Black Death and the Lesson of Life – Two Scenes

Abstract

: The essay confronts two ways in which the Black Death motif is used in
two 14-Century Italian collections of novellas. In Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron the pestilence means the crisis of civilized forms of collective life, the decay of social relations and moral disarray. The protagonists in a sublime way reconstruct various forms of “art de vivre” distancing themselves from the brutal reality. Giovanni Sercambi perceive the plague as a divine punishment that strikes the entire society for collective sins. The only way of salvation is a pilgrimage-penance, and later the acceptance of a new political regime, in which all the power belongs to a preposto, elected for life, and the citizens are interested only in their private affairs and respect of severe moral principles.