At the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, just before the bookshops closed, I bought a copy of Boccaccio’s Decameron from Waterstones Piccadilly (Camus’ The Plague had sold out entirely).

Revisiting the Decameron
Flowers Gallery, online exhibition
(flowersgallery.com)

At the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, just before the bookshops closed, I bought a copy of Boccaccio’s Decameron from Waterstones Piccadilly (Camus’ The Plague had sold out entirely). Boccaccio’s account of young Florentine nobles escaping the plague of 1348 and diverting themselves during quarantine by telling each other stories had, as I’d hoped, a spooky resonance in lockdown. There are all sorts of echoes between the plague of the fourteenth century and the pandemic of the twenty-first: hasty burials, the relentless march of infection, the mixture of fatalism and panic among the citizenry. The unpleasant facts of reality also give rise to similar needs for comforting escapism: storytelling in Boccaccio’s era; binge-watching television and baking in our own.

The same thought has clearly occurred to The Tablet’s own Laura Gascoigne, curator of “Revisiting the Decameron”, who’s had the doubly-inspired idea of asking a number of contemporary artists to consider the new relevance of The Decameron and then to gather the work these reflections generate in a Covid-proof online exhibition.

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