[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.