A recent study of Boccaccio’s other works referred to theDecameronas “possibly the most enigmatic text in continental medieval fiction, richly difficult to fathom.”¹ It has been called escapist and realistic, nostalgic and historical, utterly amoral, godless and profoundly moral, deeply Christian. It has been read as a book permeated by medieval naturalism and as one that warns against the dangers of concupiscence, as a purely aesthetic text and as a paean to worldly intelligence, as pure entertainment and as national epic, the “chanson de gesteof the paladins of a mercantile world.” Lately interest has focused on the...

The fourteenth century in Italy was a period of social, philosophical and economic crisis. New classes, new institutions, new socio-political values and new ideas on the universe were emerging everywhere in the aftermath of phenomenal changes in Europe, such as the growth of the towns, the emergence of national monarchies in some countries and the overthrow of Boniface VIII. William of Occam’s work was calling new attention to Nominalism, and Marsilius of Padova’s treatiseDefensor Pacis(1324) was spreading the revolutionary idea that the previous relationship between Church and state should perhaps be reversed. Tensions between old and new forms...

The much discussed problem of whether theDecameronis religious, areligious, or anti-religious can also be approached from an anthropological point of view.¹ There can be no doubt that many ecclesiastic customs come off very badly at Boccaccio’s hands, but it could be argued that they come off no better at Dante’s, whose faith has never for a moment been questioned. The difference lies in the fact that where theDivine Comedyboils over with honest indignation at corrupt clerical practices while belief in Church dogmas and sacraments is openly stated, and the Church itself as an institution is fully...

The description of the plague that opens what may be called theDecameronproper is very carefully constructed and rhetorically elegant. It was probably modeled either on Thucydides (from Lucretius via Macrobius) or on Paolo Diacono (with overtones of Isidore of Seville), in spite of the realism of the facts, which are not so different from the ones given by those of Boccaccio’s contemporaries who, like him, had witnessed the epidemic.¹ The second of the two questions that arise from the long and prominent description of disaster at the beginning of a self-avowedly “happy” book, which is said to be...

There are semiotic systems within theDecameron cornicethat are carefully structured s-codes, deliberately designed as sign-functions by the author, and others that were not so designed but that reflect the changing cultural models of the time. The former provide evidence about Boccaccio’s purpose in writing the book and about its function as an aesthetic text. They are thus worth studying both for their message and from the point of view of how narrative systems communicate. The latter should be examined as indications and explanations of the tension in theDecameronbetween traditional and “revolutionary” values, between a past that...

The five concentric “worlds” of theDecameronshown in Chapter IV can also be presented as a series of five “frames,” as in the diagram on the following page. The elaborate fivefold structure has a double function. It not only encloses the stories in such a way as to emphasize their value but also serves, in accordance with a long and continuing literary tradition, to guard their author from possible accusations of sedition against the official morals and religion of the times.² The series of frames also insulates the reader from the material contained in the stories, which at times...

The rich ambiguousness of theDecameronis perhaps the only quality about which critics will not continue to argue. All texts are the offspring of the worlds in which they are born and into which they are reborn each time they are read. By their very nature as texts, their communication is governed both by the sender and by the receiver. Senders and receivers are in turn influenced by their cultural models. A text born in a transitional period and read over six hundred years later, during what may well prove to be another transitional crisis, therefore offers doubly interesting...