The Decameron

Boccaccio's mid-fourteenth-century frame tale sends ten young Florentines, seven women and three men, out of plague-stricken Florence to a country villa, where they pass ten days telling stories. Each day has a ruler and often a theme: misfortune that ends well, tricks of lovers, the cunning of wives and clerks, generous deeds. The hundred novelle range from bawdy fabliaux to tragic passion and anticlerical satire, set in Italy and across the Mediterranean. The work is a prose collection that uses retreat from the Black Death as a scaffold for a survey of human appetite, wit, and chance rather than a single plot.

Bound in brown buckram. Ten monochrome picture plates in each volume. Brown slipcase.