The Decameron, Volume I — Edition Insights

Plague as a Catalyst for Storytelling

The plague is not merely a backdrop but a narrative engine. Boccaccio describes how the disease caused such fear that “brother forsook brother,” and even parents abandoned their children. This breakdown of traditional bonds creates a vacuum that the ten storytellers fill with their own rules and rituals. They elect a queen or king each day, choose a theme, and tell stories that often mock the very institutions—church, marriage, law—that failed during the crisis.

The frame narrative emphasizes order imposed on chaos: the young people retreat to a “pleasant and beautiful” villa, where they sing, dance, and dine before each tale. This contrast between the plague’s disorder and the storytelling’s structure is a key tension. The tales themselves frequently involve characters who, like the narrators, must improvise their way out of danger.

Deception and Its Moral Ambiguity

Deception is the dominant motif of the first two days. Ser Ciappelletto’s false confession is the most extreme example: he lies so convincingly that he is venerated as a saint after death. The story ends with the narrator noting that God “accepted his repentance” despite the fraud, leaving the moral ambiguous. Similarly, in the second day’s tales, characters like Martellino fake paralysis to gain a miracle, and Andreuccio is tricked into a sewer but later steals a ruby.

The tales rarely condemn deceit outright; instead, they reward cleverness. The Jew Abraham converts not because of faith but because he sees that the clergy’s corruption proves Christianity’s resilience. The monk who sleeps with a woman escapes punishment by shaming his abbot for the same sin. Boccaccio seems more interested in the ingenuity of the deceiver than in any fixed moral code.

The Body and Its Vulnerabilities

Physicality is a constant presence, from the plague’s “gavoccioli” (swellings) to the judge Ricciardo di Chinzica’s impotence. The judge, a man “better endowed with mental than with physical vigour,” tries to regulate his young wife’s desires with a calendar of holy days, but she eventually elopes with a pirate. Boccaccio’s description of the judge’s “lean, withered and scarce animate frame” is both comic and pointed: the body cannot be denied.

In the tale of Ambrogiuolo, the deceiver’s punishment is explicitly corporeal: his body is smeared with honey and devoured by insects, leaving “his very bones completely denuded of flesh.” The story of Landolfo Ruffolo, who survives shipwreck clinging to a chest, also highlights physical endurance. These episodes ground the tales in sensory, often visceral, detail.

This volume contains only the first two of the Decameron’s ten days, so the full arc of the frame story—the return to Florence—is not yet visible. Readers may note how the narrators’ personalities emerge through their choices of tales: Dioneo, for instance, consistently tells the most irreverent stories. Pay attention to the recurring motifs of rings, chests, and journeys, which often symbolize fortune or identity. The translation by J. M. Rigg preserves Boccaccio’s rhythmic prose and dry humor, making the 14th-century text feel immediate.

Sometimes, while rereading Boccaccio’s tales of clever survivors spinning stories to outlast the plague, I thought of Clicking red heels — Context and Discussion. It wasn’t the plots, really. More that both books feel like people making sense of strange days by talking quietly, circling the same old truths, trying to find a shape for what’s happening around them. That same gentle, human persistence. I closed the volume and just sat with that feeling a while.