Decameron

Author: (Italian) Giovanni Boccaccio / Chen Shidan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-09-01
Features: The Decameron is a classic of world literature, written by Giovanni Boccaccio, an Italian novelist of the Renaissance (1313-1375). The work depicts how ten young men and women fled to a villa in the suburbs of Florence during the plague outbreak in 1348, Italy. They engaged in singing and dancing, and each person told a story every day. After ten days, they told a total of one hundred stories, hence the name The Decameron. Boccaccio wove these one hundred stories together, making them both individually independent and interconnected, forming a whole that is unified in theme in both thought and art. This work exposes the cruelty of the feudal system and the hypocrisy of the Church. It played an active role in the struggle against feudal morality and religious authority in medieval Europe. Here, one of the stories is selected for publication, with minor in the translation. The Decameron draws its stories from a wide range of sources, including historical events, medieval legends, Eastern folk tales (especially those from Arabia, India, and China, such as One Thousand and One Nights, The Book of the Seven Sages, The Travels of Marco Polo, etc.), anecdotes, and street gossip, blending the characteristics of classical and folk literature. The one hundred stories in The Decameron create a large cast of characters, including kings, nobles, knights, monks, as well as beggars, laborers, commoners, and people from all walks of life. Characters from different social strata and professions all have distinct personalities. Boccaccio is considered a human in European literary history for using realist techniques to depict such a broad life scene. Italian literary theorist Francesco de Sanctis (1817–1883) compared The Decameron to Dante’s The Divine Comedy and called it The Human Comedy. The characters in The Decameron are diverse, and the plots are varied, but what runs through the entire work is the humanist thought, which is the core of Renaissance literature. The Renaissance was a movement in 13th to 16th-century Europe that revived Greek and Roman classical literature and scholarship. It was an anti-feudal, anti-theocratic intellectual liberation movement as Europe transitioned from a feudal society to a modern capitalist society. For over a thousand years before the Renaissance, Christian culture dominated Europe, brutally suppressing what it called "pagan" classical culture. The core of classical culture was humanism and secularism, advocating that humans are the measure of all things and that earthly happiness is "the highest good." Christian culture, on the other hand, centered on divine authority and the afterlife, advocating asceticism and self-denial in the world. Capitalist production developed earlier in Italy, and the emerging bourgeoisie, to break free from the feudal production relations, religious doctrines, and medieval ideologies that hindered its development, promoted individual liberation, emphasized earthly life, and propagated a "human-centered" philosophy. The Renaissance movement thus emerged. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, the three founders of Italian literature, were pioneers of the Renaissance. In The Divine Comedy, Dante cast many Catholic popes and archbishops into hell, had his beloved Roman "pagan" poet Virgil guide him through hell and purgatory, and had Beatrice, his youthful muse, guide him through paradise. This fully demonstrates his hatred for the Catholic Church, his opposition to asceticism, and his affirmation of earthly happiness. Petrarch, in his best work Canzoniere, broke free from the constraints of medieval asceticism and theological thought, expressing a new worldview centered on humans and real life, as well as a love-centered perspective centered on personal happiness. Boccaccio’s thought went further than Petrarch’s. In many stories of The Decameron, he critiques the Catholic Church, satirizes its vices and darkness, and denounces the cunning and hypocrisy of monks, expressing the demands of the common people at the time to break free from the shackles of the Church and religion; he also mercilessly exposes and scourges the corruption and decadence of feudal nobles. The Decameron devotes considerable space to depicting and praising earthly life, condemning asceticism, praising love as the source of wisdom and noble sentiments, admiring the ingenuity of the common people, merchants, and the emerging bourgeoisie, and advocating social and gender equality. However, Boccaccio lived in a transitional period between the old and the new, and he could not completely escape the influence of medieval thought. Some of his works contain undesirable elements, with certain stories exaggerating passion and lacking refinement, reflecting a bourgeois life philosophy centered on individualism; other stories promote tolerance and submission, delivering feudal sermons, showing the humanist thought’s compromise with medieval moral concepts and the contradictions and vacillations in the author’s worldview. The Decameron has a tight structure, concise prose, and witty language, with outstanding achievements in psychological portrayal and character development. It laid the foundation for Italian artistic prose and pioneered the artistic form of the European short story. After its publication, it was immediately translated into languages across Western Europe and had a significant impact on Western European realism in the 16th and 17th centuries. Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in England and Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron in France are imitations of The Decameron. La Fontaine, Lope de Vega, Shakespeare, Lessing, Goethe, and Pushkin all referenced stories from The Decameron in their works.