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 Bowen to find out more, and to uncover why

the DeCamron'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 DeCamron 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 decamaran, it's also

Boccato's hometown. So it's very suitable for our conversation today. And as the characters in

the decamron themselves know, it gets very hot here during the summer. Fabulous. We're in the right

place and talking to the right place. So let's kick off with hopefully a few

kind of quick five questions. What is the DeCamaran? Boccaccio himself actually tells us what the

decamarin is going to be in the prologue. So before he even starts a narrative proper, he says to us,

intend to tell us, intends to raconteur......auntare cinto novelle or favole, parable or...

...that do we'll want to tell 100 tales or fables or parables or stories or whatever you want to call them.

So already he's telling us what this book is going to contain, and it's a series of different

stories. And he also tells us that they are recounted by a company of seven women and three

men. And they also contain some songs, he says, which the aforementioned women sang for their

...