The background for this book is the black death of 1348, which killed a large number of people in Florence. Within this environment Boccaccio creates the structure of the book.
The premise: The black death is terrorizing the city of Florence, and is causing a complete breakdown of all moral values. Surrounded by this horrible death, people loose respect for each other. Boccaccio is, for all purposes, describing what is happening as hell on earth. (He brought to earth what Dante had placed in the Inferno)
Within this dissolution, one Spring morning seven young ladies meet in a church where they went to pray. Soon they put their prayers aside and turn to a more pragmatic topic: how to survive the rampant death. After considering various possibilities, they decide that it is their duty to preserve their lives by getting out of the city, and isolate themselves in the countryside, away from death. However, in their opinion, they will be successful only if they are joined by some men. (At this time women felt that a man's guidance was necessary).
In the meantime, three young men, friends and relatives to the ladies, enter the church, and are asked to go along. They agree, and the next morning they leave the city with a few of their servants who have survived death. They go to a beautiful country villa, and there they will wait for the pestilence to be over.
But in order for the group to function well, they decide that they need a ruler (king or queen). So, in a democratic fashion, the decide that each one of them will be king or queen for a day, and everyone will obey and follow his/her rules. They also decide to spent the time entertaining themselves, eating well, singing, dancing, and telling stories: one story each for each day.
These stories represent the content of the book. Therefore, we have ten stories for each day. These stories portray all aspects of society, form the most noble behavior to most vulgar and depraved. This is the world of the Decameron. Here we find merchants alongside with kings, clerics, and the common people.
It is a complete representation of human behavior. It is the "human comedy," where the real life becomes the centerpiece (Dante, instead, saw life from a distance). In fact the Decameron completes Dante's vision of life. This is humanity as it is actually behaving in everyday circumstances.
From this point of view, the Decameron does not belong, as it has been suggested, to the new culture centered on Petrarch. Rather it is more properly medieval, as it is encyclopedic in nature (like Dante's Commedia).
However, this work is what we consider today as politically incorrect. It disregards all rules of literature and accepted etiquette. As already mentioned, it is dedicated to women, written with the specific purpose to entertain them, as they are bored during long days with nothing to do. This is a very modern concept: the artist addresses and meets the needs of a specific audience.
In fact, the purpose of the book was so out of place that Boccaccio had practically all the intellectual establishment against him (see his defense in the Introduction to day 4). Even he himself, later in his life, denounced his own masterpiece. In fact, the scholars who immediately followed him admired his scholarly works, not the Decameron. It will take 150 years for the book to be recognized for its artistic, intellectual, and linguistic values.
On the other hand, this book was well received by an audience that was outside the official intelligentsia. It found a crowd of imitators already in its own time in writers who realized that there was an audience for narrative. In fact, the Decameron ended up as being one of the most imitated books in history. No one escaped Boccaccio's influence: he set the rules for story-telling. His presence is felt in the entire Europe, in English literature his influence is felt by many, to name just two, Chaucer and Shakespeare.
With the Decameron, Boccaccio takes the short story and makes it come to life. His characters are, in fact, psychologically alive; he gives the plot and the characters an evolutionary development. In short, he took a minor art form -- telling short anecdotal stories, and created an artistic form.
The Decameron, contrary to other collections of stories of the time, is not a series of unrelated plots. Here, each story becomes a part of the whole. These stories are complete in themselves, and yet they add to the completeness of the book. The stories are in fact grouped by themes and by authorship (the story-tellers). Each day covers a specific theme.
The external structure (the ten young people escaping death to preserve life) is itself a story which contains all other stories; some individual stories have their own stories within, etc. Each story is characterized by the person who tells it. For examples, Dioneo (one of the ten) reserves his position to be the last one to tell his story so that he can be free to close the day with his peculiar tales that do not necessary follow to the themes of the day. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales uses the same concept of a large story as the framework which includes all other stories. The frame-story will be a description of a pilgrimage to Canterbury during which the characters tell their stories.
And at the center of this world we find humanity, in all its variety. People are seen as victim of jokes, victims to human cruelty, or survivor to misfortunes, etc. But what stands out in all this is the triumph of intelligence (mostly in day 6).
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