From Black Death to New World: Giovanni Boccaccio’s "Decameron" 

Written in the wake of the plague that devastated Europe between 1346 and 1353, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron is a remarkable book that served both to fix the calamity in his fellow Florentine’s collective memory and to point the way to a wide range of possibilities for imagining the future. This talk will first take into consideration Boccaccio’s eye-witness account of the ‘Black Death’ in Florence (that killed upwards of two-thirds of the city’s population over eight months in 1348) and then explore one of the ten days of narrated stories around which the Decameron is organized, in order to provide a glimpse of the new world Boccaccio sought to frame from the ruins of the old order.
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