The Decameron

What is this book about?

During the Black Death of 1348, ten young Florentines — seven women and three men — flee the plague for a country villa and agree to tell one story each per day, making a hundred in ten days. Their tales run from kings and monks to merchants and peasants, and take in love, wit, trickery, and fortune, all set against the frame of plague and death. Boccaccio uses this frame structure to gather everyday life and human appetite into a single book.

Why read it?

It is often called the opening work of Renaissance humanism: after centuries of church preaching on abstinence, Boccaccio puts human desire, wit, and worldly life back on the page, and makes monks and clerics the sharpest butt of the joke. You read it not only for a hundred stories but to watch European literature look at human beings through secular eyes for the first time.

Core Ideas

• It celebrates human nature, reason, and worldly love, treating natural desire and pleasure as legitimate.
• It satirizes the corruption and hypocrisy of monks and the church: the more a setting preaches abstinence, the more vice it breeds.
• It tells its tales with lively humour, and the laughter points straight at the pretence of ascetic preaching.
• Plague and death shadow the whole book, and the act of storytelling becomes a reassertion of life.

What questions does this book try to answer?

• Facing death and church control, how can people reassert the joy and dignity of life?
• Why does a setting that preaches abstinence and piety most easily breed corruption and hypocrisy?

Who should read it?

For readers interested in European literary history and Renaissance thought, and for anyone curious about the early shape of the novel and the social mood at the turn from the Middle Ages to modernity. Many tales are bawdy and satirical, so you should be comfortable with the bluntness of its age.

How to Read It

The whole book uses lively, humorous stories to expose one reality: the more a setting preaches abstinence, the more corruption it breeds. Watch its frame structure — ten young people gather because of plague, and the telling of stories is itself an answer to death. It dates to the mid-fourteenth century. Among Chinese versions, the Fang Ping–Wang Keyi and Wang Yongnian translations are standard; G. H. McWilliam's Penguin Classics translation is a good English one. At nearly a thousand pages, start with the love and trickery of Days Two and Seven.