Love and Sex in the Time of Plague: A Decameron Renaissance

I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History

by Guido Ruggiero

As a pandemic swept across fourteenth-century Europe, the Decameron offered the ill and grieving a symphony of life and love.



For Florentines, the world seemed to be coming to an end. In 1348 the first wave of the Black Death swept across the Italian city, reducing its population from more than 100,000 to less than 40,000. The disease would eventually kill at least half of the population of Europe. Amid the devastation, Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron was born. One of the masterpieces of world literature, the Decameron has captivated centuries of readers with its vivid tales of love, loyalty, betrayal, and sex. Despite the death that overwhelmed Florence, Boccaccio's collection of novelle was, in Guido Ruggiero's words, a "symphony of life."

Love and Sex in the Time of Plague guides twenty-first-century readers back to Boccaccio's world to recapture how his work sounded to fourteenth-century ears. Through insightful discussions of the Decameron's cherished stories and deep portraits of Florentine culture, Ruggiero explores love and sexual relations in a society undergoing convulsive change. In the century before the plague arrived, Florence had become one of the richest and most powerful cities in Europe. With the medieval nobility in decline, a new polity was emerging, driven by Il Popolo--the people, fractious and enterprising. Boccaccio's stories had a special resonance in this age of upheaval, as Florentines sought new notions of truth and virtue to meet both the despair and the possibility of the moment.

Genres: History, Italy, Nonfiction

316 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 1, 2021

About the author

Guido Ruggiero, Professor of History and Cooper Fellow of the College of Arts and Sciences, was born in Danbury, Connecticut and grew up in Webster, New York, a small rural town along the old shore line of Lake Ontario. After earning a B.A. with a heavy focus on ancient history and philosophy at the University of Colorado, he went on to UCLA where as a University of California Regent's Intern Fellow he earned an M.A. (1967) and a Ph.D. (1972). As a Regent's Fellow he began his long love affair with Venice and the Venetian Archives in 1970 and has been returning there for his research ever since. He makes his home in Treviso, Italy, when he is not teaching at UM.

Professor Ruggiero has published on the history of gender, sex, crime, magic, science and everyday culture, primarily in renaissance and early modern Italy. Early in his career he focused on social science history, but his interests have expanded toward yet more interdisciplinary approaches, including microhistory, narrative history, and the melding of literature, literary criticism, and archival history. His new book, The Renaissance in Italy: A Social and Cultural History of the Rinascimento, published by Cambridge University Press recently won the AAIS (the American Association for Italian Studies) prize for the best book of 2014 on premodern Italy. A radical rethinking of the period, it has been hailed as a work that offers an exciting paradigm for the Italian Renaissance both as a period and a movement. He has also published Violence in Early Renaissance Venice (Rutgers, 1980), The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (Oxford, 1985), Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage and Power from the End of the Renaissance(Oxford, 1993), Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self and Society in Renaissance Italy (Johns Hopkins, 2007); as well as Sex and Gender in Historical Perspectives (Johns Hopkins, 1990), Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe (Johns Hopkins,1991), and History from Crime (Johns Hopkins, 1993), edited with Edward Muir. In addition he has edited The Blackwell Companion to the Renaissance (Wiley-Blackwell, 2002) and Five Comedies from the Italian Renaissance (Johns Hopkins, 2003) translated with Laura Giannetti. He also edited the series Studies in the History of Sexuality (1985-2002) for Oxford University Press and was a co-editor of the six volume, Encyclopedia of European Social History for Scribner's (2002). In addition to being a fellow or visiting professor at Harvard’s Villa I Tatti in Florence (1990-1991, 2012), the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton (1981-82; 1991), and at the American Academy in Rome (Fall, 2011), he has won a number of grants and fellowships including a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1990). Ruggiero regularly teaches classes on the Italian Renaissance, the new social and cultural history, and the uses of literature for history.

Reviews

[Adam McPhee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Helpful and elucidating book, yet The Decameron remains elusive. Alas,

[Kumar Ayush · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked it up with the theme of trying something orthogonal to my usual interests, and it was worth the time. The author has selected a few out of the 100 stories in Decameron for discussion and breakdown. They were enjoyable and illuminating.

