The ten days

X. A worldly project

The return to the city, where the ten storytellers were to return to Florentine society, would seem to be made ready for with a list of pragmatic warnings, among them the defence of the family nucleus, exemplified by Griselda’s novella. Boccaccio is principally concerned with the reconstitution of a harmonious city society rather than the destiny of souls beyond life, which had, after all, egregiously been dealt with by Dante’s Divine Comedy. The message of the Decameron thus entirely plays  upon the dialectics of the departure, that is to say the abandonment of a society without rules and deprived of its equilibrium, and the return, meant to be interpreted  as the beginning of the occurrence of a terrestrial metamorphosis, the theoretical basis for which has been ably laid down by the experience of the storyteller. The coordinates of this tale are worldly, not moral and indeed neither religious. The teachings we may believe to have gleaned  from the ten days resolve themselves in the foundation of a new  behavioural habitus, realistically conceived within a historical dimension. Within the new regime of inter-relations, fired by the renewal of society, that occurs after the plight that was the plague, concern is for one’s fellows and not for a mere  “gazing at stars”.