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| photo credit: Penn Provenance Project via photopin cc
Woodcutting from German translation by Heinrich Steinhowel
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Giovanni Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (On Famous Women)
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The particular story I'm talking about was so scandalous it wasn't translated into English until the nineteenth century, but nevertheless, that means it was translated in Victorian times.
You might be thinking, wow, that's so random, why would I ever have a character read something like this in a piece of fiction? There are lots of reasons to have characters read historical literature - to give them a different historical perspective, to show the audience what kinds of things that character knows about or thinks about, or to just bring up a title that other people will know, which gives the reader a sense of game show pleasure - "Hey I know what that is!" Admit it, you've felt good when you saw a historical title brought up in a book and you new what it was. ; )
Ok, on with the post. So it turns out that story I told you about was the tenth story of the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375AD/CE). The Decameron is a fictional story about a group of 10 young men and women from Florence who tell 100 stories in 10 days while they wait out the worst plague that ever hit Europe. The stories are so racy that Giovanni Boccaccio saw it fit to defend it to readers in an epilogue:
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photo credit: Penn Provenance Project via photopin cc
Woodcutting from German translation by Heinrich Steinhowel
of
Giovanni Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (On Famous Women)
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The story I'm talking about is called "Locking the Devil Up in Hell" and was the tenth story told on the third day. It's actually a very significant story because years later after Giovanni Boccaccio had taken religious orders, he set out to destroy all of his earlier "sinful" writings, but at the last minute a friend, Francis Petrarch (another big deal writer in history) sent him a letter that talked him out of burning his writings.
Thank goodness because this story was later hailed as the first European example of a novella or short story. That's huge! He almost burned that!
The information for this post was acquired from The Longman Anthology of World Literature Volume C The Early Modern Period.
Read "Locking the Devil up in Hell" to read the filthiest but most important short story literature ever.
Read the entire Decameron on Project Gutenberg.
Visit Wikipedia's Decameron Page to learn more or visit the Harvard Decameron Page. You are going to laugh when you see how similar the Harvard's information site looks to Wikipedia's site.
Read a summary of the stories from Decameron on the Wikipedia Summary of Decameron Tales page.
I can't believe there is a page out there with "Fun Facts" about Decameron but there it is.
The Roles of Men and Women in Decameron on Student Impulse.
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| photo credit: Penn Provenance Project via photopin cc
Woodcutting from German translation by Heinrich Steinhowel
of
Giovanni Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (On Famous Women)
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DISCUSSION: So did you read it? What do you guys think about it? Comment below or discuss on The Unhinged Historian Facebook Page - please become a fan - we need 25 likes to get our own URL.
About Stephanie CarrollStephanie Carroll is the author of A White Room and "Forget Me Not" featured in Legacy: An Anthology. She blogs about magical realism, her research into the Victorian Era and Gilded Age, writing, and life in general at www.stephaniecarroll.net and at The Unhinged Historian. She also founded Unhinged and Empowered, a blog for Navy wives and girlfriends.
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I have The Decameron and have read a bit of it. I don't remember this story but now I want to go pull out my copy. I find the idea of a group of people waiting out a plague horrifying but highly readable!
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