In 1348, the Black Death, the most devastating epidemic in European history, swept across the continent. Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75), at the beginning of his famous Decameron, describes its effects on his city, Florence. Many people just dropped dead in the street. Others died in their houses, often unattended by their families. Husbands and wives, fearing infection, sat and prayed in separate rooms. Mothers walked away from their children and closed the door. In the words of a new translation of the Decameron (Norton), by Wayne A. Rebhorn, a specialist in Renaissance literature at the University of Texas, the Florentines

carried the bodies of the recently deceased out of their houses and put them down by the front doors, where anyone passing by, especially in the morning, could have seen them by the thousands. . . . When all the graves were full, enormous trenches were dug in the cemeteries of the churches, into which the new arrivals were put by the hundreds, stowed layer upon layer like merchandise in ships, each one covered with a little earth, until the top of the trench was reached.

Shops stood empty. Churches shut down. An estimated sixty per cent of the population of Florence and the surrounding countryside died.

And so begins the Decameron. Seven young ladies, friends—Pampinea, Filomena, Neifile, Fiammetta, Elissa, Lauretta, and Emilia—meet after Mass. They range in age from eighteen to twenty-eight, and they are all of genteel birth. Let’s get out of here, Pampinea, the eldest, says. Let’s go to our country estates. The other women say that they’d love to, but they think they should bring some men along. Soon, they assemble three gentlemen linked to them by kinship or by affection—Filostrato, Dioneo, and Panfilo—and the ten young people decamp at dawn for the countryside.

They agree on a routine. In the morning and in the evening, they will take walks, sing songs, and eat exquisite meals, with fine wines, golden and red. In between, they will sit together and each will tell a story on a theme set for the day: generosity, magnanimity, cleverness, etc. They will stay together for two weeks. Two days must be devoted to personal obligations, and two to religious duties. That leaves ten days. Ten tales times ten days: at the end, they will have a hundred stories. That collection, with various introductions and commentaries, is the Decameron.

Boccaccio wrote the book between 1348 and 1352, when the values of the Middle Ages (valor, faith, transcendence) were yielding to those of the Renaissance (enjoyment, business, the real). The Middle Ages were by no means over. Boccaccio’s young ladies do not assemble in real meadows, where bugs might crawl up their dresses. They gather in ideal fields. Birds sing; jasmine perfumes the air. The animals don’t know to be afraid of humans: little rabbits come and sit with the young people. This is the locus amoenus, or “pleasant place,” of ancient and medieval pastoral poetry. It is a sort of paradise, and that is what it is based on: Eden.

Social relations, too, are idealized, and imbued with the conventions of medieval courtly love. The Decameron has not just one frame—the young people in the countryside—but two. In the outer one, Boccaccio speaks to the reader directly. He is writing this book, he says, for ladies afflicted by love: “Gracious ladies,” “amiable ladies,” the narrators begin. And, whatever the day’s theme, love figures prominently in perhaps nine out of ten tales. As in the songs of the medieval troubadours, love ennobles you. In one story, a young man known locally as “stupid ass” no sooner falls in love than he begins to dress elegantly and to study philosophy.

Boccaccio was not a noble; he was one of the nuova gente, the mercantile middle class, whose steady rise since the twelfth century the nobles feared and deplored. Boccaccio’s father, Boccaccino di Chellino, was a merchant, and he expected Giovanni to join the trade. Giovanni was born illegitimate, but Boccaccino acknowledged him. When the boy was thirteen, Boccaccino moved from Florence to Naples to work for an important counting house, and he took his son with him, to learn the business: receive clients, oversee inventory, and the like. Boccaccio did not enjoy this work, and so his indulgent father paid for him to go to university, to study canon law. Boccaccio didn’t like that, either, but during this time he read widely. (The Decameron is, unostentatiously, a very learned book.) He also began to write: romances in verse and prose, mostly. With those literary credits, plus his father’s contacts, he gained entry to Naples’s Angevin court, whose refinements seeped into his work. He later said that he had never wanted to be anything but a poet. In Naples, he became one, of the late-medieval stripe. These were the happiest years of his life.