.
Now, as the Byle (at the beginning) was an assured signe of neere approaching death; so prooved the spots likewise to such as had them: for the curing of which sicknesse it seemed, that the Physitians counsell, the vertue of Medicines, or any application else, could not yeeld any remedy: but rather it plainely appeared, that either the nature of the disease would not endure it, or ignorance in the Physitians could not comprehend from whence the cause proceeded, and so by consequent, no resolution was to be determined. Moreover, beside the number of such as were skilfull in Art, many more both women and men, without ever having any knowledge in Physicke, became Physitians: so that not onely few were healed, but (well-neere) all dyed, within three dayes after the saide signes were seene; some sooner, and others later, commonly without either Feaver, or any other accident.
And this pestilence was yet of farre greater power or violence; for, not onely healthfull persons speaking to the sicke, comming to see them, or ayring cloathes in kindnesse to comfort them, was an occasion of ensuing death: but touching their garments, or any foode whereon the sicke person fed, or any thing else used in his service, seemed to transferre the disease from the sicke to the sound, in very rare and miraculous manner. Among which matter of marvell, let me tell you one thing, which if the eyes of many (as well as mine owne) had not seene, hardly could I be perswaded to write it, much lesse to beleeve it, albeit a man of good credit should report it. I say, that the quality of this contagious pestilence was not onely of such efficacy, in taking and catching it one of another, either men or women: but it extended further, even in the apparent view of many, that the cloathes, or anything else, wherein one died of that disease, being toucht, or lyen on by any beast, farre from the kind or quality of man, they did not onely contaminate and infect the said beast, were it Dogge, Cat, or any other; but also it died very soone after.
Mine owne eyes (as formerly I have said) among divers other, one day had evident experience heereof: for some poore ragged cloathes of linnen and wollen, torne from a wretched body dead of that disease, and hurled in the open streete; two Swine going by, and (according to their naturall inclination) seeking for foode on every dunghill, tossed and tumbled the cloaths with their snouts, rubbing their heads likewise upon them; and immediately, each turning twice or thrice about, they both fell downe dead on the saide cloathes, as being fully infected with the contagion of them: which accident, and other the like, if not far greater, begat divers feares and imaginations in them that beheld them, all tending to a most inhumane and uncharitable end; namely, to flie thence from the sicke, and touching any thing of theirs, by which meanes they thought their health should be safely warranted.
Some there were, who considered with themselves, that living soberly, with abstinence from all superfluity; it would be a sufficient resistance against all hurtfull accidents. So combining themselves in a sociable manner, they lived as separatists from all other company, being shut up in such houses, where no sicke body should be neere them. And there, for their more security, they used delicate viands and excellent wines, avoiding luxurie, and refusing speech to one another, not looking forth at the windowes, to heare no cries of dying people, or see any coarses carried to buriall; but having musicall instruments, lived there in all possible pleasure. Others, were of a contrary opinion, who avouched, that there was no other physicke more certaine, for a disease so desperate, then to drinke hard, be merry among themselves, singing continually, walking every where, and satisfying their appetites with whatsoever they desired, laughing, and mocking at every mournefull accident, and so they vowed to spend day and night: for now they would goe to one Taverne, then to another, living without any rule or measure; which they might very easily doe, because every one of them, (as if he were to live no longer in this World) had even forsaken all things that hee had. By meanes whereof, the most part of the houses were become common, and all strangers, might do the like (if they pleased to adventure it) even as boldly as the Lord or owner, without any let or contradiction.
Yet in all this their beastly behaviour, they were wise enough, to shun (so much as they might) the weake and sickly: In misery and affliction of our City, the venerable authority of the Lawes, as well divine as humane, was even destroyed, as it were, through want of the lawfull Ministers of them. For they being all dead, or lying sicke with the rest, or else lived so solitary, in such great necessity of servants and attendants, as they could not execute any office, whereby it was lawfull for every one to do as he listed.
