The Black Death

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375)

Giovanni Boccaccio was an Italian writer, poet, and scholar whose Decameron is the most celebrated literary work to emerge from the Black Death. Born in 1313, the illegitimate son of a Florentine merchant (the tradition that his mother was a French noblewoman is a later legend), Boccaccio was educated in Naples and returned to Florence in the 1340s, where he lived through the plague of 1348 and produced the work that would make him one of the founders of Italian literature.

Life and Career

Boccaccio was born in Florence or Certaldo, Tuscany, in 1313. His father, Boccaccino di Chellino, was a merchant and agent of the Bardi banking company. Boccaccio was sent to Naples in the 1320s to study law and commerce, but his interests lay in literature and the classical tradition. In Naples, he encountered the court of King Robert of Anjou, which was a centre of literary and intellectual activity, and he began to write poetry and prose in both Italian and Latin.

Boccaccio returned to Florence in the early 1340s and established himself as a writer and civic figure. He became a friend and correspondent of Francesco Petrarch, and together the two men are considered the founders of Italian humanism. Boccaccio’s early works — including the Filocolo, the Filostrato, and the Teseida — were written in the vernacular and drew on classical and romance traditions.

The Decameron

The Decameron, written between approximately 1349 and 1353, is Boccaccio’s masterpiece. The work consists of one hundred stories told by ten young Florentines — seven women and three men — who have fled the plague-stricken city for a country villa. The frame narrative, which describes the plague in Florence with remarkable vividness and emotional power, is one of the most widely read descriptions of the pandemic in any language.

The stories themselves range from the comic to the tragic, from the bawdy to the philosophical, and they explore the full range of human experience: love, desire, greed, cunning, generosity, cruelty, and the search for meaning. 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 Plague Introduction

The introduction to the Decameron is Boccaccio’s most famous contribution to the literature of the Black Death. He 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, those who isolated themselves, those who abandoned themselves to pleasure, and those who tried to maintain normal life.

Boccaccio’s account has been used by historians as a primary source for the pandemic’s impact on Florence. However, it 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.

Later Life and Legacy

Boccaccio continued to write and to engage in civic life after completing the Decameron. He produced several works of scholarship, including a biography of Dante and a genealogy of the pagan gods. He died in Certaldo in 1375.

Boccaccio’s influence on subsequent literature was enormous. The Decameron was widely read and copied, and it influenced Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron, and countless other works of narrative fiction. It established the frame narrative as a literary form and demonstrated the capacity of the vernacular to express the full range of human experience.