“Just as folly often destroys men’s happiness and casts them into deepest misery, so prudence extricates the wise.”
You want to live in Boccaccio’s world. Okay, not 14th-century Italy per se (perhaps a bit too much plague, among other inconveniences), but rather in a mental meritocracy like that which obtains in The Decameron, where quick thinking and a barbed tongue will take you to the top—or someone’s bottom, if that’s what you’re after.
The Decameron consists of 100 tales (10 told each day for 10 days by 10 Florentine nobles who were hiding out from the plague in 1348), and almost all involve someone outsmarting someone else and thereby getting out of a jam—or a debt, a dispute, or a disheveled bed. It’s a world of trickery and deception, yes, but even the tricked, if they’re smart enough, get their due revenge—and tend to add a little interest to the principal. When we think of the Middle Ages, we imagine that God must be ordering the universe; in The Decameron, however, it seems like intelligence did, and that’s a cosmology we can all endorse.
Crafty as Boccaccio’s characters are, in most of the stories their brainy machinations work in service of messages sent from a decidedly different part of the body. It’s a sexed-up world, Boccaccio’s, where adultery, if we are to believe him, is cosi fan tutti, (practiced by everyone everywhere), and “all other pleasures … are mere trifles by comparison with the one experienced by a woman when she goes with a man.” In The Decameron, even the wives who want to remain chaste seem to get tricked into sleeping with their suitors, to the point where the cloth caps that men wore in that era would have to have been fitted with holes to accommodate the horns each of them was sporting. (I guess you could take this as another knock on the Boccaccian universe.)
Sex—adulterous and otherwise—is so rampant in The Decameron, one has a harder time finding a tale that doesn’t involve some nook-nook than finding one that does. But the most striking element in all this hanky-panky is the degree to which Boccaccio focuses on women’s pleasure. Some literary scholars would have you believe that sex in premodern literature was invariably concerned with the male point—of view and otherwise—but time and again Boccaccio says that sex is what women “enjoy doing most” and is both “the greatest pleasure that Love can supply” and “the one thing that gives young women their greatest pleasure.” He even exonerates cheating wives if they weren’t getting the good stuff at home. Despite some moments of severe misogyny in a few of its tales, The Decameron is in a certain sense a progressive document, suggesting that women were entitled to a right that still isn’t inalienable in many cultures.
Read Boccaccio, then, for the cleverness, the randiness, the verbal play, and the general gioia di vivere. Skip a lot, give yourself over to the general mirth, and know that there might not be a six-century-old bestseller quite as light and playful as The Decameron—nor one with as much illicit sex, adultery, and religious figures doing naughty things.
The Buzz: As I said above and will reiterate when discussing Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, people tend to forget how bawdy the writers of the Middle Ages could be. Boccaccio, however, has always been known for his raunch. He’s had a rake’s reputation for centuries, but it’s actually pretty exaggerated. Though Boccaccio is Italy’s preeminent writer this side of Dante (and only one generation his junior), most of his work has been woefully neglected, primarily because his lowest-brow, poppiest, most jazzed-up work is the one he’s come to be famous for. Like Dr. Alex Comfort, the British scientist, poet, and novelist who authored fifty-odd books but is famous for only one (The Joy of Sex), Boccaccio got pigeonholed for his most scandalous work, causing people to forget his many other contributions to literature and letters (some of Italian literature’s high points, actually). Boccaccio didn’t intend The Decameron to be taken seriously; he calls it a mere “diversion for ladies in love” (and, yes, there were women readers back then—and a few writers too). But it’s the one that stuck.
What People Don’t Know (But Should): Boccaccio’s introduction to The Decameron contains a first-person account of life during the Black Death (bubonic plague), movingly describing how people were afflicted and deserted, and how society and morality were turned upside down (“People behaved as though their days were numbered, and treated their belongings and their own persons with equal abandon.”). It’s gripping history, told in an elegant and serious tone you don’t find elsewhere in The Decameron—good stuff.
Best Line: “No mortal being who is without experience of love can ever lay claim to true excellence” (IV, 4).
What’s Sexy: What isn’t? The Decameron has as much sex as any Best American Erotica collection—and many more priests. The sexiest tales are II, 10 (the lover is better than the husband); 1 (naughty nuns!); III, 10 (“putting the devil back in Hell”); 2 (hickey reference, see below); V, 4 (how many times will the “nightingale” sing?); V, 10 (gays! horny wives! threesomes!); the intro to Book VI (no virgins in the neighborhood); VII, 2 (the original tale of the tub); VII, 9 (some pear tree!); VII, 10 (“tilling” the garden); VIII, 2 (the “grinder’s art”); VIII, 8 (wife-swapping!); IX, 6 (“tacked hard to windward again and again”); IX, 10 (pin the tail on the …). The conclusion to Book V also contains a bunch of salacious puns that, sadly, are considerably more funny in Italian.
Quirky Fact: The Decameron has perhaps the first high-literature reference to a hickey: “Take a look under your left breast, where I gave the Angel such an enormous kiss that it will leave a mark there for the best part of a week.” (IV, 2) Five centuries later, Swinburne will become the great poet of the osculatory bruise, but Boccaccio might well be Europe’s first to make that particular mark (I couldn’t resist).
