#27 – Boccaccio Part Three

* So let’s talk about The Decameron. * The book’s primary title exemplifies Boccaccio’s fondness for Greek philology: * Decameron combines two Greek words, δέκα, déka (“ten”) and ἡμέρα, hēméra (“day”), to form a term that means “ten-day [event]”. * Ten days is the period in which the characters of the frame story tell their tales. * It was set during the Black Death hit Florence in 1348. * Boccaccio wasn’t there at the time, he was back in Naples. * According to Machiavelli, Florence lost 96,000 people. * Modern estimates are the population of Florence was reduced from 110,000–120,000 inhabitants in 1338 down to 50,000 in 1351. * 45–50% of the European population died during a four-year period. * It killed some 75 to 200 million people in Eurasia. * The most widely accepted estimate for the Middle East, including Iraq, Iran and Syria, during this time, is for a death rate of about a third. * about 40% of Egypt’s population. * Half of Paris’s population of 100,000 people died. * At least 60% of the population of Hamburg and Bremen perished,  and a similar percentage of Londoners may have died from the disease as well. * Renewed religious fervour and fanaticism bloomed in the wake of the Black Death. * Some Europeans targeted “various groups such as Jews, friars, foreigners, beggars, pilgrims”,  lepers,   and Romani, thinking that they were to blame for the crisis. * Lepers, and other individuals with skin diseases such as acne or psoriasis, were singled out and exterminated throughout Europe. * Because 14th-century healers were at a loss to explain the cause, Europeans turned to astrological forces, earthquakes, and the poisoning of wells by Jews as possible reasons for the plague’s emergence. * The governments of Europe had no apparent response to the crisis because no one knew its cause or how it spread. * The mechanism of infection and transmission of diseases was little understood in the 14th century; many people believed the epidemic was a punishment by God for their sins. * This belief led to the idea that the cure to the disease was to win God’s forgiveness. * There were many attacks against Jewish communities. * In February 1349, the citizens of Strasbourg murdered 2,000 Jews. * In August 1349, the Jewish communities in Mainz and Cologne were annihilated. * By 1351, 60 major and 150 smaller Jewish communities had been destroyed. * These massacres eventually died out in Western Europe, only to continue on in Eastern Europe. * During this period many Jews relocated to Poland, where they received a warm welcome from King Casimir the Great. * * But the stories the Decameron were probably written from 1344 – 1350. * He might have been writing them before the Black Death. * And then he retrofitted them into Florence and the Black Death. * It was finally published in 1353. * The book is about seven young women and three young men who run from Florence during the plague to escape infection. * They hide out in the countryside for a two weeks, of which ten days are spent storytelling, making one hundred tales in all. * Each story ends with a canzione, or song. *