The Decameron, by John William Waterhouse. 1916. Lady Lever Art Gallery, UK. • WIKIMEDIA COMMONS / LADY LEVER ART GAL Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), known in French as Boccace, is considered one of the creators of the Italian language. If Dante invented it by choosing poetry above all, Boccaccio used it mainly in prose, writing a very famous collection of short stories:the Decameron , his major work composed during the Black Death, in 1348. Son of an Italian businessman, Boccaccio received an intellectual education in Florence and then, from 1327, in Naples, where his father represented the Bardi banking and commercial company from 1327 to 1341. There he continued to first studying canon law then, in the movement of the court of Robert of Anjou, he read the Latin classics, chivalric literature, Dante and Petrarch. He returned to Florence in 1341-1342, and his meeting with Petrarch in 1350 was decisive. Between the two men was born a great friendship which is manifested in particular by nourished epistolary exchanges. In 1362, Boccaccio retired to his father's domain of Certaldo, near Florence, and led a solitary life. He continues to write, but more in Latin than in vernacular. Each day has its theme Boccaccio wrote extensively in very diverse genres:many poems (La Caccia di Diana, Filostrato, Teseida, Amorosa Visione ), novels (Filocolo, Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta ), literary biographies, treatises, collections of exemplary lives, a commentary on The Divine Comedy of Dante, etc. But his most famous work is the Decameron (etymologically:the "book of ten days"). It is a collection of 100 short stories, written between 1349 and 1351 in an apocalyptic context, since the Black Death which fell on all of Europe decimated nearly a third of the population. Seven young women and three young men from Florentine high society, fleeing the epidemic that is ravaging the city of Florence, retire to a villa located in an idyllic countryside near the Tuscan city to escape the scourge. For ten days, each participant tells ten stories. Each day is devoted to a theme. The work therefore consists of 100 short stories, a new literary genre at the time. The stories take up material from Latin and Tuscan oral traditions, oriental stories, exempla and fabliaux. Boccaccio stages characters drawn from the reality of his time, in all its diversity (knights, merchants, notaries, bankers, craftsmen, common people). The main theme of this short story is love in all its forms. This is why Boccaccio likes to stage the feminine world. It is also a satire of society, often a very anticlerical work. And he does not hesitate to put dialogues in spoken Tuscan into the mouths of his protagonists. Locked away from the plague In the introduction to this capital work, Boccaccio described in a detailed, moving and poignant way, the arrival of the Black Death in Florence in 1348, the helplessness of men in the face of the scourge and the escape from the city of the most fortunate. of them. He writes:"I say therefore that the years which had elapsed since the fruitful Incarnation of the Son of God had reached the number of one thousand three hundred and forty-eight, when in the eminent city of Florence, of all the cities of Italy the most beautiful , came the deadly pestilence […]. And there, nothing could oppose her:despite the wisdom of human measures, such as ridding the city of its filth under the direction of people appointed to this office, such as prohibiting entry to all sick people and giving a host of advice for the preservation of health, in spite of the humility of supplications over and over again made to God by devout persons in solemn processions and in still other forms, towards the threshold of the spring of the said year, horrible it began, and in a prodigious manner, to manifest its painful effects. […] To cure these ills, the advice of doctors was apparently useless, any more than the virtue of any medicine provided no remedy […]. Some, resolving to a more cruel choice, even though it was perhaps the safest, claimed that there was no better medicine, or even so good, against pestilences than to flee from them.; and, moved by this idea, caring for nothing but themselves, many men and women left their own city, their own homes, estates, relatives and possessions, going to other campaigns or at least theirs. » Also read:The Black Death, the great tragedy of the Middle Ages This possibility of leaving the city to be lodged in the countryside is a privilege of the rich, reserved for people like Boccaccio and the ten young storytellers of the Decameron who are lucky enough to own a villa outside of Florence. With the Decameron , Boccaccio signs the first major narrative work written in vulgar prose. The success is immediate. The collection is translated throughout Europe. Boccaccio influenced the greatest, including Chaucer, La Fontaine and Molière. Since 2011 in France, the Boccace Prize has been awarded each year to an author who publishes a collection of short stories written in French. Find out more The Decameron, Boccaccio, Gallimard (Classical Folio), 2006.
