The Hundred Tales Ten Florentines Told Each Other in a Country Villa to Wait Out the Black Death

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) was 35 years old when the Black Death reached Florence in spring 1348. He was substantially a Neapolitan-trained literary figure of substantial but not yet first-rank reputation; his father died of the substantial plague in summer 1348, leaving him with financial responsibilities and an unfinished literary career. He spent the subsequent five years (1348–1353) composing the Decameron — the founding work of European vernacular prose fiction.

The frame

The Decameron’s framing device is its central literary innovation. The work opens with an extended description of the 1348 Florentine plague — the most detailed contemporary eyewitness account of the Florentine epidemic, written by a direct survivor — and then introduces ten young Florentines (seven women: Pampinea, Filomena, Neifile, Fiammetta, Elissa, Emilia, Lauretta; three men: Panfilo, Filostrato, Dioneo) who meet by chance at the church of Santa Maria Novella in early summer 1348 and decide collectively to flee the plague-stricken city for a country villa in the hills above Fiesole.

The ten set up a entertainment programme: each day a different one of them is appointed ‘king’ or ‘queen’ of the day and proposes a story-theme; the remaining nine then each tell a story on the theme. Ten tellers × ten days = 100 tales.

What the tales contain

The substantive thematic range is broad. Tragic romance (the Tancredi-Ghismonda tale of IV.1), comic clerical satire (Frate Cipolla’s trick relic in VI.10), witty mercantile parable (Federigo’s falcon in V.9), substantively bawdy tales (the Alibech-Rustico ‘put the devil in hell’ tale of III.10), substantively serious moral examination (the substantively reformed brigand in X.1). The substantive range is broader than any prior European vernacular literary work.

Boccaccio’s literary innovation was substantively the framing structure rather than the individual tales. Most of the 100 tales had substantively prior circulation in European oral or literary tradition — the substantively original Boccaccian work was the substantive arrangement of the pre-existing tale material into a coherent literary framework.

The plague frame

The opening plague description is the most substantive direct primary literary witness to the 1348 Florentine outbreak. Boccaccio substantively reports the clinical symptoms (bubonic swellings, systemic fever, mortality patterns), the substantive municipal-administrative collapse (breakdown of normal funeral practices, the mass-burial pits at Santa Maria Novella and the substantively other major Florentine parishes), the social-behavioural pattern (fragmentation of family responsibility, substantive collapse of normal commerce, substantive fleeing of the urban population to country properties).

The Boccaccian plague description shaped the European literary plague tradition through the subsequent four centuries — Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722) substantively borrows its structural framework from the Boccaccian opening; Manzoni’s 19th-century I promessi sposi reproduces the Boccaccian observational template.

Boccaccio survived the 1348 outbreak and lived another 27 years. He died at his property at Certaldo in December 1375, aged 62, of old-age complications. He was buried at Certaldo’s church of San Iacopo, where his tomb survives.