expedition and nearly took Boccaccio along. Boccaccio
wrote several Latin eclogues on the situation in Naples;
he was at fi rst critical of the Neapolitans but was later
outraged by the brutality of the king of Hungary.
Boccaccio was back in Florence when the dreadful
plague of 1348 struck. Both his father and his stepmother
died, leaving Boccaccio responsible for the remaining
family and its property. The death of between one-third
and half of the population of Florence, and the survivors’
fear of contagion, caused a temporary breakdown of
Florentine society. Out of this terrible experience came
the Decameron (1349–1351), whose ten narrators fl ee
the plague, take refuge in their villas in the hills, and tell
each other stories for ten days, ending each day with a
song. (Activities such as singing and telling comic tales
were actually recommended by doctors to preserve the
balance of humors and thus prevent disease.) The hun-
dred tales are “retold” by Boccaccio for women who
are obsessed by love and unable to distract themselves
as men can. (There are echoes here of Ovid’s Remedia
amoris.) By chasing away their melancholy, Boccac-
cio hopes to restore their mental health. The Dantean
journey from the pestilential city to a garden which
resembles an earthly paradise suggests a moral as well as
a physical meaning. Yet the layering of narrative voices
(the real Boccaccio, the inscribed “I”, the narrators, and
often characters telling tales within tales) complicates
the possible interpretations. As with Boccaccio’s earlier
writings, critics have disagreed about how to read this
work. Some have seen it as championing the rights of
“nature” against social morality; others as teaching
Christian morals; others as rejecting any moral func-
tion of literature in favor of aesthetic pleasure; others
as intentionally thwarting any possibility of fi xed mean-
ing. The Decameron has been considered feminist and
misogynist, radical and conservative, conducive to the
reordering of society after its breakdown and subversive
of established order.
In writing the Decameron Boccaccio drew on a
complex mixture of popular and literary sources. Prov-
erbs and tales from the oral tradition; recent events and
anecdotes; evocations of Dante; and classical narratives
by Ovid, Apuleius, and Valerius Maximus all merge in
a rich work that has been called the “human comedy.”
Although many of the tales take place in Italian towns in
Boccaccio’s own time or the recent past, there are also
other settings, including the Orient and ancient Athens.
Branca (1976) has suggested that the wandering knights
of romance have been replaced here by wandering
merchants who encounter everything from prostitutes
to disguised princesses.
Each day (except days 1 and 9) is assigned a topic,
so that the tales interact as variations on a theme, while
Dioneo’s fi nal tale on each day often parodies the pre-
ceding stories. The topics are also linked: the power of
fortune is followed by the achievement of one’s desires;
unhappy love stories are followed by happy ones; tricks
by women against men are followed by the deceits of
humans generally against each other; and the fi nal topic,
magnanimous behavior, is introduced as a corrective to
all that has gone before.
This collection had an enormous infl uence on prose
fi ction throughout Europe for the next several centu-
ries. The major themes of the Decameron—fortune,
love, trickery, the deceits of women, the hypocrisy of
clergymen—became those of a genre called the novella.
Another feature, the framing tale, was also copied,
with variations. Dramatists found the Decameron a
wonderful source of plots. Boccaccio’s prose—com-
bining formal Latinate syntax with lively, realistic dia-
logue— established a standard for Italian prose, just as
Petrarch became the model for Italian poetry. However,
unlike Petrarch, who denigrated Italian and encouraged
writing in Latin, Boccaccio defended Italian as a literary
language. His admiration for Dante, whose Commedia
he sent to Petrarch with exhortations not to scorn it,
undoubtedly persuaded him of the potential power and
range of the vernacular.
In October 1350, Petrarch came to Florence, and
Boccaccio went outside the gates of town to meet him
and invite him home. This was the beginning of a deep
friendship that lasted to the end of their lives, and many
of their letters to each other are still extant.
From 1350 on, Boccaccio became more and more
involved in public life. He was given responsible of-
fi ces within the city and was sent on sensitive embassies
abroad, including one to the pope in Avignon in 1354.
In 1355, he made one of his disappointing trips to
Naples; during this journey, the best beloved of his fi ve
illegitimate children died—the little girl whom he af-
fectionately memorialized in his eclogue Olympia. (All
fi ve children seem to have died very young.) At the rich
library of Monte Cassino, he copied a number of classi-
cal texts, because he was beginning to work on his own
historical volumes: Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, The
Fall of Illustrious Men, and the geographical dictionary
Of Mountains, Forests,... and Seas (De montibus.. .).
All these works took many years to complete. They re-
fl ect Boccaccio’s more humanistic, scholarly side, which
was encouraged by Petrarch and was highly valued by
the humanists of the following century.
In the early 1350s, Boccaccio wrote, in Italian,
Trattatello in laude di Dante (Little Treatise in Praise
of Dante) for a manuscript in which he copied all the
known poetry of Dante; this collection became a major
source for the transmission of Dante’s verse. Tratatello,
which was revised several times (c. 1360 and before
1372), was a celebration as well as a biography, offered
in lieu of the ancients’ physical monuments to great
men. Boccaccio praises Dante as a poet-theologianBOCCACCIO, GIOVANNI