The Decameron — Commentary

In brief

In the spring of 1348 the Black Death reaches Florence. On a Tuesday morning seven young women meet in the church of Santa Maria Novella, and with three young men who happen in, they decide to leave. In a succession of country villas they set up a small government: each day a new king or queen sets a theme, and each of the ten tells one story. A hundred stories and about a fortnight later, they go back to the city.

Most people know the book as a byword for dirty stories, and plenty of them are dirty. It is more interesting as a book about what is left after a society has collapsed, and the answer it gives is wit, nerve and the pleasure of talking well. Its author, Giovanni Boccaccio, gave it a subtitle: “Surnamed Prince Galahalt”. That is the go-between Francesca blames in Dante’s fifth canto, and the book offers itself knowingly as one more.

The argument

Boccaccio’s people are governed by Fortune, by appetite and by their own intelligence, and only the last is theirs. The first story sets the terms. Ciappelletto, by every account the worst man alive, tells a holy friar a pack of lies on his deathbed and is venerated: people “styled and yet style him Saint Ciappelletto” (Day 1, story 1). Two stories later Melchizedek the Jew is asked by Saladin which of three faiths is true and tells a tale of three identical rings. On the three laws, he says, “even as of the rings, the question yet pendeth” (Day 1, story 3).

The sexual comedy belongs to the same argument. Adult appetite is treated as a natural force, and the sin that gets punished is hypocrisy. Masetto pretends to be mute to get work as a gardener in a convent, and the nuns all take advantage of it (Day 3, story 1). Madam Filippa of Prato, caught with her lover and facing a law that burns adulteresses, argues that the law is void, since “not only did no woman yield consent thereunto”. She then asks what she should have done with what her husband never wanted, the crowd laughs and the statute is changed (Day 6, story 7). On the seventh day wives deceive husbands for ten stories, and the reader is meant to applaud.

It is not a libertine’s manifesto. On the fourth day lovers are killed by fathers and brothers. Ghismonda receives her lover’s heart in a bowl of gold from her father (Day 4, story 1), and Lisabetta buries her lover’s head in a pot of basil (Day 4, story 5). Those are among the book’s best stories.

The plague

The opening is the reason the book is more than an anthology. Boccaccio warns his “gracious ladies” that the start will be like “a rugged and steep mountain” (Day 1), and it is. He describes the boils, the speed and the failure of doctors. Rags from a plague victim are thrown into the street, “two hogs came up to them”, and in a little while both fall dead.

What he is recording is the death of obligation. Some retreat, some riot, some flee. Then “brother forsook brother”, and worse, “fathers and mothers refused to visit or tend their very children”. Burial rites collapse until “folk recked no more of men that died than nowadays they would of goats”. He gives a figure, “upward of an hundred thousand human beings”, which is surely too high, and he half concedes that the city had not been thought to hold so many. It is not certain he was there. His stepmother died in the epidemic, and his father in 1349.

Every bond the stories play with, between husband and wife, parent and child, priest and flock, has just been shown broken. The company’s rules and dancing are a deliberate reconstruction. At the close the last king, Pamfilo, proudly reports that he has seen “no act, no word, in fine nothing blameworthy”, and they go home (Day 10). The stories are licentious; the people who tell them are not.

The shape of the book

There are ten days of ten stories, with a proem, an introduction to the fourth day, and a conclusion in the author’s voice. Each day ends in a song. Fridays and Saturdays are kept free, so the telling covers “fifteen days” away.

Day 1. Free topic under Pampinea, with the plague before it.
Day 2. Fortune, like Andreuccio’s one night in Naples (story 5).
Day 3. Things gained by diligence, including Gillette, the source of All’s Well That Ends Well (story 9).
Day 4. Loves with unhappy endings, the theme set by Filostrato.
Day 5. Lovers who come through. Federigo serves up his only falcon to the lady he loves (story 9).
Day 6. Witty replies. Fra Cipolla, in Boccaccio’s Certaldo, finds coals where his angel’s feather should be and talks his way out (story 10).
Day 7 and Day 8. Tricks, by wives on husbands, then by anyone on anyone, including Calandrino’s hunt for a magic stone (Day 8, story 3).
Day 9. Free again, under Emilia.
Day 10. Generosity and magnificence, ending in Griselda.

Readers have seen an ascent from the vice of Ciappelletto to the virtue of Griselda. The ending resists it.

The voice

Boccaccio built a new Italian prose out of Cicero’s long periods and the street’s quick talk. He claims to write for women in love, and the proem opens modestly: “A kindly thing it is to have compassion of the afflicted”.

Attacked, he turns sharp. The introduction to the fourth day answers critics who say he likes women too much with a story: a hermit’s son, eighteen and raised away from the world, sees women for the first time and is told, “They are called green geese” (Day 4). He wants one to take home. The conclusion goes further, mocking “squeamish hypocritical prudes, who weigh words rather than deeds”, and claims a painter’s licence: “no less liberty should be accorded to my pen than is conceded to the brush of the limner” (Conclusion). Chaucer ends his book by revoking it; Boccaccio ends by defending his.

Griselda

The last story is the problem. The Marquess of Saluzzo marries a poor villager and tests her. He takes her children and lets her believe they have been killed, then repudiates her and sends her home in her shift. She accepts all of it, and at last he restores her. Dioneo, the book’s licensed joker, tells it, and announces it as “not an act of magnificence, but a monstrous folly” (Day 10, story 10). He ends by asking who but Griselda could have borne “barbarous and unheard proofs”, and suggests that Gualtieri deserved a wife who would have gone off with someone else.