Betweene these two rehearsed extremities of life, there were other of a more moderate temper, not being so daintily dieted as the first, nor drinking so dissolutely as the second; but used all things sufficient for their appetites, and without shutting up themselves, walked abroad, some carrying sweete nosegayes of flowers in their hands; others odoriferous herbes, and others divers kinds of spiceries, holding them to their noses, and thinking them most comfortable for the braine, because the ayre seemed to be much infected by the noysome smell of dead carkases, and other hurtfull savours. Some other there were also of more inhumane minde (howbeit peradventure it might be the surest) saying, that there was no better physicke against the pestilence, nor yet so good, as to flie away from it, which argument mainely moving them, and caring for no body but themselves, very many, both men and women, forsooke the City, their owne houses, their Parents, Kindred, Friends, and Goods, flying to other mens dwellings else-where. As if the wrath of God, in punnishing the sinnes of men with this plague, would fall heavily upon none, but such as were enclosed within the City wals; or else perswading themselves, that not any should there bee left alive, but that the finall ending of all things was come.
Now albeit these persons in their diversity of opinions died not all, so undoubtedly they did not all escape; but many among them becomming sicke, and making a generall example of their flight and folly, among them that could not stirre out of their beds, they languished more perplexedly then the other did. Let us omit, that one Citizen fled after another, and one neighbour had not any care of another, Parents nor kinred never visiting them, but utterly they were forsaken on all sides: this tribulation pierced into the hearts of men, and with such a dreadfull terrour, that one Brother forsooke another, the Unkle the Nephew, the Sister the Brother, and the Wife her Husband: nay, a matter much greater, and almost incredible; Fathers and Mothers fled away from their owne Children, even as if they had no way appertained to them. In regard whereof, it could be no otherwise, but that a countlesse multitude of men and women fell sicke; finding no charity among their friends, except a very few, and subject to the avarice of servants, who attended them constrainedly, (for great and unreasonable wages) yet few of those attendants to be found any where too. And they were men or women but of base condition, as also of groser understanding, who never before had served in any such necessities, nor indeed were any way else to be imployed; but to give the sicke person such things as hee called for, or to awaite the houre of his death; in the performance of which service, oftentimes for gaine, they lost their owne lives.
In this extreame calamity, the sicke being thus forsaken of neighbors, kinred, and friends, standing also in such need of servants; a custome came up among them, never heard of before, that there was not any woman, how noble, young, or faire soever shee was, but falling sicke, shee must of necessity have a man to attend her, were hee young or otherwise, respect of shame or modesty no way prevailing, but all parts of her body must be discovered to him, which (in the like urgency) was not to be seene by any but women: whereon ensued afterward, that upon the parties healing and recovery, it was the occasion of further dishonesty, which many being more modestly curious of, refused such disgracefull attending, chusing rather to die, then by such helpe to bee healed. In regard whereof, as well through the want of convenient remedies, (which the sicke by no meanes could attaine unto) as also the violence of the contagion, the multitude of them that died night and day, was so great, that it was a dreadfull sight to behold, and as much to heare spoken of. So that meere necessity (among them that remained living) begat new behaviours, quite contrary to all which had beene in former times, and frequently used among the City Inhabitants.
The custome of precedent dayes (as now againe it is) was, that women, kinred, neighbours, and friends, would meete together at the deceased parties house, and there, with them that were of neerest alliance, expresse their hearts sorrow for their friends losse. If not thus, they would assemble before the doore, with many of the best Cittizens and kindred, and (according to the quality of the deceased) the Cleargy met there likewise, and the dead body was carried (in comely manner) on mens shoulders, with funerall pompe of Torch light, and singing, to the Church appointed by the deceased. But these seemely orders, after that the fury of the pestilence began to encrease, they in like manner altogether ceased, and other new customes came in their place; because not onely people died, without having any women about them, but infinites also past out of this life, not having any witnesse, how, when, or in what manner they departed. So that few or none there were, to deliver outward shew of sorrow and grieving: but insteed thereof, divers declared idle joy and rejoycing, a use soone learned of immodest women, having put off all feminine compassion, yea, or regard of their owne welfare.
