Reading Contagion in Boccaccio's Decameron

The Banquet in the Pine Forest by Sandro Botticelli

In the spring of 1348, the plague spread to Florence. There are a number of contemporary chronicles, one of which is Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. In the second lecture in the EU Center’s virtual lecture series on plagues in European history, Eleonora Stoppino, Associate Professor of Italian, spoke about the moments of social and ethical breakdown described by Boccaccio, as well as the potential for reconstruction after the plague. 

The Decameron, Dr. Stoppino said, is what we call a “macro text.” It is composed of a hundred tales told by 10 people over the course of 10 days. As Dr. Stoppino noted, much like wealthy New Yorkers decamping to safer grounds during the COVID-19 crisis, the 10 storytellers are seven women and three men who left Florence for the countryside to escape the plague.

Dr. Stoppino spoke about the representations of contagion in The Decameron, noting the fear and unease surrounding contaminated objects and animal-human transmission. In one of the passages that she cited, Boccaccio writes: “…such was the energy of the contagion of the said pestilence, that it was not merely propagated from man to man, but, what is much more startling, it was frequently observed, that things which had belonged to one sick or dead of the disease, if touched by some other living creature, not of the human species, were the occasion, not merely of sickening, but of an almost instantaneous death.”

Watch the recording of the full lecture, moderated by EU Center Associate Director Jonathan Larson, below. The next lecture in this series, “Life After [the Black] Death,” will be given by Carol Symes, Associate Professor of History, on Wednesday, April 22 at 4pm.

Posted in: Black Death,Decameron,Eleonora Stoppino,Florence,Giovanni Boccaccio,Literature,Plague