That framing did not survive. Petrarch read the story late in life, translated it into Latin as a parable of a soul’s patience before God, and sent it to Boccaccio. Most European versions came from his Latin, including Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, and his version loses Dioneo’s disgust. The company, Boccaccio notes, divided over it, “some inclining to one side and some to another”. I think the book intends that: it ends on a disagreement, not a moral.

The ten narrators

The women are between eighteen and twenty-eight, and the men are at least twenty-five. Boccaccio says he has changed their names to protect them, “the laws of disport being nowadays somewhat straitened”. They are lightly drawn, though some have edges.

Pampinea

The eldest, “her of ripest age”, proposes the flight and rules the first day.

Fiammetta, Filomena, Emilia, Lauretta, Neifile, Elisa

Fiammetta bears the name Boccaccio gives his beloved in earlier books. Filomena warns that women without men will fall out, and Elisa agrees: “men are the head of women”. It is uneasy to hear at the start of a book addressed to women. Each rules one day.

Dioneo

Dioneo asks for a privilege at the end of the first day: not to be bound by the theme, and “still the last to tell”. So the book has a licensed exception, with the last word on nine days of ten. On the seventh he reigns, and sets the tricks of wives.

Filostrato and Pamfilo

Filostrato sets the deadly fourth day. Pamfilo opens with Ciappelletto and closes as king of the tenth day.

How it was made

Giovanni Boccaccio was born in 1313, in Florence or near Certaldo, probably the illegitimate son of a merchant with the Bardi bank. Apprenticed in Naples, he disliked banking and began writing there. He wrote this book about 1349 to 1353, met Petrarch in 1350, and moved towards Latin learning. He died in 1375.

Many characters are real, like Giotto and Guido Cavalcanti (Day 6, story 5 and story 9).

Codex Hamilton 90, now in the Berlin State Library, was identified as Boccaccio’s autograph by Vittore Branca and Pier Giorgio Ricci in 1962. It dates from about 1370, nearly two decades after the first version, and includes drawings probably in his own hand. Before that discovery, editors relied on a copy made in 1384 by Francesco d’Amaretto Mannelli, now in Florence. Modern texts rest on a manuscript no one knew was the author’s for almost six centuries.

Censors

The book spread fast, especially among merchants. In 1373 Boccaccio wrote to Mainardo Cavalcanti, dismayed that the ladies of his household were reading his vernacular work; this is traditionally read as regret for the Decameron, though that is now questioned.

Pope Paul IV’s Index of 1559 listed the book. Readers wanted it anyway, and Pietro Bembo had made its prose the model for Italian. The Index of 1564 allowed a cleaned text, and in 1573 a Florentine committee, the Deputati, with Vincenzo Borghini prominent among them, published one. Its main remedy was to change status: priests, monks and nuns became lay people, so the Church was no longer the one mocked. Authorities found it too mild, and Lionardo Salviati produced a heavier revision in 1582.

English translators had their own methods. The 1620 English version, printed by Isaac Jaggard and attributed to John Florio, replaces the tenth story of the third day with a harmless tale of Danish royalty. Later versions cut it or left parts in other languages, a habit that reaches the free text linked here.

Readers and critics

Erich Auerbach’s chapter on Frate Alberto (Day 4, story 2) in Mimesis treats Boccaccio as a stylist who gave everyday life a new elegance but no tragic depth. Vittore Branca’s Boccaccio medievale (1956) resisted the old picture of a proto-Renaissance rebel, and called the book an epic of merchants, a medieval work with medieval roots. Millicent Marcus’s An Allegory of Form (1979) reads the frame as a commentary on storytelling.

Afterlives

Chaucer drew on it directly or indirectly. Shakespeare took All’s Well from the third day and the wager in Cymbeline ultimately from Day 2, story 9. Lessing’s Nathan the Wise (1779) takes up the three rings. Botticelli painted the Nastagio story (Day 5, story 8) in panels of 1483, and Keats turned Lisabetta into Isabella, or the Pot of Basil. Griselda went on alone, through Perrault and Vivaldi to Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (1982).

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film of 1971 moved the stories to Naples and into Neapolitan, cast the director himself as a pupil of Giotto, and won a Silver Bear at Berlin. It began his Trilogy of Life, with The Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights. In an essay of 1975, published after his murder that year, he renounced the trilogy, arguing that consumer culture had absorbed the sexual freedom it celebrated. Netflix’s comic series The Decameron followed in 2024.

How to read it

Know what the free text is. The link here is John Payne’s translation, printed privately for the Villon Society in 1886, in an undated American printing: Project Gutenberg’s best one-volume text, with all hundred stories. It is the first complete version made from the Italian. Payne’s English is the weak point. It is mock-medieval, “Certes” and “natheless” throughout, and J. M. Rigg called it “somewhat too archaic and stilted”.
Know the one gap. This printing leaves one passage, in the third day’s tenth story, in Italian. The Gutenberg transcriber has added Payne’s own 1886 English in a note, so nothing is lost.
Consider Rigg. J. M. Rigg’s 1903 translation (second volume) is also free and easier going. Its Gutenberg text gives that same passage in English, though reference accounts say his printed text left it in Italian. Avoid the 1620 version if you want Boccaccio, though it is fine Jacobean prose.
Buy a modern one if you can. G. H. McWilliam’s Penguin (1972, revised 1995) has the fullest notes on translation. Wayne Rebhorn’s Norton (2013) is the liveliest. Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella’s plain American version (a Norton selection in 1977, the whole book in 1982) is still reliable.
Read the frame. Do not skip the links between stories.
Start here. Read the plague, then the first story, Lisabetta, Federigo, Filippa, Fra Cipolla and Griselda.

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (about 1387 to 1400). The great English answer, which breaks the frame Boccaccio keeps intact.
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy (about 1320). The book Boccaccio lectured on and copied, and the hundred-part design he brought down to earth.
Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). The other great account of a city in plague, without the villa.