I’m going to take as many angles on this question as I can, but let’s start at the very beginning (as they say, a very good place to start), with Boccaccio on Boccaccio. The introduction of The Decameron gives a couple of important pieces of context. First, the outer frame places the story in a garden, being told to young (presumably well-off) women by our speaker. This frame, at least, is not one of a text claiming to high philosophical significance. The text frames itself as one that is purely recreational. Whether we buy this framing or not, there is some insulation from criticism provided by the fact that the outer frame tells us that what is within is, in slightly more modern parlance, “just a prank, bro.”

The inner frame, (the story of the Black Death and the ten young men and women) too, is essential context for the work as a whole. I will refrain from any broad based commentary on how the Black Death did or did not reshape medieval society, because a. it’s not essential here, b. I’m a literary studies guy, not my field. The essential point for the Decameron is our narrator thinks the Black Death represents a sea change. The Black Death, in the opening passage is a catastrophe against which “all human wisdom and foresight was useless.” Specifically, at least by my reading, Boccaccio points to the institutional failure to contain the Black Death, by which I mean his specific examples are things like the inability of the magistrates’ policies or the failures of group prayers to God. This is contrasted with the personal responses of people to the plague, namely either retreating into secluded moderation or living, as we would call it, like it’s their last day on earth. In short, the specific context of the story is a small group retreat into pleasant but moderate enjoyment (largely comedic storytelling), in the face of institutional crisis, perhaps authorizing the critique of things like the institutional church within the stories.

So, in short, the framing narrative sets us up for a set of stories that are perhaps not so friendly to particular institutions, but that are light in character and therefore not particularly dangerous. The work itself, therefore, creates a context (A. Light stories told to women in a garden, B. Those stories are set in a context where norms have broken down) in which the stories within are not particularly dangerous.

Second, the audience of the book. Boccaccio was from the growing wealthy, non-noble class that was particularly developed in Italy at the time. His father was a banker, and the evidence suggests that the book mainly circulated in this mercantile/skilled professional class, at least early on, though there is reason to believe both nobles and people lower on the urban totem pole might have heard it as well. I want to hesitate before saying too much about what his class means for The Decameron, though. People often toss around terms like “bourgeoisie morality,” some sort of nebulous ethic around professionalism, humanism, and cleverness, to describe everything from 14th century humanists to 17th century playwrights, and I’m skeptical of this, or any sort of framework that supposes a massive reshaping of the moral order based on this new “class.” Still, though, it might be the case that being outside the noble-clerical framework offered some level of moral license to Boccaccio and his fellows.

However, I would also suggest that joking, laughter and mockery are not so far out of the medieval milieu as many seem to think. Aristotle, whose thoughts underpin so much of medieval ideology, thought that moderate laughter and seeing the ridiculous in things was part of a healthy life, and that idea generally was agreed upon by most thinkers in the middle ages. A good laugh, once in a while, was thought good for you. Further, there is substantial evidence of people employing jokes as teaching tools, as methods of veiled criticism, or just as fun at all levels of society. Works like the Corpus Christi plays use humor as a didactic tool in itself, and writers also frequently describe humor as the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down (Though not in those exact terms). Whether or not those latter protestations come off as earnest or not (Boccaccio tries something along those lines, saying this is really a teaching tool for the lovesick or something, and I, for one, don’t buy it) varies from text to text, but it’s definitely something in the mix.

Criticism of the church, too, was hardly unacceptable in Boccaccio’s time. By the fourteenth century, concerns about growing papal corruption were widespread, there was substantial angst about the moving of the Papacy to Avignon, and generally the moral authority of the church had eroded somewhat by the 14th century. Indeed, who would call Boccaccio to account over his satire of the church? Plenty of secular leaders were frustrated by Papal power in their realms, and any clergy who were deeply concerned with the maintenance of the church’s spiritual authority were probably as likely to agree with much of Boccaccio’s frustrations as condemn him. It’s not like Boccaccio’s the only one writing satire of the church at this time either. Plenty of the clerical characters in Canturbury Tales don’t come off well (The Pardoner and the Summoner are out and out corrupt, and both the Monk and the Prioress probably care more about temporal things than they should.) I won’t say that we see the roots of the Protestant reformation in this time, (The early modernists around here would probably come and rip my head off) but suffice it to say that the Church’s minor case of the schisms in the early 16th century didn’t come out of nowhere. Frustration with clerical corruption had been boiling for a while.

Before I close, I want to leave off with one example of a reaction to this work, written by Boccaccio’s frequent correspondent and fellow poet, Petrarch. Petrarch, rather amusingly, says that essentially he was too busy to read the whole thing closely, since it’s rather long and things have been crazy, but he mentions a few things that are interesting. He assumes that the book was written in Boccaccio’s younger years and “for the multitude,” the latter of which is particularly interesting. My guess is this meant the urban, literate and semi-literate public, namely those with enough free time to read or have someone read to them, and indeed we do see a fair bit of book ownership in the urban professional classes in Italy at this time. Further, Petrarch takes Boccaccio’s supposed youth, as well as this multitude audience as a suitable excuse for humor which he says is a bit too free. In addition, he says, this humor is excused both by the light subject matter and the elegant language, which render the book worth reading anyway. Petrarch also mentions that the work attracted some critics, and praises Boccaccio for defending his work fiercely, and derides the kind of people who do nothing but complain about the writing of others.

Petrarch, then, seems to take it that given the subject matter and the audience, Boccaccio’s humor is appropriate, and that since it’s couched in such excellent language, it’s okay anyway. Petrarch had no particular reason to know some of the precise facts of The Decameron’s composition (Boccaccio was actually in his mid-30s when the present form of the text came together, though some stories probably predate that.), but he knew what a writer could and could not do in their social context. If the Poet Laurate of Rome thought Boccaccio could get away with some free humor, he probably could.

Bayless, Martha. Parody in the Middle Ages :The Latin Tradition /. Ann Arbor :, c1996. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015038607985.

Boccaccio, Giovanni, and Wayne A. Rebhorn. The Decameron: A New Translation, Contexts, Criticism. First edition, W. W. Norton & Company, 2016.

Coleman, Janet. Medieval Readers and Writers, 1350-1400. Columbia University Press, 1981.

Madigan, Kevin. Medieval Christianity: A New History. Yale University Press, 2015.

Robins, William. “The Case of the Court Entertainer: Popular Culture, Intertextual Dialogue, and the Early Circulation of Boccaccio’s Decameron.” Speculum, vol. 92, no. 1, Dec. 2016, pp. 1–35, doi:10.1086/689996.