[Alex Anderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

There was an opportunity to put Boccaccio's Decameron in dialogue with our own experience of a pandemic which wasn't taken. I felt as though I was on one of the websites that people use to summarise and analyse (on the surface) books they haven't read for high school english. To its credit, the stories of the Decameron were given in an engaging recount, but had I known it would have been a recount, I'd have just read the Decameron itself.

[Billie Pritchett · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a work of literary criticism on the tales and themes of the Decameron. It fails because its thesis doesn't allow for counterexamples. Guido Ruggiero argues in large part that the stories in Boccaccio's book glorify a form of 14th-century cunning, virtu in Italian. But this just isn't true. In some stories, for example, men cuckold women and women cuckold men and succeed as a result of their connivances, but then similar stories follow in the work where the characters are as equally conniving and yet they are punished for their actions. The truth is that there is not one overarching virtue praised in the book but rather the stories follow the themes of the ten days in which the stories are told, period.

The value of Ruggiero's book is his identification of some major themes and images, but you could probably do as well on your own.

[Ella · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve enjoyed some of Ruggiero’s other work, but this was a bit too lit-critty for me. Does make me excited to go see a local early music festival’s Decameron-based programme in April though.

[Bridget · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my fav Renaissance Italy historians - he does it all once again. Much more literary-based than “the renaissance in Italy,” but that’s a plus for me

[Emma Hooton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Through a historical reading, Ruggiero examines how The Decameron would have been understood by a broader public and how it reflects a Florence that is promising ‘a new age of love’ in a climate of ‘death’ and ‘dissolution’ (11).

The introduction is a great background to Florence's shifting class system and the contemporary prophecies promising a new age ‘of the Spirit’ (10). With the ‘popolo grosso’ replacing nobles, new ‘cultural markers’ for the elite were created, the most important being ‘virtù’ (18). Moving away from its previous links to violence and honour, virtù came to emphasise refined manners and ‘reason over emotion’ within the commercial empire of Florence. Virtù was particularly connected to love and Boccaccio presents virtù and marriage as ways to ‘civilise’ violent passions (26).

Ruggiero’s discussions are original, particularly his analysis of the tales of Nastagio, Lisabetta and Alibech, where he diverts from commonly explored themes, such as the allusions to Dante’s Inferno in the tale of Nastagio.

The main strength of this text is its accessibility - its entertaining writing style, broad index, paraphrasing of each relevant novella and delicate breakdown of context and ‘virtù’, allow anyone, even those completely unfamiliar with The Decameron, to read this book and understand its points.
There are some ideas that could benefit from further development. Although ‘Boccaccio-writer’ is brought up throughout the text and adequately explored, ‘Boccaccio-character’ is never again addressed after the introduction, leaving readers confused as to its function and importance. Another concept that could be explored further is Ruggiero’s argument that Boccaccio’s text relates to us in contemporary times. Ruggiero states that what we learn about love may help us ‘respond to the dislocations and traumas’ of our own (4). Besides occasional broad comments about the nature of love today, such as it being a ‘number one google search’ (35), Ruggiero does not prove much relevance. His desire that we see how the tales ‘contributed in a foundational way… to visions of marriage, love, and sexuality that… underpin Western notions… today.’ (185) is not directly fulfilled, although as readers we may make our own comparisons without authorial prompting. This concept requires more research, particularly the point that in modern times love has been ‘pared down’ through ‘a complex process of adapting emotions to different societies and cultures’ (29).

Finally, there was a missed opportunity to explore violent masculinity, specifically within the tale of Guiglielmo. Although Ruggiero examined the violence of Tancredi, Rinieri and the knight in the story of Nastagio, Guiglielmo, who feeds his wife her lover’s heart, a deed which ‘reflected a particularly troubling form of virtù.’, lacked analysis (63). I want to know more about this ‘troubling form of virtù’ and how it encouraged violence in men in response to their consensus realities as successful, masculine lovers being threatened. Perhaps a comparison could also be made between Nastagio and Guiglielmo who both commit acts of violence (Nastagio’s being self-inflicted) in response to this threat.