The Decameron

Q. What is The Decameron

A. The Decameron is a collection of tales from many sources collated by the Florentine Giovanni Boccaccio. Thought to have been written down over many years, they were put together in their definitive form between 1349 and 1351.

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Q. Who was Boccaccio

A. Boccaccio (1313-75) was a writer and humanist. Born in or near Florence, the son of a Florentine merchant, he is one of those historical and cultural figures whose influence is incalculable. He was a friend of Petrarch, wrote and lectured on Dante, and the stories collected in The Decameron fed multitudinous streams of future literature.

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Following a cultivated upbringing within sophisticated, Neapolitan circles, Boccaccio returned to his native Florence in the 1340s, just in time to witness the horror of the Black Death. The epidemic is estimated to have wiped out a third of the population of Europe, but it provided the inspiration for The Decameron, probably the world's most famous - and influential - collection of short stories.

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Q. So what are the stories in The Decameron about

A. The 100 tales contained in The Decameron were brought together in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death. The pretext for the compendium is a fictional encounter in a Florentine church between seven attractive young women and three gallant young men. They resolve to escape the plague by decamping to the idyllic hilltop retreat of Fiesole, just outside Florence. To pass the time it is suggested that, over a ten-day period, each member of the group tells a tale - hence decameron, Boccaccio's own Greek compound, meaning 'ten days'.

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Q. Why is it so important

A. The work exerted a huge influence on European literature, as evidenced, for example, in the creation of Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales were written in the tradition of The Decameron, but the work also continued to provide inspiration on the work of later poets, such as Shakespeare, Dryden, Keats, Longfellow and Tennyson.

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Q. Any examples of this influence

A. The tales of 'Bernab� of Genoa' and 'Gillette of Narbonne' provided Shakespeare with the plots of Cymbeline and All's Well That Ends Well respectively. 'Isabella and the Pot of Basil' became a famous narrative poem by Keats, whilst 'A Garden in January' provided the basis for Chaucer's 'Franklin's Tale'.

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Although Chaucer never mentions Boccaccio by name, he probably encountered Boccaccio in translation, and the Italian's earlier work 'Teseida' was recast by Chaucer as the 'Knight's Tale', whilst his 'Filostrato' was an important early source of the Troilus and Cressida story, used both by Chaucer and, later, Shakespeare.

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For more on The Decameron go to

http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/dweb.shtml

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By Simon Smith