Jan-Maat's Reviews > The Decameron

The Decameron is a set of one hundred stories told to each other by a group of ten people, seven women and three men, over ten days. All these stories exist within one story which is about this group of people who come together in Florence during an outbreak of the plague and how they react to it - which is by going off into the surrounding countryside and recreating a kind of temporary Eden outside the ravages of the times. Beyond that there are the author's intentions and his defence of his work, which are a further frame to the whole work. Boccaccio sees stories as a form of education - in this case to teach his reader, which he largely assumed to be women since references to potential male readers are rare, about love. Love is a vague word in English, you can love to have tea with your chips, you might love your dog, or the colour yellow on a bedroom door. None of those feature in the Decameron, love here is of the sexual or occasionally of the romantic kind.

The new society of the ten people is based on affinity and trust. They live in common, although apparently using the estates of other people, and they benefit from the labour of servants so this is socially exclusive, unlike The Canterbury Tales in which people come from a mix of social backgrounds. The new society is time bound and intended from the first, like reading itself, to be a temporary respite from events. They have a monarch to rule each day, but each of the ten in turn gets one day to rule

One of the advantages of taking part in a group read - like our one of the Decameron - is benefiting from the contributions that all the other readers make. ReemK10 pointed out that that there is a wealth of meaning in the character names and in the complex of numbers (three men and seven women, the importance of ten and so on) but as a reader all of that largely passed me over. The only character who really stood out for me was Dioneo, and not because he was Dionysian but because he got to tell the last story of everyday. This at last was a reference point - everything else was in flux for me. I felt at one moment that Panfilo was an author stand in, but that moment passed and life returned to normal.

In other words the Decameron has intricate foundations but they don't interfere with the appearance of the building. For the reader there are simply one hundred stories, divided into ten days set in a framing narrative with some linking text.

The stories give an impression of the world view of leisured middle to upper class urban people (socially below the nobility but of high enough status and wealth to be able to look down on people who are overly concerned with business) of mid-fourteenth century north Italy. The geographical scope ranges over the entire Mediterranean, with a couple of stories set in France and England (England is as exotic here as Saladin, a fantasy destination where dreams can become true) there are no stories set in China or other far eastern locations despite The Travels of Marco Polo. The Merchant of Prato gives an idea of just how natural and everyday that geographical scope was to those involved in commerce in Italy at that time. The stories are set throughout history, some in antiquity, others in the recent past, many are roughly contemporary to Boccaccio's time. Boccaccio may not have invented any of the stories. Many are recognisable retellings, and some will in turn be retold by Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales, others like the horrible Griselda story seem to have been widely known at the time and pop up in a variety of sources as a role model for a good woman (see for instance Le Menagier de Paris.

In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer reuses and adapts a few stories from Decameron and takes Boccaccio's idea of a framing narrative however he makes an important change. Chaucer's storytellers cover a fairly broad social spectrum (view spoiler)[albeit with a southern English bias (hide spoiler)], Boccaccio's reflect one view point that of Florentine urban Patrician families. They own landed estates, but don't have aristocratic titles (view spoiler)[ at least not yet, they are probably the kinds of people who with judicious marriages or helpful 'gifts' to the right persons might reasonably hope to acquire one in time (hide spoiler)], they admire aristocratic values and although their family wealth probably comes from trade and commerce, too pronounced an interest in business is felt to be improper.

Being chaste, or more to the point being seen to be chaste, is an important attribute for the women of this class and governs how they are perceived in society. Therefore the ability to conduct extramarital relationships with discretion is lionised. Oddly although their own reputation is important, persuading a servant to have sexual relations with an over eager suitor or to receive a beating in place of the heroine in exchange for a gift such a suit of clothes is seen as laudable, even by a bishop. Morality is a social attribute, what is appropriate depends on the social position of the person, rather than an absolute set of values that is immutable throughout the whole of society (view spoiler)[ and that society is strange to modern eyes, within the stories Sicily and southern Italy are seen as different to northern Italy which is however seen as similar to France, or maybe this is not such an unusual viewpoint after all! (hide spoiler)]

Having said that women of a low social class can be exemplary - pre-eminently Griselda, and can have some concern for their virtue, equally the poor (broadly speaking) can be dismissed as simple minded and herd like, ripe to be fooled by any passing quick witted Friar who is prepared to claim that a parrot's feather, in fact, came from an angel's wing. It is difficult, and without doubt very unwise, to do what I am doing and attempt to generalise about one hundred stories told by ten narrators as there always seem to be exceptions and nuances of opinion from one story to the next. Perhaps if read with paper to hand and a pencil behind the ear, setting out in columns the attitudes revealed in each story, patterns might emerge consistent to particular narrators, or maybe that each day had a particular tone.

But all of this is perhaps besides the point, this is a compendium of stories. Few if any would have been original to Boccaccio, many have deep roots and have been endlessly retold. What he has done is collect, adapt and present them within the frame work of this group of seven young women and three men moving between various estates, not many miles outside Florence, over a period of a few days while the plague runs it's course within the city.

The stories are lively, often funny, and vivid. They feature lecherous men (particularly priests and friars), cunning plans and generally the victory of the witty. Love and Fortune are capitalised and at times appear to be forces in their own right in the universe alongside God (view spoiler)[ like the plague they sweep through society without regard to status or duty (hide spoiler)] and one law of nature seems to be that one woman can keep a man happy but it takes many men to please one woman. This, given the social importance for a woman of appearing chaste, provides drama and humour in many of the tales. Some of the stories have a savage twist (view spoiler)[ not all of which were comfortable reading (hide spoiler)] , not always condemned by narrator or his in book audience, a few see a man getting the woman he wants despite her lack of interest, some marriages are between partners of unequal ages, which doesn't seem to have been particularly unusual for the times, and this can be a narrative driver for the pursuit of extra-marital pleasures. The idea of marriage as a romantic union between two people is a rather unusual one if one takes a broad view of it. Marriage in Boccaccio in common with most of human history is a business like affair, for love to develop in it (or despite it) takes particular skill and the triumph of the witty over the wilful (view spoiler)[ some reminded me of the kind of folktales in which the main character has to complete seemingly impossible tasks (hide spoiler)].

So overall what can be concluded about the Decameron? Perhaps nothing other than that people have to read it for themselves and that it may not be the medieval Europe that you expected to find.