The Decameron is one of the great monuments of world literature: a brilliant, earthy, comic, tragic, and endlessly human collection of one hundred tales told in the shadow of catastrophe. As plague ravages Florence, ten young people-seven women and three men-withdraw to the countryside and pass the time by telling stories: tales of love, wit, deception, desire, fortune, foolishness, clerical hypocrisy, social climbing, revenge, generosity, and human survival. The result is a vast panorama of medieval life seen with extraordinary intelligence, humour, and narrative energy.
Written in the fourteenth century, Boccaccio's masterpiece helped establish Italian prose fiction at the highest literary level and became one of the essential bridges between medieval storytelling and Renaissance humanism. Its frame narrative gives order to a world shaken by death, while the tales themselves range from bawdy comedy to moral fable, from romance to satire, from shrewd social observation to stories of startling emotional force. The influence of The Decameron can be felt throughout later European literature, including the development of the short story, the framed tale collection, and works such as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
This SMK edition presents The Decameron for readers of classic literature, medieval fiction, Italian literature in translation, Renaissance humanism, plague literature, comic storytelling, and the history of European narrative art. It remains as alive, sharp, scandalous, and humane as ever: a book about storytelling as refuge, pleasure, judgment, and proof that human imagination persists even in an age of fear.