She described the stories as allegories of the virtues, with the women representing qualities like prudence, justice, and fortitude, and the men representing anger, lust, and reason. Newman, professor of comparative literature at the University of California at Irvine, provided the historical context for the book, and after her talk, took questions from the other participants.

Last week, to gain better insight into the book, I joined 78 other people for a Facebook Live presentation sponsored by The National Humanities Center. It would certainly be more challenging than binge-watching TV shows I had missed and more satisfying than the Zoom cocktail parties that I’ve started avoiding, just as I did in real life, a term now poignant and expanded in meaning. Oddly, given my lust for fiction, I had never read The Decameron, probably because I didn’t major in English, where it no doubt would have been forced upon me. And it even prompted a key plot line in Richard Nelson’s latest play, What Do We Need to Talk About?, when one of the characters suggest they imitate the Florentines and tell timeless stories about the human condition to make them forget, perhaps for just an evening, the plague outside their doors. The classicist Daniel Mendelsohn tweets a new passage from it every day. The critic Eric Banks has been running a five-week, $150-per-person Zoom reading group in conjunction with McNally Jackson Books. Virtual books clubs are analyzing the 1353 masterpiece, consisting of a hundred stories told by three young men and seven women during their quarantine in a villa outside Florence.

All of a sudden, everyone seems to be reading Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, a novel published more than 600 years ago.

The decameron of boccaccio book