Boccaccio: Decameron | National Humanities Center

Work of the Fellows: Monographs

Boccaccio: Decameron

By David Wallace (NHC Fellow, 1989–90)

The Black Death; Italian Literature; Fourteenth-Century; The Decameron; Giovanni Boccaccio

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991

From the publisher’s description:

In Boccaccio's innovative text ten young people leave Florence to escape the Black Death of 1348, and organize their collective life in the countryside through the pleasure and discipline of storytelling. David Wallace guides the reader through their one hundred novelle, which explore both new and familiar conflicts with unprecendented subtlety, urgency and humor: everything from the struggle for domestic space, fought out between individual men and women, to the greater politics of the Mediterranean world where Christian and Arab meet. He emphasizes the relationship between the Decameron and the precocious proto-capitalist culture of Boccaccio's Florence. He also discusses gender issues and the influence of the text, particularly on Chaucer and on the novel.

Subjects
Literature / Literary Criticism / The Black Death / Italian Literature / Fourteenth-Century / The Decameron / Giovanni Boccaccio /

Wallace, David (NHC Fellow, 1989–90). Boccaccio: Decameron. Landmarks of World Literature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.