Recently read: The Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio
I read the abridged Norton Critical Edition of The Decameron in college, but decided a few months ago that it was high time I read the whole thing. I’ve been reading it off and on since, 10 or 20 stories at a time with extended breaks for other books.
This is a really delightful collection of stories, spanning a range of topics from “people who have attained something they desired through their ingenuity or who have recovered something they once lost” (Day III) to “the tricks which, either out of love or for their own self-preservation, wives have played on their husbands, whether these tricks were discovered or not” (Day VII) to “those who have acted generously or magnificently in affairs of the heart or other matters” (Day X) and carefully arranged to play off each other. The stories are almost shockingly irreverent, funny, lewd (including at least two stories, VII 2 and VII 9, in which women have sex with their lovers in the presence of their husbands),1 and cruel (e.g. VIII 7, X 10, much of Day IV), often all at once (as in, for example, the Calandrino stories), but, for all that, are rather pleasantly pre-modern in their un-selfconscious lack of irony.
1 This doesn’t even count the arrangements made at the ends of V 10 and VIII 8.
