Compassion in the Decameron: The Opening Sequence

SET AGAINST THE BACKDROP of an apocalyptic pandemic that extirpates all certainty, order, and kindness from the city of Florence, the Decameron is a work that is self-consciously novel. It is a massive undertaking unprecedented in its form: a frame narrative in modern Italian prose, deploying systematically multiple narrators and levels of narration, both stringently regular and in its micropatterns deliberately asymmetrical. It is equally unprecedented in its themes: the purpose and functioning of imaginative fiction, the (gendered) role of appetite in human behavior, the drivers and outcomes of behavioral choices examined in a rigorously immanent context. Beginnings are always important; every work carries its content on its forehead, as Giovanni Boccaccio said of his tales’ rubriche, positioning its readers and shaping their expectations and experience of it. Of this immense production, even more than most, the opening sequence offers a road map to its readers. First and foremost, the proem announces that compassion is the engine that powers this innovative project. Compassion is a complex value in any society, particularly in one infused as much with a capitalist as with a Christian ethos. TheDecameron sets out to explore the spiritual and social dimensions of compassion, although through neither a philosophical or theological analysis nor a didactic series of transparently exemplary models reflecting and rewarding “good” behaviors and indicting and punishing “bad” ones. Boccaccio both invokes and revises the didactic exemplum, whose simplicity limits its utility for him; his strategy here, as in all his literary fictions, is not to clarify but to nuance—not to spoon-feed but to challenge his readers. This ap-