They meet at the Santa Maria Novella cathedral in Florence and discuss their plans. They want to escape the city, not just for their health but to maintain hope for the future. During this moment of crisis, seven young women from rich and noble families gather together. Traditional relationships and morals are forgotten at a time when so many people are dying in the streets. The plague is killing many people and the extent of the death and suffering means that social order and institutions are on the point of collapse. “For centuries, doctors continued to prescribe emotional balance as key to overall health, especially in times of epidemic outbreaks numerous healers have specifically advocated a form of narrative or literary prevention.The Decameron opens with a description of the Black Death that is ravaging the Italian city of Florence in 1348.
It was a brilliant diversion from the onslaught of pandemic disease. But it wasn’t about the pest: it was about the foibles of love and lust. Most Tuscans could not read at all, actually, but they could certainly be read to.Īnd what they heard or read themselves was essentially the first Italian literary work to tackle the pestilenza. But the book was wildly popular among the middling classes, the “merchants, bankers, shop owners, and workers.” Few of them knew Latin. For one thing, it was written in the vernacular Tuscan and elites still used Latin. While a direct relationship between Boccaccio’s success and the new literary cure is impossible to pin down, the fact remains that after the Decameron began circulating, doctors started to “specifically advocate literary pursuits as a way of diverting the mind and maintaining spirits high.”īoccaccio’s work was not much appreciated by the “cultural and intellectual elite” of Florence. That means that “just as Boccaccio was inspired by contemporary medical theories for his frame story, it is also likely that Boccaccio influenced his contemporary society, in particular the medical community.”įourteenth-century medical treatises of the time of the initial outbreak of the Black Death in Europe had “physicians propose that happiness lifts people’s spirits and strengthens their mind and body so that they will not succumb to contagion.” “Laughter is the best medicine” is an old tradition.Īfter 1351, what Marafioti calls “narrative prophylaxis”-reading, storytelling, and singing, the obvious lessons of the Decameron-were added to the doctors’ regimes for fighting disease and, especially, the emotional horror of mass death suffered by survivors. After the Decameron began circulating, doctors started to “specifically advocate literary pursuits as a way of diverting the mind and maintaining spirits high.”Īs Marafioti explains, the Decameron spread widely and to great acclaim among the middle class in the latter part of the Trecento-that is, the fourteenth century in Italian culture.
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