Boccaccio's Decameron

Boccaccio’s Decameron uses the bubonic plague’s arrival in Western Europe in 1348 to frame a storytelling marathon among a group of young Florentine nobles keen to engage in comedy even in the midst of tragedy. Although this course centres on the stories themselves (taught in English with frequent glances at the Italian), it also touches on Boccaccio’s other works and explores fourteenth-century Italian history, painting (especially the work of Giotto), architecture, fashion, commerce, pilgrimage, crusading, banking, law, church and government bureaucracy, chivalry, food culture, medicine, and manuscript production.

Finally, we'll consider the author's contemporaries and successors in and out of Italy, especially in France and England, e.g. Immanuel of Rome, Margherita Bandini and her husband Francesco Datini, Christine de Pizan, Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Lydgate.

Instructor: Dr. Joseph Grossi

Tentative texts: Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron: Selected Tales, ed. and trans. Donald Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2017)

Tentative assignments: Midterm exam, final exam, reading quizzes, short writing assignments, possible medium-length research paper