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, to my judgment, we have well and honourably done for that, an I have known to see aright, albeit merry stories and belike incentive to concupiscence have been told here and we have continually eaten and drunken well and danced and sung and made music, all things apt to incite weak minds to things less seemly, I have noted no act, no word, in fine nothing blameworthy, either on your part or on that of us men nay, meseemeth I have seen and felt here a continual decency, an unbroken concord and a constant fraternal familiarity the which, at once for your honour and service and for mine own, is, certes, most pleasing to me.This is part of a series on the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. To-morrow, as you know, it will be fifteen days since we departed Florence, to take some diversion for the preservation of our health and of our lives, eschewing the woes and dolours and miseries which, since this pestilential season began, are continually to be seen about our city. “Charming ladies, as I doubt not you know, the understanding of mortals consisteth not only in having in memory things past and taking cognizance of things present but in knowing, by means of the one and the other of these, to forecast things future is reputed by men of mark to consist the greatest wisdom.

The decameron giovanni boccaccio