A surprisingly interesting read

I hadn't been expecting to find Boccaccio's Decameron to be a book that's hard to put down. But so it is. Not so much because the stories are particularly riveting as stories — by today's standards, they're mostly kind of lame, very moralistic, and rather predictable. But as a window into medieval life and thought, they are absolutely riveting. What do the characters value? What do they think about the events in the stories? Who are the villains, who the heroes, and why? What do they eat and drink? Where do they sleep? What do they wear? How do people of different classes relate to each other, and what does that reveal about the attitudes that pervaded society so deeply that they were not even questioned by the characters, let alone the readers?

And beyond that, there are the technical questions about the stories themselves: why is a given conflict resolved in this way, or that way, or not resolved at all? Why do some characters have an active role and others merely a reactive? What is the structure of the conflict: where does it peak in the course of the story, and when it's resolved, what kind of conclusion or closure is there for the characters? Why does a story so often end with what we'd call a deus-ex-machina ending, and why was this considered a satisfying ending then, but not now?

I'm quite enjoying the Decameron, and I recommend it as a fascinating reading adventure. Also useful for those interested in building medieval-based worlds for their own work....