A new translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron.

Renaissance Man

by Joan Acocella in The New Yorker - November 11, 2013

The skill of ingenuity features prominently in the Decameron. So does unfraught sex. Illustration by Anna and Elena Balbusso.

In 1348, the Black Death, the most devastating epidemic in European history, swept across the continent. Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75), at the beginning of his famous Decameron, describes its effects on his city, Florence. Many people just dropped dead in the street. Others died in their houses, often unattended by their families. Husbands and wives, fearing infection, sat and prayed in separate rooms. Mothers walked away from their children and closed the door. In the words of a new translation of the Decameron (Norton), by Wayne A. Rebhorn, a specialist in Renaissance literature at the University of Texas, the Florentines

carried the bodies of the recently deceased out of their houses and put them down by the front doors, where anyone passing by, especially in the morning, could have seen them by the thousands. . . . When all the graves were full, enormous trenches were dug in the cemeteries of the churches, into which the new arrivals were put by the hundreds, stowed layer upon layer like merchandise in ships, each one covered with a little earth, until the top of the trench was reached.

Shops stood empty. Churches shut down. An estimated sixty per cent of the population of Florence and the surrounding countryside died.

And so begins the Decameron. Seven young ladies, friends—Pampinea, Filomena, Neifile, Fiammetta, Elissa, Lauretta, and Emilia—meet after Mass. They range in age from eighteen to twenty-eight, and they are all of genteel birth. Let’s get out of here, Pampinea, the eldest, says. Let’s go to our country estates. The other women say that they’d love to, but they think they should bring some men along. Soon, they assemble three gentlemen linked to them by kinship or by affection—Filostrato, Dioneo, and Panfilo—and the ten young people decamp at dawn for the countryside.
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