Female Liberation and Power in Boccaccio’s “The Decameron” Veronica Weis

Introduction

Giovanni Boccaccio’s medieval masterpiece “The Decameron” is a collection of stories, chronicled over ten days, which highlights the best and worst of human nature. Boccaccio’s tales deal with themes such as adultery, love, premarital sex, devotion, trickery, and manipulation, among others. Yet this work is historically significant as a result of its brutal and unprecedented courage to show what was occurring behind the closed doors of medieval society. As one scholar notes in Boccaccio’s epilogue, there is a “plea for freedom of expression, for a concept and acceptance of literature free of didactic and moralistic constraints and directed towards the amusement, pleasure, and consolation of the reader.”

Boccaccio’s declared intent in writing “The Decameron” was to entertain the ladies of the era who had lost and suffered so much during the Black Death that swept the entire European continent. However, through his work Boccaccio also illustrated the sexual freedom women experienced during this time; a benefit of the social instability during and after the epidemic. Additionally, Boccaccio showed a side of the female gender, unseen before from the perspective of a man: woman using their intellectual prowess, wit,...