Explication:
Reading: W&H: 1774-1812, Boccaccio's Decameron.

Both Boccaccio & Cervantes claim that they are reporting facts.  Their works are fiction, so why do they claim a kind of historic facticity for their works?
p. 1777     I cannot otherwise tell you how the tales you are about to read
                came to be told, I am forced by necessity to write in this [realistic] manner

Realism contrasts with medieval romance (such as tales of King Arthur), fairy tales & tales about saints.  Realism is about this world, not the next world.  In comparison, Renaissance writers suggest, works like Dante's Divine Comedy are fantasy.  Boccaccio discovered or invented a highly effective kind of realism that begins with a horrific account of historical events & then slides into telling the stories.  Consequently there is never an opportunity for the reader to challenge the writer's authority in regard to how real the work may be.

How gripping Boccaccio's opening is:
1777     In the year 1348 . . . Florence was attacked by deadly plague.
            Against this plague all human wisdom & foresight were vain.

What seems to be the most likely inference to make?  That if human wisdom & planning are vain, we should turn to prayer.  Time & again Boccaccio refuses this retreat into medievalism.  Instead of inviting us to go back to the monastery, Boccaccio plays physician to describe symptoms & etiology (causes of the disease):
1777      To speak to or go near the sick brought infection & . . . death

Boccaccio then tells us how various people responded to the threat:
1778      Some though that moderate living . . . would preserve them from the epidemic.  They
             formed small communities, living entirely separate from everybody else.

Our characters, in fact, adopt this strategy.  Other people:
1778      thought the sure cure for the plague was to drink & be merry, to go about singing & amusing
             themselves, satisfying every appetite they could

The narrator confesses that:
1778     the authority of human & divine laws almost disappeared.
            Every man was therefore able to do as he pleased.

This might be called the motto of the Renaissance.  Boccaccio's counterpart in France was Rabelais.  In his very funny work, Gargantua, Rabelais imagines a new monastery whose motto is: "do as thou wilt."  The medieval outlook was dedicated to exactly the opposite: to denying every appetite & interest that might attach one to this world.  The monastery was designed as a preparation for the next world, which required turning away from this world. If you follow your desires (concupiscence), they will lead you straight to hell, as Dante illustrated.  The monastery offered to help you resist your desires thereby bringing you to the pearly gates.  I doubt that many of you have visited a Catholic monastery.  I recall helping with the construction of a Carmelite monastery for nuns when I was perhaps a 7th grader.  I was shocked to find that the nuns slept on a thin straw tick & ate, standing up, at a table where the centerpiece was a human skull.  Of course talking was forbidden, much less TV, radio, or telephone.  Your "cell" in a monastery is likely to be no more plush than a prison cell.  Boccaccio doesn't invent a new monastery, but his imagined country retreat resembles nothing so much as a liberal arts college where he can illustrate that, if refined people are able to do as they please, the result will not be anarchy & sin, but Renaissance art, refinement, & elegance.

Boccaccio's young woman take the lead in determining to escape the black death & the dark ages, saying:
1781    In my opinion we remain her [in Florence] for no other purpose than to witness how many bodies are buried..

Staying in Florence not only exposes them to disease, but to crime (rape) as well:
1782     The few [people] that remain . . . do anything which gives them pleasure or pleases their appetites,
            both by day & night, whether they are alone or in company, making n distinction between right & wrong.
            Not only laymen, but those cloistered in convents have broken their oaths & given themselves up to the
            delights of the flesh, & thus in trying to escape the plague by doing what they please, they have become
            lascivious & dissolute.

Monastic discipline is only a habit or a threat imposed by someone else's authority.  As soon as the objective authority & threat is removed, people revert to what they are.  The Renaissance will propose a change from within.  Education, rather than religion, will be the key institution.  Not the monastery, but the university will graduate men & women devoted to making this world a better place in which to live.

Our young women (18-28 years old) proposes to take refuge in one of their families' summer home.  One of the young women is worried:
1783     Remember we are all women: & any girl can tell you how women behave together & conduct
            themselves without the direction of some man.  We are fickle, wayward, suspicious, faint-hearted & cowardly.
            Indeed men are a woman's head & we can rarely succeed in anything without their help.

I know this is unforgivably pre-21st century, but there is more at work here than male chauvinism or easy jokes on the universal theme of the war of the sexes.  Remember the theme.  Everything in the work has a reason for being there.  That reason is to illustrate the theme; & the theme is to denigrate medieval values & to advocate Renaissance values.  The central institution of the medieval world was the monastery that required celibacy as part of the project of rejecting the enjoyment of life in this world.  The counter model offered by the Renaissance must be more natural, acknowledging, e.g., sexual relation as natural.  Our liberal arts college must be co-ed.  This is why the young woman is skeptical about the chances for success, if the retreat regresses into some kind of nunnery.

She has a second reason for saying such unflattering things about women.  It is morally preferable to disparage one's self rather than to admit a sexual interest in the boys.  Nonetheless, our young lady worries about reputations:
3.55      It is known to everyone that they are in love with some us women here; & so, if we taken them 
            with us, I am afraid that blame & infamy will fall upon us, through no fault of ours or theirs.
 