Very few also would accompany the body to the grave, and they not any of the Neighbours, although it had beene an honourable Citizen, but onely the meanest kinde of people, such as were grave-makers, coffin-bearers, or the like, that did these services onely for money, and the beere being mounted on their shoulders, in all hast they would runne away with it, not perhaps to the Church appointed by the dead, but to the neerest at hand, having some foure or sixe poore Priests following, with lights or no lights, and those of the silliest; short service being said at the buriall, and the body unreverently throwne into the first open grave they found. Such was the pittifull misery of poore people, and divers, who were of better condition, as it was most lamentable to behold; because the greater number of them, under hope of healing, or compelled by poverty, kept still within their house weake and faint, thousands falling sicke daily, and having no helpe, or being succoured any way with foode or physicke, all of them died, few or none escaping.
Great store there were, that died in the streetes by day or night, and many more beside, although they died in their houses; yet first they made it knowne to their neighbours, that their lives perished, rather by the noysome smell of dead and putrified bodies, then by any violence of the disease in themselves. So that of these and the rest, dying in this manner every where, the neighbours observed one course of behaviour, (moved thereto no lesse by feare, that the smell and corruption of dead bodies should harme them, then charitable respect of the dead) that themselves when they could, or being assisted by some bearers of coarses, when they were able to procure them, would hale the bodies (already dead) out of their houses, laying them before their doores, where such as passed by, especially in the mornings, might see them lying in no meane numbers. Afterward, Bieres were brought thither, and such as might not have the helpe of Bieres, were glad to lay them on tables; and Bieres have bin observed, not onely to be charged with two or three dead bodies at once, but many times it was seene also, that the wife with the husband, two or three Brethren together; yea, the Father and the Mother, have thus beene carried along to the grave upon one Biere.
Moreover, oftentimes it hath beene seene, that when two Priests went with one Crosse to fetch the body; there would follow (behind) three or foure bearers with their Bieres, and when the Priests intended the buriall but of one body, sixe or eight more have made up the advantage, and yet none of them being attended by any seemly company, lights, teares, or the very least decencie, but it plainly appeared, that the very like account was then made of Men or Women, as if they had bene Dogges or Swine. Wherein might manifestly bee noted, that that which the naturall course of things could not shew to the wise, with rare and little losse, to wit, the patient support of miseries and misfortunes, even in their greatest height: not onely the wise might now learne, but also the very simplest people; and in such sort, that they should alwaies bee prepared against all infelicities whatsoever.
Hallowed ground could not now suffice, for the great multitude of dead bodies, which were daily brought to every Church in the City, and every houre in the day; neither could the bodies have proper place of buriall, according to our ancient custome: wherefore, after that the Churches and Church-yards were filled, they were constrained to make use of great deepe ditches, wherein they were buried by hundreds at once, ranking dead bodies along in graves, as Merchandizes are laide along in ships, covering each after other with a small quantity of earth, and so they filled at last up the whole ditch to the brim.
Now, because I would wander no further in everie particularity, concerning the miseries happening in our Citie: I tell you, that extremities running on in such manner as you have heard, little lesse spare was made in the Villages round about; wherein (setting aside enclosed Castles which were now filled like to small Cities) poore Labourers and Husband-men, with their whole Families, dyed most miserably in outhouses, yea, and in the open fieldes also; without any assistance of physicke, or helpe of servants; and likewise in the high-wayes, or their ploughed landes, by day or night indifferently, yet not as men, but like brute beasts.
