What a delightful (and dirty!) book from the 14th century! It's comforting to know that even in the Middle Ages, people's thoughts were just as in the gutters, and Boccaccio had the balls to put his down on paper.

7 young women and 3 young men escape plague-ridden Florence and pass their idle time telling 10 stories for 10 days. Some of my favorites were:

* A man is fooled into thinking he's pregnant, and his first reaction is to blame his wife for insisting on being on top all the time.

* Madonna Filippa successfully and logically argues at court that she can have sex with whomever she pleases.

* A gay man marries a frustrated buxom woman, who sneaks in a lover. Rather than getting mad, the husband finds a compromise for all three...ahem.

The Decameron has the audacity to suggest that both men and women enjoy sex. The 100 stories are not only each unique, but each of the 10 narrators gears hers or his story in connection to the one told before it. It is an amazing book and it is deceptively modern for something centuries old. Admittedly, there is still some violence I'm not 100% wild about. And it's hard to tell when Boccaccio is being satirical. But underneath the snark, sex comedy, satire, and some upsetting stories, there is a real heart beating underneath.


I read Wayne Rebhorn's translation, and it's really good. It matches the modern feel of the themes, but still has Boccaccio's antiquated beat. My one big niggling problem is the footnotes. They start off pretty useful, explaining some untranslatable puns and historical context, but progressively become obnoxious to redundant. I'm not sure needing to know the real-life inspirations to EVERY character is that helpful, and it's really annoying when Rebhorn explains things that are obvious (like sex jokes), or worst, explains things HE ALREADY FOOTNOTED EARLIER.

But forgiving Rebhorn's indulgence in footnoting (which is a minor sin anyway), this really is the best modern translation of a wonderfully funny and thoughtful book. Just make sure to carve out plenty of time to read it. It's a biggun...

Began reading this in 2020 at the height of the pandemic, and finally finished. It feels a bit silly rating a classic of the humanities on a five-star scale, so consider this a rating for the Wayne Rebhorn translation (2013), which was impressive. The footnotes and end notes were great for slang or turns of phrase, and the historical context never felt lacking. Overall it’s highly accessible, even for a non-academic audience.

I don’t recommend reading each story in succession like you would read a novel (ie like I did), unless you really want to get into it. For what it’s worth, here were some highlights.

1.2: A Jewish man converts to Catholicism. The church is so corrupt, he says, that it could only prosper by the hand of the one true God.

1.4: An abbot and a monk discover that they have been sleeping with the same woman, and they agree to keep it a secret. “But you can bet they brought her back again!”

2.2: A tale of justice that ends with a band of thieves kicking in the north wind.

3.1: A gardener at a convent pretends to be mute and sleeps around until he is exhausted and can’t keep up the act.

3.3: Lovers communicate by confessing to a dim-witted priest. “Father, tell that man not to come to my window this evening, or I don’t know what I’ll do.”

3.5: Yet another clever plan is hatched between lovers to disguise their communication.

3.6: In a dark room in a Turkish bath, one Ricciardo deceives a woman into thinking she is sleeping with her husband, when in fact she was sleeping with Ricciardo. Apparently it was romantic back then, but I’m pretty sure Ricciardo would be on a registry today.

3.10: A man teaches a woman how to put the devil back into hell—if by put the devil back into hell, you mean fix her kitchen sink. (I don’t want to spoil the details, but the innuendos in this one are pretty funny.)

Day 4 was a downer, although 4.5 might be worth reading if only for the background to the Keats poem The Pot of Basil.

Day 5 had some feel-good tales. Animal lovers are encouraged to avoid 5.9.

Day 6 was all about clever quips. If you read this, read them all.

Days 7 and 8: Stories about tricks wives play on their husbands, or that people play on one another. Most are love affairs. One (8.5) is just about pulling a judge’s pants down. Some gags really do stand the test of time.

9.2: An abbess’s affair comes to light when, thinking she donned her headpiece, she actually put her lover’s trousers on her head.

Day 9 or 10: Somewhere in here is a tale about a priest who claims priests are better lovers because they have more water stored in the millpond. Boccaccio uses this innuendo more than once.

There are more, but no one is paying me to write this. Happy reading.

[O]n the following morning when the young man was returned to the square, he found himself not quite sure about which one he had been with more that night, the husband or the wife.