Doesn't this strain our credulity?  The guys are in love with them, but there is nothing romantic going on!  In any case the guys get invited & attention turns to the description of the college retreat:

1784     a country mansion with a large inner courtyard.  It had open colonnades, galleries & rooms, all
            beautiful in themselves & ornamented with gay paintings.  Roundabout were lawns & marvelous
            gardens & wells of cool water.  There were cellars of fine wines . . . .  The whole house had been
            cleaned, the beds were prepared in the rooms, & every corner was strewn with the flowers of the season . . . .

You should be attending such a college where the motto is:
1784     let us amuse ourselves, for that was the reason why we fled from our sorrows.

You may not recognize how revolutionary this is.  The medieval view would have considered the invitation to amuse yourself as issued by the devil with the result illustrated by Dante's Inferno.  It is easy to juggle the syntax of that sentence a little to read: let us amuse ourselves, for that is the reason we were born into this world, which is not a vale of sorrow, but an invitation to pleasure.  Wouldn't you like to attend classes conducted like this:

1785     The company of gay young men & women . . . went off together slowly through the gardens,
            talking of pleasant matters, weaving garlands of different leaves, & singing love songs.

At lunch:
1786     Delicately cooked food was brought, exquisite wines were at hand, & the 3 men servants waited at table.

After lunch there is dancing:
1786     All the ladies & young men could dance & many of them could play & sing; so, when the tables
            were cleared . . . they began to sing gay & charming songs.

Settled into their new college retreat, the young people decide to pass the time by telling entertaining stories, the very ones we will read. Before we analyze the stories in our text, there is one more question we should ask.  Why are the Renaissance writers so ribald?  Chaucer, Rabelais, &, to a lesser degree, Boccaccio, all tell bawdy sexual tales.  Why?  I guess we could say that this is universal, but we did not find bawdy stories in the ancient Greek world, even though there was a frank recognition of sex.  Whenever questions like this arise, what should we do?  Go back to remember the theme & argument.  In this case we need to remember that Renaissance writers are not writing in Latin but in the vernacular.  Latin is an artificial language, not taught by moms to babies, but by school masters to fidgety boys. Artificial languages have no connection with anyone's emotions & dreams.  In contrast, one's so-called mother tongue has exactly this emotional dimension.  In addition, Renaissance writers are addressing a very different audience: not exactly common folks (who were illiterate), but people who wanted to be entertained instead of threatened & lectured.  What is the topic of conversation & gossip in the streets or in the student union?  Romance.  This is why Chaucer & Rabelais & Boccaccio write bawdy stories -- for the sake of realism & because this is what real people gossip about.  Real people are not plaster cast saints.  Your text recognizes that Boccaccio portrayed:
1775     women not as etherealized ideals [of the Virgin Mary -- like Dante did] but as realistic creatures of 
            flesh & blood who are driven as much by desire as men are.
 
 
 
 
 

After pasoney:
11.95     usury offends
             divine goodness
11.106   if you recall
             the ea

The violent are condemned to simmer in:
11.46    theers.
When the condemned dare to rise above the blood, they become a target for centaurs:
1170     Chirow.

The nity as trees:
13.107  in the of trees]

Flatters are:
18.112    down in the ditch
              . . . plunged in excrement
              which seemed to have come from human privies.
The idement."

We s based on:
Matthew 16.18    thou art Petech

Simonists who:
19.3   prostitute the things of God
         for gold & silver
find themselvesout:
19.73    under mes of the rock.
They mu rock.

I dol:
20.13    forbackward.

Daw or Christian.
20.40    See Tmembers

Those risters):
21.42    for money, a "no" becomes a "yes.".

Theirtion:
21.49    Hean!

Dante says:
22.16    I was  sinew.

This victim let criminals go for bribes:
22.85    money he took, & let them off quietly

Hypocrites, a "painted people," wear heavy gowns:
23.61    they wovy

Eveys:
24.46   Now youon water.

Such ego formation has no ground in Christianity where the model is Paul who said, "I live not, but Christ in me."

One of the scariest scenes in the Inferno is "The Metamorphosis of Thieves" in canto 25.  The sinner makes the mistake of giving the finger to God:
25.1    the this

Do yoplaces:
25.70    The 2gh the ditch.
The lizard now takes the shape of the shade/man.

We finnfess:
27.94    ne of men.
AppareMuhelf:
28.24   split frswallowed.
& if the body heals or grows back together:
28.37    A devil is here behind us who cuts us
            thus cruelly with the edge of his sword,
            reopening all the wounds.

You know Dant is his explanation of thunder:.
31.43    the horrible giants [Titans], whom Jove [Jupiter/Zeus] still threatens
            when he thunders in the heavens

Dante provides a humorous theory of evolution:
31.49    when ust

Dante ted death:
33.130    its body passed..

Once  at birth.

Satan is:
34.28      The emperor of the dolorous realm
              [who] from mid-breast protruded from the ice

In a nightmare mirror image of the trinity, Satan has 3 heads:
34.55     In each mouth he chewed a sinner with his teeth

We athe Hun:
12.34 who was a scourge on earth
is hardly roasting at all back in the 7th circle (p. 1433).

What ple the majesty of Catholic Rome.

Somehow the sn:
34.73     the shaggy sides
             & desc frozen crust.

This rust.
 

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