From roughly 1346 to 1353, Europe was paralyzed by the most fatal pandemic in recorded human history; the bubonic plague. The plague killed more than 60% of the total population in Eurasia. This is the backdrop of Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, a collection of short novellas completed in 1353.
Robert Pogue Harrison is a professor of French and Italian Literature at Stanford University. He is author of the books The Dominion of the Dead and Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. 

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