Decameron Web from the Virtual Humanities
Using technology to facilitate, enhance and innovate reading the late medieval literary text from Boccacio
Using technology to facilitate, enhance and innovate reading the late medieval literary text from Boccacio
and its crucial role in the negotiation and production of shared social and cultural values
In its hundred stories, shared in ten days by ten young people escaping the Plague in mid-14th-century Florence, it combines sheer entertainment with a meaningful humanistic message. A tribute to human ingenuity, an epic masterpiece of a rising, dynamic mercantile society that pursues pleasure while being threatened by sudden extinction, the Decameron can be read as a transgressive and escapist manual of behavior as well as a breviary of moral predicaments intended for a secular, unprejudiced reader.
As one critic (Guido Almansi) put it: "The text can perhaps give the impression of being outrageously amoral; our reading, on the other hand, can turn into ethical meditation; the former does not exclude the other." In his Western Canon Harold Bloom thus recently acknowledges the crucial position of Boccaccio's Decameron : "Ironic storytelling whose subject is storytelling is pretty much Boccaccio's invention, and the purpose of this breakthrough was to free stories from didacticism and moralism, so that the listener or reader, not the storyteller, became responsible for their use, for good or for ill."
The Decameron has elicited throughout the centuries fundamental discussions on the nature of narrative art, on the tenets of medieval versus modern morality, on the social and …
from the Virtual Humanities
Using technology to facilitate, enhance and innovate reading the late medieval literary text from Boccacio
Brown University Box 1942 190 Hope Street Providence, RI 02912
