Decameron, The

Decameron, The (Greek, “ten days”, or “ten days' work”), collection of stories written by Giovanni Boccaccio between 1348 and 1353 in Italian prose and now accepted as his major work. It is considered to be a masterpiece of Italian prose, and its stories influenced countless writers in the centuries that followed.

The Decameron (Il Decamerone in Italian) is best known for its obscene and blasphemous content, and for this reason a complete and unexpurgated English version was not available until the beginning of this century. Although the text was banned by the Papal Index of 1557, it had been in wide circulation among the Italian merchant classes, which ensured that it reached a wider audience in the rest of Europe, who, as a consequence of the Reformation, were more open to its secular themes. However, in his native Italy, Boccaccio remained more famous for his scholarly works in Latin, encouraged by his friend and contemporary, Petrarch, than for The Decameron.

The Decameron is a series of 100 short stories, or novelle, narrated over ten days, by a group of ten young Florentine noblemen and noblewomen. This group, or brigata (a party of people who have come together principally for enjoyment), is made up of three men and seven women who are all either related or, in the case of the men, in love with one of the women. They have decided to flee a plague-stricken Florence and retreat to a country villa two miles outside the confines of the city. In this way they hope to escape both the life-threatening physical effects of the plague and the pernicious moral effect of civic breakdown. Each member of the party takes it in turn to “rule” the group for one of the ten days, deciding the theme for the day's storytelling.

Boccaccio places his story in a contemporary context by naming his narrators (with pseudonyms, so he says, to protect their identity), and giving graphic descriptions of the events and consequences of the Great Plague, which reached Florence in 1348, in his introduction to Day I. Boccaccio sets out his aims and proposed readership in both his preface and epilogue, asserting that the stories are intended to provide comfort to lovesick women, who have little opportunity to divert themselves either outside their own household or with activities other than sewing and spinning. Despite the themes given for each day, the stories contain a wide range of disparate elements, from the false confessions of Ser Cepperello (Day I, story 1), to the noble actions of the King of Sicily, who ensures the honourable marriage of a grocer's daughter who has fallen in love with him, promising to remain her faithful knight (Day X, story 7).

Boccaccio used and adapted novellas and exemplum (stories with a moral point or example) which were already in circulation, some of which he was known to have written himself prior to bringing them together in The Decameron. For instance, the story of Madonna Dianora and Messer Ansaldo, which appears as the fifth story in Day X, was the fourth narrative in the fourth book of Boccaccio's Filocolo, itself an adaptation of the French romance, Fleur et Blanchflor, and which is in turn used by Geoffrey Chaucer as the basis of “The Franklin's Tale” in The Canterbury Tales.