Welcome to the History Extra Podcast, Fascinating Historical Conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine.

What would you do if your hometown was ravaged by plague?

Would you lock your doors and hide?

Would you run for the hills? Or would you simply accept the end was nigh and throw a massive

party? The De Cameron, a medieval bestseller written during the Black Death considers all these options.

And with the launch of a new Netflix series based on this pivotal work,

Dave Musgrove put in a call to historian Rebecca Rebecca Bowen to find out more and to uncover why the

de Cameron's author thought that risque stories might help people to come to terms with the

horrors of the plague. Rebecca joined us from Florence,

coincidentally, exactly where the de Cameron is set.

Rebecca, thank you so much for joining us.

How is it in Florence today?

Hot, I think.

Oh Dave thank you so much yes it's great to be here and

not only is Florence the fictional setting for the main narrative of the

de Cameron it's also Picacho's hometown. So it's very suitable for our conversation today.

And as the characters in the Decamarin themselves know, it gets very hot here during the summer.

Fabulous, we're in the right place and talking to the right person.

So let's kick off with hopefully a few kind of quick fire questions.

What is the Decamron?

Bolkacho himself actually tells us what the de Cameron is going to be in the prologue so before he even

starts a narrative proper he says to us

...