Dr. Kristin Stasiowski

Set in Florence, Italy during the 1348 plague known as the Black Death, Boccaccio’s one hundred novella collected in his masterwork The Decameron have received recent, widespread attention as readers the world over struggle to navigate the perils of the COVID 19 pandemic. The real strength of Boccaccio’s tales, however, is not derived solely from the weight of their literary proximity to our current experience. Rather, these stories about virtue and vice; honesty and deceit; love and loss; fortitude and temperance; prudence and magnificence, help readers to shift their focus to the humanity that is needed to rebuild and remake the world.
In this three-part course, we will introduce readers to the major themes of The Decameron against the backdrop of the historical reality of the plague in Florence. We will then focus our specific attention on a close reading of various novelle from the Decameron. Each of these novelle will be read in relation to one another and discussed from within the framework of Boccaccio’s larger thematic and literary concerns. As these tales will demonstrate, it is not the pathos of Boccaccio’s plague that gives The Decameron its enduring and vital power, it is the passion and compassion that his stories reveal us capable of when called upon to care about and for each other.

Lecture 1: This lecture will cover the Introduction to the Decameron and a discussion of the literary and historical contexts of the text. Day 1: Story 1 and Day 10: Story 10 will be discussed in depth.

Lecture 2: This lecture will discuss the stories from Day 3, the theme of which is erotic desire. We will place the first and last stories of this day (1 &10) within the larger context of Boccaccio’s relationship to Dante while offering participants a look at the stories that helped land The Decameron in Savonarola’s “Bonfire of the Vanities” and the index of Prohibited Books.

Lecture 3: This lecture will focus on Boccaccio’s “artists.” From Buffalmacco, Bruno, and Calandrino to Giotto himself, we will meet and discuss the ways that Boccaccio uses artists to address ideas about fortune and virtue; truth versus fiction; and the power of the eye and the pen to persuade.

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