The Lockdown Chronicles 12: Giovanni

Giovanni Boccaccio (6 June 1313 – 21 December 1375) was an Italian writer, poet, correspondent of Petrarch, and an important Renaissance humanist. Boccaccio wrote a number of notable works, including The Decameron and On Famous Women. Sometimes nicknamed l’Umana commedia (“the Human comedy”), The Decameron is structured as a frame story containing 100 tales told by a group of seven young women and three young men sheltering in a secluded villa just outside Florence to escape the Black Death, which was afflicting the city. Boccaccio probably conceived of The Decameron after the epidemic of 1348, and completed it by 1353. [Wikipedia entry]

Text adapted from: McKinley, Kathryn (2019) “How the rich reacted to the bubonic plague has eerie similarities to today’s pandemic”, The Conversation, April 18, 2020.

Source images: Panel 1: The plague of Florence in 1348, as described in Boccaccio’s Decameron. Etching by L. Sabatelli after himself. Wellcome Images, Wellcome Collection. CC-BY 4.0; Panels 2-4: Portrait of Giovanni Boccaccio, engraving by Raffaello Sanzio Morghen, .ca 1822. Sourced from Sumner, Charles (1875) The Best Portraits in Engraving (5th ed.), New York City: Keppel & Co. OCLC: 17144657, via Wikimedia. Public Domain. This comic strip CC-BY-NC-SA.

References

Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University (Last Updated at 4/24/2020, 2:31:34 PM BST) COVID-19 Dashboard. Available at https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html [Accessed 24 April 2020]

Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron (1353) (ebook Release Date: December 3, 2007). Translated by John Payne. Project Gutenberg. Available at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/23700/23700-h/23700-h.htm [Accessed 24 April 2020]

McKinley, Kathryn (2020) “How the rich reacted to the bubonic plague has eerie similarities to today’s pandemic”, The Conversation, April 18, 2020. Available at https://theconversation.com/how-the-rich-reacted-to-the-bubonic-plague-has-eerie-similarities-to-todays-pandemic-135925 [Accessed 24 April 2020]

The plague of Florence in 1348, as described in Boccaccio’s Decameron. Etching by L. Sabatelli after himself. Wellcome Images, Wellcome Collection. Available at https://wellcomecollection.org/works/awnp6vyq  [Accessed 24 April 2020]

Portrait of Giovanni Boccaccio, engraving by Raffaello Sanzio Morghen, .ca 1822. Sourced from Sumner, Charles (1875) The Best Portraits in Engraving (5th ed.), New York City: Keppel & Co. OCLC: 17144657. Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Boccaccio   [Accessed 24 April 2020]

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The Lockdown Chronicles are made at night in candlelight, and publication and tweetage are scheduled in advance, not in real time. Catch up with the series at https://epriego.blog/tag/the-lockdown-chronicles/.