What to Skip: All ten days’ introductions and conclusions can be skipped or skimmed (though the songs are pretty good at the end of each day). Apart from those, here’s a tale-by-tale breakdown. Note: the ones I don’t describe and advise you to skip are all pretty lame and repetitive somebody-tricking-somebody stories. You won’t miss anything.
I: Tale 1 is great (an archsinner “confesses” on his deathbed and is sainted); 5 is okay (a noblewoman resisting the king of France); the rest are skippable.
II: Skip 1–6; 7 has the story of a woman with eight lovers taken to be a virgin; skip 8; 9 is skippable but begins with an argument about women’s constancy; 10 is great (about a wife choosing to get what she wants).
III: Tale 1 has a young buck pretending to be dumb so that he can get hired by some naughty nuns—funny and sexy; 2, 3, and 4 are okay (all have decent tricks); skip 5; 6 celebrates a woman suckered into having sex—not so kosher; skip 7 unless you want to read a long critique of the friars of the time; skip 8 and 9; 10 is straight-out vulgar, convincing a pious girl to “put the devil back in Hell”—you can imagine.
IV: Tale 1 is gruesome—a woman’s lover’s heart is sent to her in a chalice—but has the first real emotion in the book in Ghismonda’s monologue; 2 is okay and has the hickey line mentioned in Quirky Fact (opposite page); 3 and 4 can be skipped, though the latter contains the “Best Line” above; 5 has the famous story of the basil plant growing madly with a head buried in its pot—still rather skippable; 6–10 can all be skipped.
V: Tales 1–3 can be skipped; 4 is funny and sexy, a crafty response to being caught sleeping in the wrong bed; 5–8 can be skipped; 9 is okay—a man sacrificing everything for a woman’s love—and has some more feeling; 10 is among the raciest of the tales, with the wife complaining that since the husband deserts her “to go trudging through the dry stuff with clogs on”—he’s gay—she’ll “get someone to come aboard for the wet” and arguing that “women exist for no other purpose but to do this and to bear children.” It ends with what might be a threesome—or at least a husband and wife passing a boy back and forth.
VI: Tales 1–4 can be skipped; 5 also, though it contains interesting comments on the early Renaissance painter Giotto; 6 is good—with a very novel way of insulting an old family; 7 and 8 should be skipped; 9 discusses the poet Guido Cavalcanti (a contemporary of Dante’s whose father appears in Inferno) but can be skipped; and 10 can be skipped too.
VII: Skip 1; 2 is funny and sexy (“honey, go outside for a while; I think there’s a werewolf”); 3 and 4 stink; 5 is good and has one of the best-thought-out tricks (“It’s an edifying sight, I must say, when a mere woman leads an intelligent man by the nose”); 6–8 can be skipped; 9 is clever and sexy (again the wife outsmarts the jealous husband); 10 reveals that in Hell, everyone’s had sex with someone they weren’t supposed to. Sums up Boccaccio’s worldview.
VIII: Tale 1 is okay (how to sleep with a man’s wife for free); 2 has a randy priest—again—but is pretty funny; 3–5 should be skipped; 6 is funny—and contains candies made out of dog shit; 7 recommends that one never try to get the better of a scholar (a sentiment I’d like to endorse, but I fear we academics have fallen off a bit since the fourteenth century) but should still be skipped; 8 is okay, especially if you’re into polyamory; 9 has some decent slapstick verbal humor but can be skipped; and skip 10.
IX: Skip 1; 2 is okay—more naughty nuns; 3 has a man tricked into thinking he’s pregnant because his wife was on top during sex—not quite sure what to say about that—but is otherwise skippable; 4 and 5 can be skipped; 6 is the source of Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale—very funny; 7 is okay (variation on never cry wolf); 8 can be skipped; 9 is ultramisogynistic, told by one of the ladies but recommending that all women be beaten by their husbands—not to my taste; 10 brings it back a little with a bawdy tale of the adult version of pin the tail on the donkey.
X: Skip 1 and 2—and 3 as well, unless you’re an anthropologist studying potlatch ceremonies; skip 4 unless you like necrophilial feel-ups; skip 5 and 6 but read 7 with its sweet and good older man (a rarity, at least here); skip the boring academic sophism of 8 and the straightforward, Arabian Nights-y 9; then, with 10, decide if you want to read the famous tale of Griselda, the peasant girl picked to marry a nobleman but forced to endure horrific tests of her submissiveness and resiliency. It’s a highly misogynistic tale and not one I’d recommend. But it is famous.
Author’s Epilogue: Pretty cute, tongue-in-cheek defense against various things The Decameron could be criticized for, including having “taken too many liberties.” My favorite line is one that perhaps applies to this book as well: “The lady who is forever saying her prayers, or baking pies and cakes for her father confessor, may leave my stories alone.” The very last line, by the way, where Boccaccio says The Decameron is “otherwise known as Prince Galahalt” is a reference to a famous panderer, cited by Francesca in Inferno as well, suggesting that he hopes The Decameron will help get some couples two-backing. And it probably did.