Section II: The Middle Ages
Dr. Susan Dodd, Associate Director, Foundation Year Program; Associate Professor of Humanities
...the Decameron shows that, unleashed from the ordinary by the extreme suffering of the plague, and salved by the release from fear, small comforts, and the glory of nature, people rediscover a divinity that reveals itself only when human beings gather together, creatively, to tell stories.
Every time, most gracious ladies, that I reflect on how natural feelings of pity are for you, I recognize that you will judge this work to have a wearisomely depressing beginning. What it thrusts before you is a painful re-evocation of the carnage caused by the recent plague, which cannot but be deeply hurtful and upsetting to everyone who witnessed the events or learned about them indirectly. But I don’t want this to frighten you from reading any further, as if you were bound to be sighing and weeping all through the book. As you read this horrible opening, consider yourselves travellers climbing a steep, rough path up a mountain, behind which is hidden a delightful plain; it proves all the more pleasurable the harder the climb and the descent that follows. If the extreme limit of happiness is pain, wretchedness is similarly brought to an end by the onset of joy. This brief distress (I say brief, because it takes up only a few pages) will be quickly followed by sweetness and pleasure, as I promised initially, but which you might not expect from an opening of this sort. And truly, if I could have decently led you where I want by some other path than the unpleasant one that this will be, I would have done so. But without recalling those
events, it would have been impossible to explain what lay behind what you will be reading later. So it is from a sense of necessity that I bring myself to write about them. (Boccaccio, Giovanni. Tales from the Decameron
(Penguin Classics) (pp. 9-10). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.)
The narrator of Boccaccio’s Decameron draws his lady-readers in by promising to move them through the “brief distress” of a “painful reevocation of the carnage caused by the recent plague” into a “sweetness and pleasure” that would have been unattainable by any other path. He tells us that he is compelled by “a sense of necessity” to begin his stories of love, revenge, and reversal of fortunes with a full (and some commentators say exaggerated) account of Florence as it was ravaged by the Black Death in 1384. “The plague brought out the best and the worst in everyone” the narrator explains, and so the youth set out to their villas to escape fear, death, and equally importantly, the existential and moral squalor brought on by the plague, in order to find refuge in a fanciful world of their own creation. The country frees the imagination from the mortal fear and moral oppression: 6
