The Decameron

Composed in the mid-fourteenth century, this prose work frames a hundred tales told over ten days by seven young women and three young men who have left plague-stricken Florence for a country house. Each day a different member of the company rules and often sets a theme: fortune's reversals, love that ends in disaster or in wit, the tricks of wives, monks, and merchants. The novelle range across Italy and the Mediterranean, from bawdy fabliaux to stories of generosity and cruel tests. The book is a framed story-cycle about appetite and ingenuity under the Black Death, not a chronicle of the plague and not a single romance.

Bound in brown buckram with a design in red and green. White dust-jacket printed in red and green.