A Masterpiece Born of the Black Death

Ever since the COVID-19 virus lockdown began, I’ve been thinking nonstop about Boccaccio’s Decameron, that celebrated collection of 100 short stories written in 1353, five years after the Black Plague killed about 20 million Europeans and more than half of Boccaccio’s fellow Florentines. I have always enjoyed the book, a bawdy collection filled with hilarious stories, like those of a hardened criminal on his deathbed who tricks a gullible priest into believing he is a saint, an arrogant horse dealer who falls into a sewer after being duped by a prostitute who pretends she’s his long-lost sister, or a group of enterprising nuns who discreetly employ a gardener to satisfy their carnal urges. I laughed at the jokes and reveled in the storytelling. But I never grasped the book’s profundity.

Then disaster struck. The haunting images of empty streets in Boccaccio’s city, the usually bustling Florence, and the endless news of families and communities ravaged by pandemic brought the urgency of the Decameron to life. Boccaccio too had watched the world he knew suddenly disappear. I came to understand the Decameron as much more than a series of entertaining yarns. It was the author’s attempt to translate ambient calamity into something meaningful.

The Decameron is often called the “human comedy,” to distinguish it from Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” which was completed about 30 years before Boccaccio’s masterpiece. In fact, Boccaccio would go on to become Dante’s biographer and was even paid handsomely to lecture on the poet. Yet these two Tuscans came from two different universes: one before the plague, the other after it.

“It is human to feel compassion for the suffering,” the Decameron begins. Dante could never have written that line. An intensely Christian poet, he felt his job was to judge the suffering, situating them in hell, purgatory, or heaven. A man like Boccaccio, who had lived through the plague and witnessed firsthand its brutal effects, could never be so quick to judge. The city of Florence was strewn with corpses, he writes, and “the dead were now treated like goats,” bundled away in batches, left to rot away from their loved ones, or dumped into mass graves. The word compassion originally meant to “share suffering,” as we now all do in the midst of a crisis global in scale and virulent in reach.

Yet how is it that the Decameron, conceived in the shadow of the Black Plague, could be so funny and irreverent, a chalice raised in toast to life? Boccaccio himself provides the answer, writing, “Of all the virtues, gratitude is the one most worthy of praise.” Life’s pleasures suddenly subtracted, he understood that we should savor, even celebrate, what is good and enjoyable, and not waste our time on the inessential. The plague had a brutally clarifying effect. Even after it passed, life could not go on as before. A new frame of mind, built on gratitude, was needed.

We like to think of Boccaccio as one of the first “Renaissance men,” a pioneer in that powerful cultural moment when thinking people moved past the medieval obsession with the afterlife and promoted instead a rational and scientific worldview that celebrated the arts and the creative potential of humankind. As reductive as any sweeping generalization of this nature must be, it has an element of truth that returns us to the Black Plague. When the pandemic was over, the world was in a sense reborn, albeit painfully, and with it came a celebration of human life and its potential on a scale unimaginable in Dante’s medieval world. Here, I think, is Boccaccio’s ultimate challenge to us today: How can we change the world after our own pandemic passes, translate its brutal insights into new directions in private and public life? How can we heed the message of the Decameron and, true to the etymology of the word renaissance, earn the right to terms like rebirth?

The Decameron is ultimately a hymn to the power of storytelling. The world around the book’s 10 storytellers was crumbling, the spread of a hungry disease was raging unchecked. Yet they believed in surrendering to what Boccaccio calls “the joy of listening.” Each storyteller understood that the world would never be the same. Yet they somehow found a path to compassion and gratitude, their spirits as resilient as the forms of their 100 gorgeous works.