Over the decade and counting that I've been on this website, I've spent enough time fiddling with my digital shelves to make such a hobby in and of itself, and one of my latest major renovations involved demarcating the works that I both have intended to read since 2010-2012 and own physical copies of. 'The Decameron' is one of a dozen works that herald from the earlier portion of that trilogy of years (apparently I tried and failed to read it waaaay back in 2007), and while many would sympathize had I chosen to put it off for another eleven years, I decided to bite the bullet, the desire to actually read it being as strong as the desire to not have it stare forebodingly at me for one moment longer. In terms of the reading experience itself, it's true that the stories can get quite repetitive, the gender politics rather grotesque, and the historical venue a tad incomprehensible, the last especially when a reader only has recourse to a text that lacks the hundreds of pages of footnotes/endnotes/etc that more grandiose editions are equipped with. However, I am nothing if not good at both cross-referencing and picking out what diamonds out of the hundreds of pages of rough as I can recognize, and there were enough genuinely pleasing aspects of the text for me to view it in a positive light as a whole. Having said that, do I believe everyone who takes it on must read the thing in its entirety? Only if you plan on having your views on 14th c. Italy in terms of its arts and its ideologies reconfigured, as this is a text with both typical bigotries and surprising humanizations, and it wouldn't be surprising if abridged editions left out the instances of both for the sake of preserving pretenses today.

This is why it is said: "A mouth that is kissed loses no flavor, but, like the moon, is renewed."

If I had to choose a sequence of tales from the Middle Ages, I'd admittedly forgo this for 'The Canterbury Tales' without spending much in the way of thought towards the proposition. Plagiarism and wholesale lifting of at least two of Boccaccio's tales and modifying them only slightly in the translation aside, there are a lot of reasons for my preference: closer to my linguistic home, more involved in creative structure and critical reasoning, and of course the fact that I had a benefit of an entire university course within which to go through the entirety of the available text in the original Middle English. Less laudatory reasons include the fact that, even when retained in its original language, the Anglo take is much shorter, although the impact this has on the comparing and contrasting of the two works is a bit more convoluted than that. I already mentioned Boccaccio's repetitiveness, but the sheer quantity of stories is probably why I found many narrative instances that go against conventional pictures of European sensibilities of that time period. True, the antisemitism hits you in the face right off the bat in the first day of stories, much as it does in Chaucer, and the fact that it never really shows up again after that isn't much of a comfort. What I didn't expect were instances such as bisexual polyamory being framed in at least two of the tales as a happy ending, or a favorable view of Muslims and their nations that meant that figures such as Saladin and unnamed Sultans appeared with a great deal of luxurious trappings and military engagements without any sort of stigma or other sorts of dehumanizing conversion innuendo attached. As for more recognizable links in the chain of the evolution of narrative, any instance of an Italian woman crossdressing immediately gave off Shakespeare vibes, although I suppose history had "progressed" too much for the Bard to be as free with his designations of love and recognition of fellow humanity as was what I imagine was one of his source materials.

Many kings and great rulers were once poor, and many of those who plow the land and watch the sheep were once very rich, and they still are.

I have to thank my habit of reading works disparate in chronology and topic for being able to think about the relationship between the growth of the Atlantic slave trade, with Europe forcing itself into direct trade and resource conflict with the Saharan slave trade driven by Muslim civilizations, and the rise of Islamophobia in European texts, which by the time of Voltaire had made a complete turn around from the rather neutral effusiveness of Boccaccio. As for the "women question," a lot of Boccaccio's stance mimics how it mostly, if not always, is in the case of female saints in the Catholic tradition: one of the implied prerequisites for sainthood is to give up a great deal of wealth, and poor women are apparently incapable of possessing enough to able to relinquish with any guarantee of a return on investment in the form of imbued sanctity. So, a few peasants who protect a woman from being raped by a nobleman are beheaded to the satisfaction of the tale's largely female audience (seven of the ten 'Decameron' participants are women), while the noblewomen save themselves (sometimes) through crafty plans and clever tongues and the noblemen bluff their way through with a combination of never criticized confidence and longwinded rhetoric. True, there are some bits and bobs that deride social tendencies towards edifying Mammon, but there's tons more 'and because they were noble they escaped execution/starvation/rape/etc' upon which the happy resolution of many a tale ends on, so the time when authors told stories about 'ordinary' folks was still a blip on the horizon. If you left those in addition to the 'and the dude fell in love and had to get what he wanted no questions' out, you might miss some historical details or interesting plot choices/authorial framing devices, but you'd get a much more interesting reading experience, and considering how much complexity Boccaccio put into the subversive yet humane (humanism, perhaps?) Dioneo, I have to wonder how much of the text was intended, and how much of it was padding to ward of the censors.

