Many, I’m willing to bet, who love reading, have found themselves during this time thinking about, rereading, or looking at for a first time some one or more of literary pieces centered on or around an epidemic illness, the quarantine one has produced, or both. Katha Pollitt, for example, took up this theme recently in one of her columns in The Nation. I am no exception. I’ve two personal favorites, each Italian: Allesandro Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi and Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron; the former’s epidemic being plague in 17^th century Milan and the latter’s plague in 14^th century Florence. It is The Decameron I’ve revisited these recent days, having looked at it first decades ago.

And not the whole of it—800 pages (!) (100 stories)—but a much-reduced version, translated (English, 21 stories) and edited by Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella (Norton, 1977). The word, decameron, by the bye, is from the Greek, meaning ten days. Boccaccio had studied Greek; he went so far as to travel in Sicily, where in his day some natives still spoke that language as their means of everyday discourse. The title arises because Boccaccio frames his story (which he wrote in vernacular Italian prose, and with such clarity and beauty it was to propel the language into the literary big leagues of Greek and Latin) around the ten days he gives to his characters to tell short stories to one another out in the Florentine countryside as a break from the agonies of city life at the time, social distancing-light, we might say now. And the number 10 is recursive: there are 10 characters in all (seven women, three guys) and they are each to tell 10 stories of an afternoon, for a total of 100 (cento novelle in tutto—the Italian for short story is novella).

The novelle themselves are more than a few lifted from classical sources, but given an Italian twist, one that has them fit the then-contemporary Italian cultural surround as Boccaccio wants it to seem (in parody). The dominant attitude is mocking, mocking of “heavenly” idealism: making fun of the overwrought and overly pious, often via overtly explicit depictions of forbidden sexual enactments carried out by its exemplars or pretenders, male and female. Yet scattered amidst the satirical novelle is the occasional one, most emphatically the very last, #100, that illustrates warm, genuine generosity and innocence, even generosity of considerable, perhaps nearly madly so, sacrificial degree. I read him, Boccaccio, as urging us to value the real human: by degree a scoundrel, predator (sexually and otherwise), narcissist, liar, truth-teller, lover, companion, survivor, inspirer, prophet, discoverer. Which is why Boccaccio has sometimes been called the author of The Human Comedy (an obvious juxtaposition to his predecessor’s, Dante’s, The Divine Comedy—Dante himself had died when Boccaccio was 9 years old). I see Boccaccio not so much an anti-religionist as he is an anti-hegemonist, i.e., he is confrontational toward religion tyrannizing other innately human idealizing virtues of the mind. (In those instances where idealization can be a virtue, perhaps not so many as commonly supposed; he is a bit of an idealist-sceptic, too).

But there’s more. The plague consciously or unconsciously he wants to be seen and experienced as one among those damnable calamities humans endure (and survive or not) mainly through chance. One of the things they can do is be sensible, be grounded in reality, be wary of paranoid, narrowly idealized, or magical thinking that may worsen their plight, plight both collective and individual. Plus, let’s face it, the erotic, particularly in any of its benign forms, is an energizer, both symbol and immanence of life itself, the will to endure.

One of the uniquely satisfying features of the volume I’ve mentioned is that the editors end with a sustained section of commentary about The Decameron, reprinting pieces by some of its critics through the centuries. Just three among such writers here included are Boccaccio’s friend and contemporary, Petrarch, the famous 19^th century critic, Francesco DeSanctis, and finally Musa and Bondanella themselves. My own point of view, as I’ve sketched it, approximates that of a few; others of them disagree decidedly. Please, be my guest: have a look at The Decameron yourself; I will be honored and pleased were you to share your own opinion here on this blog.