The Black Death

Boccaccio’s Decameron and the Black Death

Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron is the most celebrated literary work to emerge from the Black Death. Written in the early 1350s, the work’s frame narrative — ten young Florentines who flee the plague-stricken city for a country villa, where they pass the time by telling stories — provides one of the most vivid and widely read descriptions of the pandemic in any language. The introduction to the Decameron has shaped the modern understanding of the plague’s impact on urban life and remains one of the most powerful accounts of social collapse in Western literature.

Boccaccio’s Life and Context

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) was born the illegitimate son of a Florentine merchant; the tradition that his mother was a French noblewoman is a romantic legend. He was educated in Naples, where he studied law and literature, and returned to Florence in the 1340s. He was a friend and correspondent of Francesco Petrarch, and together the two men are considered the founders of Italian humanism.

Boccaccio lived through the Black Death in Florence, witnessing the catastrophe that would provide the frame for his masterpiece. The experience of the plague — the death of friends and family, the collapse of social order, the confrontation with mass mortality — profoundly affected him and shaped the work that would make him famous.

The Frame Narrative

The Decameron opens with a description of the plague in Florence that is among the most detailed and emotionally powerful accounts of the pandemic in any medieval source. Boccaccio describes the symptoms of the disease — the buboes, the dark patches on the skin, the rapid progression to death — with clinical precision. He describes the breakdown of social bonds — families abandoning their sick, parents fleeing from children — with unflinching honesty. And he describes the various responses of the Florentine population: those who fled the city, those who isolated themselves, those who abandoned themselves to pleasure, and those who tried to maintain normal life in the face of catastrophe.

The frame narrative then introduces the ten storytellers — seven young women and three young men — who flee Florence for a country villa. In the villa, they pass the time by telling stories: one hundred stories in total, organised into ten days (decameron means “ten days” in Greek). The stories range from the comic to the tragic, from the bawdy to the philosophical, and they reflect the full range of human experience.

The Literary Achievement

The Decameron is not merely a plague narrative. It is a vast, complex, and deeply human work that explores the full range of human experience: love, desire, greed, cunning, generosity, cruelty, and the search for meaning in a world governed by fortune. The plague provides the frame — the context of crisis and mortality within which the stories are told — but the stories themselves are concerned with the full spectrum of life.

Boccaccio’s literary innovation was to write in the vernacular — Italian rather than Latin — and to address a broad audience that included women and the merchant class. The Decameron was one of the first major works of European literature to be written in a vernacular language, and it established Italian as a literary language capable of expressing the full range of human experience.

The Plague as Literary Device

The plague in the Decameron serves several literary functions. It provides a dramatic frame that heightens the significance of the stories: in a world where death is omnipresent, the stories become acts of resistance, assertions of life and meaning in the face of catastrophe. It provides a moral context: the breakdown of social order in Florence is contrasted with the ordered, civilised society that the storytellers create in their villa. And it provides a psychological context: the stories are told as a means of coping with trauma, of maintaining sanity and civility in the face of horror.

Boccaccio’s description of the plague has been used by historians as a primary source for the pandemic’s impact on Florence. However, the description is a literary construction, not a straightforward historical record. Boccaccio drew on his own experience, on the accounts of others, and on literary models — particularly Thucydides’ description of the plague in Athens — to create a narrative that is both historically informative and artistically shaped.

The Influence of the Decameron

The Decameron was enormously influential. It was widely read and copied in manuscript, and it was one of the first works to be printed when the printing press was introduced to Italy. It influenced subsequent literature — Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron, and countless other works of narrative fiction — and it established the frame narrative as a literary form.

The Decameron’s description of the plague has shaped the modern understanding of the pandemic more than any other single source. Boccaccio’s account of the breakdown of social bonds, the failure of medical treatment, and the various responses of the population has been cited by historians, adapted by filmmakers, and quoted in popular accounts of the Black Death for centuries.