"Giovanni Boccaccio's work taught citizens how to maintain mental
wellbeing in times of epidemics and isolation." - The New Statesman.
In 1348 the plague struck Florence with devastating fury--killing three
quarters of its population. Ten young men and women fled the
plague-ridden city to a deserted villa in the countryside. To pass the
evenings and to remember their former lives, each member of the party
told a story illustrating the set theme of the night. And so, we have
these one hundred wonderfully vivid stories. These are tales of love,
passion, jealousy, and pride as well as of profit and loss. Ribaldry,
licentiousness, farce, trickery and deceit are a constant thread, but
with a moral undercurrent. Boccaccio's stories are miniatures which give
us a window onto life at the time and depict a society on the cusp of
change, with the renaissance virtues of quick-wittedness, intelligence
and sophistication trumping the monastic and feudal virtues of piety and
loyalty.
The Decameron is a masterpiece of early Italian prose, and its tales
have inspired many subsequent writers, most famously Chaucer and
Shakespeare but also Molière, Tennyson, Keats, Longfellow and Shelley.
Even Martin Luther had occasion to repurpose one of Boccaccio's stories.
About the Author: Giovanni Boccaccio (1313 - 1375) was a medieval
Italian writer and an important early humanist. Along with Petrarch and
Dante, he is regarded as one of the fathers of the Italian language. In
contrast to the formulaic approach of his medieval contemporaries,
Boccaccio uses realistic dialogue and complex plots which were unusual
at the time. His best-known work after The Decameron is On Famous
Women, the first collection devoted exclusively to biographies of women
in Western literature.
About the Translator: John Payne was a poet and translator, who is
especially remembered for his translations of The Decameron, The
Arabian Nights and the Diwan Hafez.
