A handsome and unusual Boccaccio-adjacent object rather than a standard reading edition.

This illustrated edition gathers manuscript images from Boccaccio’s Decameron, pairing scenes from the fourteenth-century tale cycle with explanatory text and reproductions of medieval illumination. Rather than presenting the work simply as literature, the book approaches The Decameron as a visual and material object: a story-world copied, decorated, transmitted and reimagined through manuscript culture.

Boccaccio’s original frame is famously bleak and alive: ten young Florentines flee the plague-struck city and retreat to the countryside, where they pass the time by telling one hundred stories over ten days. The tales move between desire, deception, fortune, clerical hypocrisy, erotic misrule, wit, cruelty, social mobility and survival. It is one of the great comic architectures of European literature: a plague book that keeps producing jokes, plots and bodies as if narrative itself were a form of quarantine.

This volume is especially appealing as a visual companion to the text. The manuscript images turn the stories into beds, banquets, gardens, lovers, priests, pilgrims, rooms, borders, marginalia, staged scenes of private chaos made public through painted order. A good pick for readers interested in medieval literature, manuscript art, book history, plague narratives, erotic storytelling, and the long human tradition of being appalling but decorative.

1978 illustrated edition produced by Productions Liber SA / Éditions Minerva SA, Fribourg–Geneva, printed in Spain; text by J. Peter Tallon. Hardback with illustrated wraps; visible age-toning, light shelfwear, small marks and edge/corner wear, but internally bright with colour reproductions throughout.