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.
Title Metadata
Subject/Genre
8 Subjects| No. | Volume Title | Page Count |
|---|---|---|
| Vol. 1 | The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio | — |
| Vol. 2 | The Happy Art of Narration, Readings of Boccaccio and the Decameron | — |
Gilded top page edge. Bound in red Wassa goatskin leather blocked in gold and black with a design by Jeff Clements. Short excerpts from John Dryden, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Percy Bysshe Shelley and James Leigh Hunt. Bound in green paper. SOLANDER BOX: Dark green cloth box with gilt title on spine.
| Printing | Print Year | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1st Printing | 2007 | — |