By meanes whereof, they became lazie and slothfull in their dayly endevours, even like to our Citizens; not minding or medling with their wonted affaires: but, as a waiting for death every houre, imployed all their paines, not in caring any way for themselves, their cattle, or gathering the fruits of the earth, or any of their accustomed labours; but rather wasted and consumed, even such as were for their instant sustenance. Whereupon, it fell so out, that their Oxen, Asses, Sheepe, and Goates, their Swine, Pullen, yea their verie Dogges, the truest and faithfullest servants to men, being beaten and banished from their houses, went wildly wandring abroad in the fields, where the Corne grew still on the ground without gathering, or being so much as reapt or cut. Many of the foresaid beasts (as endued with reason) after they had pastured themselves in the day time, would returne full fed at night home to their houses, without any government of Heardsmen, or any other.
How many faire Palaces! How many goodly Houses! How many noble habitations, filled before with families of Lords and Ladies, were then to be seene emptie, without any one there dwelling, except some silly servant? How many Kindreds, worthy of memory! How many great inheritances! And what plenty of riches; were left without any true successours? How many good men! How many woorthy Women! How many valiant and comely young men, whom none but Galen, Hippocrates, and Aeesculapius[3] (if they were living) could have bene reputed any way unhealthfull; were seene to dine at morning with their Parents, Friends, and familiar confederates, and went to sup in another world with their Predecessors?
It is no meane breach to my braine, to make repetition of so many miseries; wherefore, being willing to part with them as easily as I may: I say that our Citie being in this case, voide of inhabitants, it came to passe (as afterward I understoode by some of good credite) that in the venerable Church of S. Marie la Neufue[2], on a Tuesday morning, there being then no other person, after the hearing of divine Service, in mourning habits (as the season required) returned thence seven discrete young Gentlewomen, all allyed together, either by friendship, neighbor-hood, or parentage. She among them that was most entred into yeares, exceeded not eight and twenty; and the yongest was no lesse then eighteene; being of Noble descent, faire forme, adorned with exquisite behaviour, and gracious modesty.
Their names I could report, if just occasion did not forbid it, in regard of the occasions following by them related, and because times heereafter shall not taxe them with reproofe; the lawes of pleasure being more straited now adayes (for the matters before revealed) then at that time they were, not onely to their yeares but to many much riper. Neither will I likewise minister matter to rash heades (over-readie in censuring commendable life) any way to impaire the honestie of Ladies, by their idle detracting speeches. And therefore, to the end that what each of them saith, may be comprehended without confusion; I purpose to stile them by names, wholly agreeing, or (in part) conformable to their qualities. The first and most aged, we will name Pampinea; the second Fiametta; the third Philamena; the fourth Aemilia; the fift Lauretta; the sixt Neiphila; and the last we terme (not without occasion) Elissa, or Eliza. All of them being assembled at a corner of the Church, not by any deliberation formerly appointed, but meerely by accident, and sitting, as it were in a round ring: after divers sighs severelly delivered, they conferred on sundry matters answerable to the sad qualitie of the time, and within a while after, Madam Pampinea began in this manner.
Faire Ladies, you may (no doubt as well as I) have often heard, that no injury is offered to any one, by such as make use but of their owne right. It is a thing naturall for everie one which is borne in this World, to aide, conserve, and defend her life so long as shee can; and this right hath bene so powerfully permitted, that although it hath sometimes happened, that (to defend themselves) men have beene slaine without any offence: yet Lawes have allowed it to be so, in whose solicitude lieth the best living of all mortals. How much more honest and just is it then for us, and for every other well-disposed person, to seeke for (without wronging any) and to practise all remedies that wee can, for the conservation of our lives? When I well consider, what we have heere done this morning, and many other already past (remembring (withall) what likewise is proper and convenient for us:) I conceive (as all you may do the like) that everie one of us hath a due respect of her selfe, and then I mervaile not, but rather am much amazed (knowing none of us to be deprived of a Womans best judgement) that wee seeke not after some remedies for our selves, against that, which everie one among us, ought (in reason) to feare.
