Cheap The Decameron (Book) (Giovanni Boccaccio, Mark Musa, Peter Bondanella, Peter E. Bondanella) Price

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Customer Reviews of The Decameron

Italy's Canterbury Tales
This is an awesome collection of a hundred stories told over ten days, by the young people Fiammetta, Dioneo, Filostrato, Neifile, Emilia, Elisa (or Elissa), Filomena, Panfilo, Pampinea, and Lauretta, who have temporarily left Florence because of the scariness of the Plague. Each of them also brings also a servant. The introductory chapter is really gripping, told from the pov of someone who actually lived through that devastating and frightening time when this mysterious deadly disease was sweeping through Europe, killing nearly everyone, devastating families and churches, destroying morality, and generally creating a very terrifying atmosphere. The young people spend more than ten days on hiatus from Florence, taking some of the days off for religious purposes, but most of the time is spent telling stories. Most of the days have a theme to be followed, like love stories that began sadly but ended happily, though Dioneo gets to tell a story on whatever topic he likes. Because of this privilege, he always must tell his story last.

This came before the Canterbury Tales, and I consider it a lot better. Chaucer seems to have been greatly influenced by it in that a number of his own tales are suspiciously similar to stories in here; one is admittedly even a practically word-by-word retelling of the final Decameron story. There are all sorts of people in these stories, from all walks of life, doing all kinds of things, things which many people would never think of people of this time period doing. Nearly everyone commits adultery or has premarital sex, people deceive priests and friars with false confessions, women are just as sexually demanding as the men, people cheat one another out of goods and money, women get rid of unwanted suitors, monks, nuns, friars, and priests violate their vows of chastity, even a (for the time) very risqué tale about a gay man who marries a woman as a cover for his ongoing affairs with other men. A lot of the stories are also very funny, like the priest who makes a vain woman believe the Angel Gabriel is in love with her and is using the priest's body to sleep with her every night, or (my favourite) the tale about how to put the Devil back into Hell. Women were second-class citizens and property at this time in history, yet there are plenty of spirited female characters who get what they want and are smarter than the men in their lives.

There are only a few stories in here I would consider dated doozies. The story where the moral is to learn to beat your wife so she won't assert herself and disobey her husband's every last word is repugnant, and I hate the eighth story of the fifth day. Nastagio has spent nearly all of his money trying to court a woman who doesn't like him, and after seeing a bizarre supernatural scene involving a man in his same position, a man who killed himself, he decides to invite the woman and some friends and family over to lunch the next time this scene occurs. Because he threw his weight around, this poor woman was terrified she would end up in Hell and be chased by a phantom knight and mauled by phantom dogs every Friday, and so gave in to this bully. The first story of the fifth day, about Cimone, also is very dated...how is it a happy ending to a love story when the man throws his weight around and bullies the woman into being with him? The second story in the book is also way dated and offensive-a merchant bullies his Jewish friend (typically only called by his name thrice during the story) into converting to Christianity, and the man makes a pilgrimage to Rome and comes back convinced he must convert, since Christianity thrives despite the corruption of the Vatican. That's pure Christian fantasy and just historical inaccuracy; the huge majority of Jews who changed religions in that era of time did not do so out of conviction but rather for improved social, business, or educational status. Though in the second of the stories where Saladin, the legendary Muslim ruler, appears, he is treated as one of the two heroes of the story, not some "heathen" who has no virtues and who must be converted asap.

A lot of books written during the Middle Ages are no longer remembered or in print today. There's a reason why this has stuck around for hundreds of years and is regarded as a timeless classic.

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a mammoth collection of medieval tales
This mammoth collection of short stories was written in the wake of the Bubonic Plague which killed a third of the population of Europe back in the 14th century. The stories are for the most part really good narratives, and they're told through ten young noblemen who are trying to hide out from the plague to save themselves and tell these stories to pass the time. Written in a clear, classical, controlled, strongly plotted style, these are tales about sex, violence, intrigue... but nothing gratuitous of course. Good, easy-to-read translation!

David Rehak
author of "Love and Madness"

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You can read it in 10-minute chunks
Don't be intimidated by this medieval masterpiece. It is actually just a collection of very loosely related short stories, most of which are rather comical. You need not read them in one sitting and you need not read them all. In fact, the editors provide a list of their favorite stories (an alternative view is that they are telling you which ones to skip).

Great modern translation.