Adventures in Speech: Rhetoric and Narration in Boccaccio's "Decameron"

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1996

The Decameron is a narrative account of a situation in which narration takes place-a collection of one hundred stories set within a larger story. As a group of young men and women fleeing the plague trade stories to pass the time of crisis, storytelling occurs in a social context that allows for comment upon the tales by the tellers themselves, in a setting that elicits one story in return for another.

In his close and origi...