I could hardly summarize, let alone intervene in, the numerous debates here. For centuries, critics have disputed which stories are serious and which are parodic, which characters deserve our sympathy and which our censure, and what, if any, is its overarching message. The Decameron’s trick is that it does not offer a simple answer. Although Boccaccio laments the dissolution of social bonds in his Introduction, the hundred stories recounted by the brigata raise different questions: Which bonds are worth saving? How should we live? For whom should we have compassion? And how should we structure society once the plague has passed? Safely in the countryside, they do not ruminate on the conditions of the plague. After the Introduction, Boccaccio’s brigata-the group of seven young women and three young men who narrate the Decameron’s tales-escapes ravaged Florence. Reading these recent pieces, one might believe that the Decameron is mostly about the Black Death of 1348, but the plague takes up a relatively tiny fraction of the work.

Commentators have astutely recognized the similarities between Giovanni Boccaccio’s description of plague-stricken Italy and our new normal as COVID-19 wreaks havoc across the globe. The fourteenth-century Italian masterpiece is “on Everyone’s Coronavirus Reading List” and “shows us how to survive coronavirus.” Decameron-inspired book clubs and collections of Coronavirus tales are popping up all over the Internet. This is part of a series on the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

Boccaccio tales