Middle Age Florence
This novel/collection of stories is set in Middle Age Florence, in the 14th Century, during the height of the Black Plague. The setting is clearly one of the most historically fascinating moments of Western history. The combination of slow cultural changes in the European landscape and the severe threat of the Black Death yields an imagery that is basically quite pleasant and charming, because it is 14th Century Florence after all, and also quite disturbing, because every street was filled with horrific illness and death.
The imagery of escape and survival
The seven young women who open the novel praying in the local chapel are an important part of imagery in the novel. Because this constitutes the "frame story" within which one hundred other short stories are embedded, this imagery has the most thematic weight of all. What are the seven young ladies up to? They are begging God for survival. The contemplation leads the women to a conclusion; they must do what they can to survive, even if that means leaving everything behind and escaping. They even hired escorts to help them survive the threats of the wilderness. When they have escaped, they survive as refugees in another church.
Royal imagery
The seven young women are all single, and so are the three young men they hired to arm them. As ironic as this seems, there quickly develops an imagery of royalty among them. They literally codify these feelings of importance and self-worth in a game of rotating royalty: each day, a new couple will be crowned "king and queen for the day," and they order their ten person society around that rotating pedestal of authority. This is to be seen as a concrete manifestation of a well-known abstract imagery, the imagery of courtship. They are literally in court dances, because that is what it feels like to have a lot of single people together in the same place.
Death and humor
The imagery of the stories is clearly deathly, because the people who are telling the stories are surrounded by death and gruesome illness. The Black Plague would be known only for this association if not for the unlikely opposite response: humor. The dilemma between seriousness and humor is on full display. Some of the stories are literally just jokes. The death and humor dichotomy is well-known in severe literature like this. This use of imagery influenced Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
