The Essential Boccaccio, or an Accidental Ethics

Two great thematic currents — one ontological, the other ethical — pulse through the Decameron, through the one hundred novelle and through the overarching connective frame tale about the seven young women and three young men who leave Florence together during the great plague of 1348 and rebuild their lives through a carefully formed mini-society founded on a commitment to the restorative use of the word. One current carries Boccaccio’s medita-tion on what is, on the essential nature of things, on truth versus falsehood; the other is devoted to the manifold ac-cidents and contingencies of life, * and to the spectacle of a human comedy in which individuals from different social, economic, and cultural backgrounds navigate between uni-versals and particulars in the pursuit of happiness — itself not a universal but differently construed by each individual seeker. These themes are built into the structure of the Decam-eron through the tension between the world of the frame characters, all from the Florentine nobility, with access to beautiful villas in the countryside and servants to help maintain their lifestyles, and the many diverse worlds — of great economic, social, cultural, and geographic variety— conjured by the stories. Which of these many textual reali-ties lays better claim to represent the “truth”? And what are we to make of the many divergent standards of com-portment found in the Decameron? Within the frame tale alone, the ten storytellers have varying opinions; moreover, *In philosophy, essence or form is the attribute that makes an object or substance what it fundamentally is, without which it loses its identity, whereas accident or contingency refers to a property without which the substance can still retain its identity. These terms and concepts were well-known to Boccaccio