Giovanni Boccaccio: The Decameron

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The excerpted document is the introduction to the first of the ten days that compose the Decameron. It constitutes the realistic narrative frame that encloses the narrators' tales and has the function of making their escape from the city a plausible event. The tragedy of the plague is instrumental in showing a society that has lost all solidarity and civic sense among its members. The disorder of the plague is therefore the narrative pretext for the narrators' physical escape from the city and their storytelling, which represents a parallel, moral escape. The plague is represented as a moment of transgression of the common rules that constituted the bases of society. Throughout the text, Boccaccio lists the most significant of these transgressions: the decline of the sense of ownership and private property, the challenge to the authority of laws and the prevailing of individual strength, the disruption of family ties and moral codes, the degradation of customs and rites usually connected to social status (as exemplified by funerals and burials). As an example of the breaching of moral codes, Boccaccio remarkably chooses the fact that, in the face of the calamity, noble and beautiful women accede to being looked after and cured by men of whatever age and social condition. This points to a major theme of the oeuvre as a whole: the changing interactions between the sexes in the emerging mercantile society of the late Middle Ages.

The plague creates a legal and moral void in which people do not know how to behave. In the text Boccaccio lists several opposing reactions to the pestilence: groups of people began to lead a secluded and sober life, while others gave free rein to their most basic instincts and made excesses the norm. Between these two extremes, there were those who kept “a middle course” and those who went into voluntary exile. The epidemic is portrayed as freeing individuals from all social constraints, yet this freedom is far from liberating. Although the plague shows no respect for aristocracy, wealth, or beauty, it is all the more devastating against those who already lead a miserable existence. Boccaccio thus uses the plague to show how a historical event brought him to create a literary model of life—those experienced by the ten narrators, whose rules and social conventions are shaped by the pleasures of storytelling. Like the majority of the other tales, the introduction to the first day thus represents a mixture of historical verisimilitude and literary imagination.