The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio

Published 1353 · 422 pages · 297,633 words · about 20 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Modernist & Experimental Fiction, Satire & Humor, Short Fiction

How hard is The Decameron to read?

The Decameron scores 47 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 45 out of 100
Modern English translations render Boccaccio's Tuscan prose into accessible, lively storytelling. Occasional period terms for religious orders, courtly customs, and mercantile life.
Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
Nested frame narrative with stories within stories, but each individual tale is told in clear, flowing prose. Sentences are longer than modern fiction but grammatically direct.
Abstraction: 42 out of 100
Boccaccio stays close to the body: sex, money, food, trickery, and revenge. The philosophical content emerges from the comedy rather than being argued directly.
Information density: 52 out of 100
One hundred tales across ten days, each with its own cast, setting, and plot. Dense in aggregate but each story is a compact, efficient narrative.
Narrative indirection: 48 out of 100
The frame story of plague refugees adds a layer of mediation, but the tales themselves are direct, comic, and plot-driven. Boccaccio tells rather than implies.
Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
The plague frame symbolizes social dissolution and renewal. Individual stories use conventional motifs (gardens, disguises, religious hypocrisy) without heavy allegorical weight.
Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
Boccaccio treats clerical corruption and sexual intrigue with amused detachment. Nuns seduce gardeners, priests deceive husbands, and the narrator observes it all with urbane pleasure.
Resolution withholding: 25 out of 100
Each of the hundred tales delivers a crisp punchline or moral reversal. The frame story closes neatly with the group's return to Florence.
Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
Elaborate frame narrative with ten storytellers across ten days, thematic groupings for each day, and a plague frame that contextualizes the whole enterprise.

How The Decameron is regarded

The Decameron holds a literary regard score of 89 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where The Decameron sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (619 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, The Decameron scores 60 out of 100. A second mythos, irony, pulls at it with a weight of 0.25. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
He was belike the worst man that ever was born.
Symbol: Formal
This usance, amongst many other places, was current at Palermo in Sicily, where likewise there were and are yet many women
Mythos: Normal Comedy iii (comedy iii)
Let this grisly beginning be none other to you than is to wayfarers a rugged and steep mountain, beyond which is situate a most fair and delightful plain
Genre: Novel + Anatomy
to recount an hundred stories or fables or parables or histories or whatever you like to style them

Where the story of The Decameron takes place

  • Florence, 1348, the main setting
  • Athens and Rome under the Triumvirate (Titus and Gisippus) (43 BCE to 27 BCE)
  • Saladin and the Third Crusade, Pavia and Alexandria (1187 to 1192)
  • Medieval Italy and the Mediterranean: Naples, Palermo, Venice, Alexandria, Genoa (1200 to 1348)
  • Plague-stricken Florence and the hill villas outside it, 1348

5 things that are true of The Decameron, with the passage for each

  1. The company that flees the plague consists of seven young women and three young men who meet in Santa Maria Novella.

    there foregathered in the venerable church of Santa Maria Novella, one Tuesday morning when there was well nigh none else there, seven young ladies

  2. Boccaccio's narrator says over a hundred thousand people died in Florence between March and July.

    it is believed for certain that upward of an hundred thousand human beings perished within the walls of the city of Florence

  3. The first story's villain, the worst of men, is honoured as a saint after his death.

    they styled and yet style him Saint Ciappelletto

  4. Dioneo bargains to be free of each day's assigned theme and always to tell last.

    And that none may think I seek this favour as one who hath not stories, in hand, from this time forth I am content to be still the last to tell.

  5. In the falcon story Federigo kills his only remaining hawk to feed the lady who has come to ask for it.

    he wrung the hawk's neck and hastily caused a little maid of his pluck it and truss it

Scenes in The Decameron that Frye would name

28 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Anagnorisis, untitled
'It is my lord, it is indeed Messer Torello!' Adalieta finds her ring in the cup and recognises her husband at her second wedding feast.
Demonic imagery, untitled
there were made throughout the churchyards, after every other part was full, vast trenches, wherein those who came after were laid by the hundred The plague mass graves, with the dead stowed in layers, are the book's demonic image of the dissolved city.
Alazon, untitled
Know, then, that, when I was little, I once cursed my mother. Ciappelletto, a monster of vice, plays pious penitent and deceives the friar.
Lyric, untitled
I burn for mine own charms with such a fire, A canzone sung in the evening round, one of many embedded songs at the end of each day.
Anagnorisis, untitled
espied on his breast a great vermeil spot, not painted, but naturally imprinted on his skin Fineo recognises his lost son Teodoro by a birthmark as he is led to the gallows.
Sparagmos, untitled
ripped open her loins and tearing forth her heart and all that was thereabout, cast them to the two mastiffs, who devoured them incontinent Nastagio watches the infernal hunt: the damned woman torn apart and devoured.

Books that share these scenes with The Decameron

About the author

Giovanni Boccaccio