Where to Buy
Affiliate links coming soon. Purchases will help support this project.
Read / Listen Free
Decameron
7.5Giovanni Boccaccio
Boccaccio's hundred tales told during the plague — the foundation of the European novella tradition, mined by Chaucer and Shakespeare and still being retold today.
GBM Assessment (Score: 7.5/10)
Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron is a collection of one hundred tales told by ten young people who have fled plague-stricken Florence, and it stands as the foundation of the European novella tradition. Its stories served as a source for both Shakespeare and Chaucer, and its frank treatment of human desire and social comedy set the tone for centuries of prose fiction.
Placed against the backdrop of the Black Death of 1348, the Decameron presents its tales as a refuge from the horror of the plague, with ten narrators fleeing Florence to tell stories of love, wit, and folly. The collection served as a major source for Shakespeare and influenced Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1971 film adaptation brought the work to modern audiences, and it is recognized as a foundational work of European prose fiction.
The High & Late Middle Ages, c. 1274-1440
The medieval synthesis peaks and shatters. Aquinas completes the Summa Theologica. Marco Polo reaches China. Then catastrophe: the Black Death kills a third of Europe (1347-1351). Boccaccio's Decameron frames its tales against the plague. Chaucer gives English literature its first masterwork. Luo Guanzhong novelizes China's Three Kingdoms era. In this same tumultuous period, someone creates the Voynich Manuscript—a 240-page illustrated codex in an undeciphered script that remains one of history's greatest unsolved mysteries. The Great Western Schism splits the papacy. The Hundred Years' War ravages France. Yet from this upheaval, the Renaissance begins to stir.
Awards & Adaptations
Pasolini film (1971). Foundation of prose fiction.
Recommended Edition
J.M. Rigg (1903); J. Payne (1886)
