Section II: The Middle Ages

Dr. Susan Dodd, Associate Director, Foundation Year Program; Associate Professor of Humanities

...the Decameron shows that, unleashed from the ordinary by the extreme suffering of the plague, and salved by the release from fear, small comforts, and the glory of nature, people rediscover a divinity that reveals itself only when human beings gather together, creatively, to tell stories.

Every time, most gracious ladies, that I reflect on how natural feelings of pity are for you, I recognize that you will judge this work to have a wearisomely depressing beginning. What it thrusts before you is a painful re-evocation of the carnage caused by the recent plague, which cannot but be deeply hurtful and upsetting to everyone who witnessed the events or learned about them indirectly. But I don’t want this to frighten you from reading any further, as if you were bound to be sighing and weeping all through the book. As you read this horrible opening, consider yourselves travellers climbing a steep, rough path up a mountain, behind which is hidden a delightful plain; it proves all the more pleasurable the harder the climb and the descent that follows.

If the extreme limit of happiness is pain, wretchedness is similarly brought to an end by the onset of joy. This brief distress (I say brief, because it takes up only a few pages) will be quickly followed by sweetness and pleasure, as I promised initially, but which you might not expect from an opening of this sort. And truly, if I could have decently led you where I want by some other path than the unpleasant one that this will be, I would have done so. But without recalling those

events, it would have been impossible to explain what lay behind what you will be reading later. So it is from a sense of necessity that I bring myself to write about them. (Boccaccio, Giovanni. Tales from the Decameron (Penguin Classics) (pp. 9-10). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.)

The narrator of Boccaccio’s Decameron draws his lady-readers in by promising to move them through the “brief distress” of a “painful reevocation of the carnage caused by the recent plague” into a “sweetness and pleasure” that would have been unattainable by any other path. He tells us that he is compelled by “a sense of necessity” to begin his stories of love, revenge, and reversal of fortunes with a full (and some commentators say exaggerated) account of Florence as it was ravaged by the Black Death in 1384. “The plague brought out the best and the worst in everyone” the narrator explains, and so the youth set out to their villas to escape fear, death, and equally importantly, the existential and moral squalor brought on by the plague, in order to find refuge in a fanciful world of their own creation. The country frees the imagination from the mortal fear and moral oppression:

‘There you can listen to the birds singing and contemplate the changing greens of the hills and plains and the cornfields rippling like the sea, with all the different kinds of trees around you and the open sky above. Though heaven may be angry with us, it will not deny us its eternal beauties…’ (Boccaccio, Giovanni. Tales from the Decameron (Penguin Classics) (pp. 20-21). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.)

But before we can go to the country with these “highly sensible young person[s] of noble birth, lovely looking, stylish and charmingly moral”, we have to hear the grim details of the plague. The narrator explains, “No expertise or human measures had any effect. Specially appointed officials made sure the city was cleansed of all refuse, anyone sick was refused entry, and advice was given in plenty about how best to stay healthy. Humble supplications to God to show mercy were repeatedly made by the pious, who organized processions and so on. But it was all fruitless: in the early spring of the year mentioned, the ravages of the plague began to be horribly evident and in a monstrous way.” Having passed through this terrible demonstration of humanity’s helplessness before the forces of nature, we will be prepared for the “sweetness and pleasure” of the stories, newly able “to enjoy all the fun and merriment and pleasure we are capable of, without ever going beyond the limits of what our reason tells us.”

The stories they share are their respite from the horrors of the plague: ten stories on each of ten days (with a couple days off for the sabbath and chores). The resulting Decameron is a playful, varied, and scandalous collection that tells of very earthly loves and conflicts. Though the 7 ladies and 3 young men should not, by the conventions of the day, wander around to villas together in such informal associations, it is crucial that the real transgressions take place in the stories, not in their actions. If the Decameron has any “moral” it is that social propriety collapses as normal physical boundaries break down with the dead

infiltrating the spaces of the living, and the illness making no social distinctions. More fundamental again, the Decameron shows that, unleashed from the ordinary by the extreme suffering of the plague, and salved by the release from fear, small comforts, and the glory of nature, people rediscover a divinity that reveals itself only when human beings gather together, creatively, to tell stories.