To this she replied: "My brothers, I am well aware of what you say, but I would much rather have a man who lacks money than money that lacks a man."

There's a niggling temptation to backtrack and track the trends of both the delightfully feminist and the tediously status quo in terms of both storyteller and demonstrated audience reaction, but I'm sure there's at least a half dozen books that have been written on the matter, so I'm not about to run myself into the ground doing so for nothing. In contrast to what I usually have to say about texts of this sort, I'm not as dismissive of abridged versions. My reading the entire thing means I was able to pick out those choice bits I previously mentioned as well as relish the fact that I'll never have to read it again, but just how many times can you present a new bevy of names in a new location and tell once again how the (male) lover eventually got their (female) beloved? In any case, reading this during Pride Month ended up not being as weird a decision as I assumed it would be, and much as I would like to view this work in the frame of Decameron inspired but non-Middle Age [b:The Heptameron|505222|The Heptameron|Marguerite de Navarre|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1600077741l/505222._SY75_.jpg|493265], I read that one too long ago to recall what my original thoughts were. So, as can be expected with texts that are this girthy in both length and historical place, there's probably a great deal that I would have liked to put down had I not forgotten it during the course of reading, as well as far more that I'm simply not going to spend the effort on adequately describing. I wouldn't say that this is in my top ten when it comes to the pre-1500 pieces, but it earns its reputation in ways I found to be more laudatory than I would have expected. If nothing else, much of what I admire in Boccaccio is similar to what I found worthy in Chaucer: a willingness towards social critique that acknowledged the reality of power structures, and a monumental effort made towards preserving culture and heritage in the wake of their respective plagues. The portion of this text that concerns itself with the devastation of the sickness that Boccaccio personally witnessed is blink-and-you'll-miss-it even if you get a translation that didn't cut it and the rest of the intros/conclusions out, but it is hard hitting enough to make one pause and think of the author's motivations in the wake of the Black Death, which killed three out of four in his resident city of Florence and could as well have taken him along with it.

[F]urthermore, when this law was put into effect, not a single woman gave her consent, nor was any one of them ever consulted about it; therefore, it may quite rightly be called a bad law.

What do you chose to write, when it seems the world you know is about to end? Many of this modern period of ours concern themselves with zombies and post-apocalypse. Others choose to remember the time before, imperfectly in all its imperfections, and who are we to say that that is not a light against the dark?

What more can be said here, except that godlike spirits do sometimes rain down from heaven into poor homes, just as those more suited to governing pigs than to ruling over men make their appearances in royal palaces.

This book, published c. 1351, is the earliest existent novel-length book in the "vulgar" Italian, rather than being written in Latin. Boccaccio's book concerns 7 young women and 3 young men who leave the city to escape the horrors of the Black Plague and retire to a country house, where they tell stories every afternoon. Each person tells one story per day over 10 days, so the book is made up of 100 short stories set in the wrap-around story.

I think this book is very interesting from a cultural artifact viewpoint and because of the structure. Apparently this book was the inspiration for Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and it has a similar structure, being a collection of stories connected by a wraparound story. In "The Decameron," you find out a lot about the prevailing attitudes toward men and women, marriage, the clergy, history & politics, other ethnic groups and nationalities, etc.

However, as a modern reader, some of the stories are hard going. Women are treated like chattel throughout, and there's a lot of wife-beating and raping, though they usually call it "ravishing" or some other euphemism. That being said, many of them are very funny and silly. I think it was worth reading, but it's not one of those "classics" that I'm going to want to read over and over again.

Short version: Amusing but trigger warnings for being pretty rapey in spots.

5 months and 18 days later, not to mention nearly a year into this pandemic whose massive effects I never could have anticipated, I have finally finished the entirety of The Decameron!

I've been meaning to read this for a long time. And it turns out to be a true desert island book. A book to help you forget the world and whatever ails you. I really didn't want this one to end.

Boccaccio's Decameron is a must-read for any lover of truly good storytelling. Here you can find the inspiration for countless standout works of the Western canon, from Shakespeare's plays to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Boccaccio's hundred stories are by turns tragic, comic, blasphemous, obscene, and hilarious, and Stephen Greenblatt was entirely accurate in calling it "a celebration of the sheer pleasure of being alive."

Rebhorn's translation is sharp, funny, and compulsively readable. The text is delightful in its own right, and manages to tell the tales for a modern reader's ear without losing the beauty of the classic language. Wholeheartedly recommended.