Netflix’s Audacious Riff on The Decameron Is Tons of Fun. But Is It Really The Decameron?

n the annus horribilis of 2020, as COVID-19 ravaged the world, a generation that had yet to experience a cataclysm of precisely this nature and scale turned to art for insight into how we might survive it. Contemporary speculative fiction about lethal pathogens, from to ’s movie , surged in popularity. Readers also turned to tales of pestilence past: Daniel Defoe’s , ’s .

But no dusty tome got a bigger boost than Giovanni Boccaccio’s early-Renaissance classic . sprung up to dissect it. The New York commissioned stories from the likes of and for its own update, .

“Six Centuries Later, Is Suddenly the Book of the Moment,” that self-proclaimed arbiter of relevance, . Set amid the that decimated Europe in the mid-14th century, Boccaccio’s masterpiece follows 10 young nobles fleeing a plague outbreak in Florence that would ultimately reduce the city’s population by half. To pass the time in their rural idyll, they tell the stories that make up the bulk of the book—one apiece for 10 days, hence the title.

The consensus interpretation of has long been that it illustrates the unique power of storytelling to buoy humanity through history’s most devastating moments. The author Rivka Galchen sums up this reading in her to : “Reading stories in difficult times is a way to understand those times, and also a way to persevere through them.” Kathleen Jordan, the creator of Netflix’s , came away from her pandemic-era reading of Boccaccio with a very different underst.