Giovanni Boccaccio

The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio, who lived from 1313 to 1375, has become one of the best-known works of medieval literature. According to the author, this collection of one hundred stories was recounted by a group of ten young men and women who sought refuge from the plague in a country house. In his introduction to The Decameron, which is excerpted here, Boccaccio created a graphic and disturbing description of the plague that became, through the fame of the book that follows, the best-known contemporary account of the Black Death.

Although The Decameron is fictional, the setting of the book and the circumstances described in the introduction were all too real. Nevertheless, historians have long debated whether Boccaccio himself was ever present in the city of Florence during the Black Death. If not, he was given details of the...