Few great books like the Decameron have shaped our very notion of storytelling and its crucial role in the negotiation and production of shared social and cultural values. In its hundred stories, shared in ten days by ten young people escaping the Plague in mid-14th-century Florence, it combines sheer entertainment with a meaningful humanistic message. A tribute to human ingenuity, an epic masterpiece of a rising, dynamic mercantile society that pursues pleasure while being threatened by sudden extinction, the Decameron can be read as a transgressive and escapist manual of behavior as well as a breviary of moral predicaments intended for a secular, unprejudiced reader. As one critic (Guido Almansi) put it: "The text can perhaps give the impression of being outrageously amoral; our reading, on the other hand, can turn into ethical meditation; the former does not exclude the other." In his Western Canon Harold Bloom thus recently acknowledges the crucial position of Boccaccio's Decameron : "Ironic storytelling whose subject is storytelling is pretty much Boccaccio's invention, and the purpose of this breakthrough was to free stories from didacticism and moralism, so that the listener or reader, not the storyteller, became responsible for their use, for good or for ill." The Decameron has elicited throughout the centuries fundamental discussions on the nature of narrative art, on the tenets of medieval versus modern morality, on the social and educational value of any form of artistic and literary expression. A true encyclopedia of early modern life and a summa of late medieval culture, the Decameron is also a universal repertory of perennially human situations and dilemmas: it is the perfect subject for an experiment in a new form of scholarly and pedagogical communication aimed at renewing a living dialogue between a distant past and our present.
Additional Tags
Classroom Considerations
- This resource is only available on an unencrypted HTTP website.It should be fine for general use, but don’t use it to share any personally identifiable information