The Black Death bequeathed us the ‘Decameron’. Who will be our Boccaccio?

What will be the lasting literary legacy of the coronavirus pandemic? It is of course too soon to say, but that the events we are now living though will leave their mark on world literature is certain. We only need to look at the rich crop of works inspired by the plagues of the past to surmise that this time, too, the alchemy of human ingenuity will transform the dross of pestilence into the gold of genius.

The greatest and most influential example of such a by-product of plague is Boccaccio’s Decameron. Begun during the Black Death in 1348 and completed four years later, this collection of a hundred tales is one of the seminal works of Western civilisation. Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75) was, like his maestro Dante, a Florentine. His Decameron is set in the hills of Fiesole, where a group of three young men and seven women escape from plague-stricken Florence to occupy a deserted villa.

The Black Death was particularly virulent in the Tuscan capital, where it killed three-quarters of the population. Even today, many Italians will instinctively turn to the Decameron as a source of comfort in time of contagion. The framing story — an astonishing innovation, endlessly imitated since — is irresistible.

Every evening for a fortnight the friends gather together and one of the company becomes king or queen for the day. They pass the time by telling stories, which are by turns satirical (particularly about the clergy), picaresque, bawdy and erotic. Written in the Tuscan dialect on which modern Italian is based, the Decameron is the first great flowering of late medieval humanism. Breaking with clerical and aristocratic values, it celebrates the new mercantile class and the tone is entirely secular. Indeed, the very situation — the original Tuscan holiday villa, with both sexes titillating one another with subversive tales of tricks played by women on men — would have shocked Boccaccio’s more traditional contemporaries. The dominant deity is not the God of the Church, but the pagan Fortuna, whose caprices render prayers and piety redundant. While the moral ethos of the narrators and their narratives is still Christian, there is an impatience with anything that stands in the path of true love. Like the other two great Italian writers Dante and Petrarch (who was his friend), Boccaccio clung to his conviction that love is capable of conquering all — even the Black Death. More than any previous work of Western literature, the Decameron bears witness to the birth of romanticism. If it is not the first modern work of fiction, it is certainly a turning point in the history of the novel. Incredibly, a manuscript in the author ’ s hand survives, with his final revisions dating from circa 1370.

This inexhaustible mine of mimetic fantasy has been quarried by other writers ever since. Boccaccio’s novellas have been adapted or borrowed by everyone from Chaucer and Shakespeare (All’s Well That Ends Well) to Molière and Swift, from Keats and Shelley to Tennyson and Longfellow. There have been several cinematic versions and spin-offs by Pasolini and others. The Decameron is a gift to humanity that goes on giving.

Never before, however, has this fund of fiction seemed so relevant to our present predicament. Humanity has been banished by the virulence of the virus from the public square into the private realm. And so the whole world has turned into a global Florentine villa, with the task before us to make our own entertainment, if not exactly after the gracious manner of the Italian poets. In the era of coronavirus, the Decameron has abruptly become the archetypal framing story of mankind. Pampinea, Dioneo, Panfilo, Fiammetta and the rest of Boccaccio’s young storytellers are us. We can only hope that the writers now living among us are equal to the challenge of immortalising our ordeal. The Black Death bequeathed us the Decameron. Who will be our Boccaccio?