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Title: The Decameron
Author: Giovanni Boccaccio
Narrator: Simon Russell Beale, Gunnar Cauthery, Alison Pettitt, Daisy Badger, Carly Bawden, Lucy Briggs-Owen, full cast
Format: Original Recording
Length: 28 hrs and 3 mins
Language: English
Release date: 09-14-17
Publisher: Naxos AudioBooks
Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 5 votes
Genres: Classics, World Literature

Publisher's Summary:
The Decameron is one of the greatest literary works of the Middle Ages. Ten young people have fled the terrible effects of the Black Death in Florence and, in an idyllic setting, tell a series of brilliant stories, by turns humorous, bawdy, tragic and provocative. This celebration of physical and sexual vitality is Boccaccio's answer to the sublime other-worldliness of Dante's Divine Comedy.

Members Reviews:
Not Up to the Usual Naxos Standard
Just as every generation thinks it is the first to have discovered sex, so every generation takes up The Decameron as proof that every generation has been doing it since the first two bits of protoplasm decided to play house.
When confronted with Boccaccios masterpiece in college, my group of friends indulged in the same Orwellian doublethink. In fact, we went further, taking these racy tales as 1) proof that all medieval piety was just so much hypocritical nonsense and 2) a sort of literary imprimatur for our own escapades.
Of course, wed conveniently forgotten (or failed to read) what one of the storytellers points out: while spending their afternoons spinning tales of illicit couplings, these young Florentines spend their evenings in their own beds, their Fridays reflecting on the Crucifixion and their Sundays at Mass. And, as Boccaccio points out at the end, the storytellers were in gardens, places devoted to pleasure, they were young (though not immature) and were not readily influenced by stories (unlike my friends and myself). His defense of his work is far more eloquent than that, but I dont want to spoil your pleasure when you get there.
Barbara Tuchman proposed another way of looking at Medieval bawdry. Though discussing the Reign of Misrule, when peasants and publicans presided over mock Masses, her point still holds. Such irreverence was an index not of unrest and the coming Reformation (how we do love to read history backwards), but of how deeply daily life was imbued with the Faith. Its teachings and tenants, its festivals and foibles, were the common coin of conversation, out of which one might make a moral point or fashion a joke. Our forefathers felt very much at home within their faith and the culture it created.
As a pillar of that culture, Boccaccios book is something to be at home in, too. Having never read the whole thing before, Ive thought of the Decameron as a grab bag of stories that can be plucked out and savored individually. While thats not a bad way of proceeding, taking the whole book from cover to cover makes each story a small chapter in a larger, single story. We get to know the different storytellers. We see their interrelationships. We hear yarns involving real people who lived in late medieval Florence, including figures like Giotto.
Are some of the stories not quite as captivating as they were in the 14th Century? Sure. Do one or two leave you wondering what was the point? Yeah. (I realize now that my professor assigned us the best of them, so some wonderful surprises were spoiled for me.) But there are more than enough naughty nuns, credulous lovers, heartless widows, lovesick priests, foolish doctors, pregnant men, drunken gamblers and stones of invisibility to go around. Theres even a little necrophilia. By the end weor at least Ifeel a part of the young peoples charmed circle.