Literary Representations of Epidemics: From Boccaccio’s Decameronto The Decameron Project: 29 New Stories from the Pandemic

Resumo

Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron was probably conceived after the epidemic of 1348. Structured as a frame story containing one hundred framed tales, the frame story centres on a group of seven young women and three young men who seek refuge in a sheltered villa outside Florence so as to evade the Black Death which was besetting the city.
In March 2020, the editor of The Decameron Project: 29 New Stories from the Pandemic writes in the preface to the book, “bookstores [in the USA] began selling out of a book from the 14th century – Giovanni Boccacio’s The Decameron”, since “many readers were looking for guidance from this ancient book” at a time people “were beginning to self-isolate, learning what it meant to quarantine” (vii). In this light, I am particularly interested in examining the way “the best fiction can both transport you far from yourself but also, somehow, help you understand exactly where you are” (ix) by comparing the two Decamerons’ response to their respective pandemic contexts, focusing on a selected tale in both cases.