Patreon Ep Unlocked: The Decameron 1

the Book Club series is back and we're here to introduce you to the Italian peninsula in 1348 or, as they might have called it: the end of the fucking world. the Black Death hit the densely-populated boot like a nuke, killing millions in just a few months. why are we talking about something so depressing and that we've already covered extensively? well, frankly, that's the backdrop of The Decameron and how Boccaccio introduces it. the plague sets the stage for the widespread breakdown of social and cultural norms and the decaying relationship between the laity and the Church, a central theme for Boccaccio. so, we start with the horror of the plague and what it unleashed, then move on to talk about the author, the metatextual aspects of the book, and introduce the setting and characters. we're going to have a great time with this one but in order to get to all the intrigue, sex, and anti-clericalism, we first have to introduce it all.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, folks, if you're hearing my admittedly weak voice, it
means that we are unlocking a new episode. As you
can tell, I am in no I'm in no space
to co host this week. I got a bad stomach
virus and when I get those, I lose my voice

(00:24):
because yeah, I just I puke really hard for some reason.
I don't know why. That's gross, and I'm sorry, but
you know here it is. Anyway, we're unlocking the first
episode of our series on the camera. Uh Giovanna Giovanni
Boccaccio's fourteenth century master work. I'm gonna keep it short

(00:48):
and sweet because you probably don't want to hear me
talk like this and I can barely talk anyway. But yeah, uh,
this is the first episode we did in the series.
We're going to cover all ten days. If if you
like this, please check out patreon dot com slash w
nsty Pod five dollars a month to get you access
to this, plus all of our other bonus episodes and

(01:09):
a free and all that stuff that we normally talk about. Uh,
y'all enjoy the show. I'm sorry, I gotta I can't.
You know, I can't talk very much today, But anyway,
Thanks for listening, and we'll be back next week with
the delayed episode on Medieval BDSM and another episode in

(01:33):
our series on the Cameron. Thanks it did it again?

Speaker 2 (01:38):
God did it really? Oh? Fuck me? Here we here,
we fucking go.

Speaker 1 (01:50):
This time it was Zoom, yes, or the last time
when we recorded the regular episode, it was the PC
port having This time, Zoom.

Speaker 3 (02:02):
We're doing We're doing a great job. I can't remember
to send you the link. Uh, you know, Zoom doesn't
want to record this. We're being silenced I think sometimes
just by me.

Speaker 1 (02:14):
By by the church. They don't ready for this. They're
still uh they're still running the the banded books list,
and they want to silence us here. I guess I
don't know.

Speaker 3 (02:29):
I was like literally just sitting here painting my nails,
and I'm just like, wait a minute, I didn't send
the link. Gat good job anyway, Like I gotta tell
you what I'm firing on all cylinders today.

Speaker 2 (02:42):
Baby, it's uh, we're ready to rock.

Speaker 3 (02:45):
Yeah yeah, Oh so I don't know, do you want
to talk about these fucking guys because lord no?

Speaker 4 (02:53):
Yeah, nice one, Yeah, let's do it.

Speaker 1 (03:27):
Hello and welcome back to We're Not So Different podcast
about our ongoing issues with.

Speaker 3 (03:40):
Yeah, it's about us really, yeah, if you think about it,
if you really do.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
Yeah, in the end, it's a show about the friends
we made along the way, namely us. Uh hello, Patron,
it's your second monest episode of fet Waite. Will let's
come out of but yeah, well the second February that
will were Professionals. Yeah, that will come out in February.

(04:10):
And uh yeah, it's the first episode in our book
club series on the de Cameron, which, uh, you know,
I knew it was one hundred stories, but I didn't
think it was going to be that long when I
got it, and I got the book and I was like, hm,
maybe a bunch of this is like an intro, and

(04:30):
there is a very long intro, like the translator's introduction
is like I don't fucking know all the Roman numerals
this far, but it gets up to c X L
I V, so I don't know.

Speaker 2 (04:42):
It take us a while to get through it.

Speaker 1 (04:44):
That's my Yeah, I didn't. Yeah, we're we're not going
to be covering every story uh in there, but I
certainly didn't.

Speaker 4 (04:51):
It was that long.

Speaker 3 (04:52):
I want to talk about I want to cover the
ones that are like, I'm racist towards genuins who are rased.

Speaker 1 (05:00):
Yeah, I hate them. They're dog people, aren't you aren't?
Isn't your uncle genuine? Shut up? That's why.

Speaker 2 (05:09):
That's how I know.

Speaker 1 (05:10):
That's how I know they're dog people, because I would
be if not for having been raised in what other
other random city state? Uh, he's he's right, yeah, the pieces,
yeah yeah he he he just you know what a guy, Boccaccio.

(05:33):
We're going to talk about him, loved women, maybe one
of the all time lovers of women.

Speaker 3 (05:41):
He's yeah, he's a ladies man, ladies man's man's man
man about Florence.

Speaker 1 (05:45):
Yeah, yeah, he's the ladies man man. There's a good
good father John Misty song called Only Son of the
Ladies Man, which I'm in my head is just playing,
and I'm like, God, damn it, I wish my brain
didn't do this anyway, Folks, Today we embark on the

(06:05):
maiden voyage of our book club series on the Cameron
by Giovanni Boccaccio. They very much enjoy the medievalist books
we've covered, like the Summarillion. In the Name of the Rose,
I am always particularly moved. We get to hear medieval
people speak in their own voices to whatever degree we

(06:26):
can through translators and all that, but you know, uh,
not the mindless recitations of medieval ledgers, church documents, and
royal correspondents, which you know, they definitely have their uses,
but it's also extremely kind of soulless to me. There,
you know, there's nothing there's nothing wrong with it by
any stretch. It's certainly useful in historic or archaeological studies,

(06:50):
but where's the heart?

Speaker 2 (06:52):
Where is it?

Speaker 1 (06:54):
Where are the Yeah? Fictional and allegorical works, on the
other hand, speak to me like us nothing else. Because
of the progression of the written word and what has
survived to us, it's very hard to get in the
minds of most historical figures, especially before the advent of
movable type printing. Sure we might see their words and
deeds recorded, but that's not a window into their mind.

(07:14):
It's usually just propaganda one way or the other. I
like to be in their heads as much as I
do modern day authors, and that's what these medieval works
of fiction and allegory provide, maybe for the first time
in human history. The Inferno, the Camera, the Romance of
the Three Kingdoms, and others except Canterbury Tales. God never

(07:35):
Counterbary tales. They provide a I gotta make I gotta
make jokes. You are right, I don't like fucking impes.
That is all a stone cold fact. Better people than
you have tried. Now, I'm just kidding. They were. They
were all far worse than you. Uh yeah. All these

(07:58):
works and cantuary tell this is fine. I'm just making
jokes for Eleanor's sake. All these provide a true window
into how medieval people thought and felt back then, and
that's why they're so important. When we did The Inferno,
we jumped into the mind of Dante, a genius writer
but also one who was annoyingly aware of his own
genius and unbelievably petty, but one who is simultaneously and

(08:22):
very very sincerely concerned about the mounting sins of the
Catholic Church and the final resting place of his immortal soul.
There's actual subtext here, and enough historical data to show
us a glimpse of what his life was like. This
is the good stuff. This is the heart of the
Middle Ages. This is how we know, unmistakably that we're
not so different to the music. Now, this is what

(08:43):
it means to be human. Nowhere in pre modern literature
is this feeling more cute than any Cameron. Though it
was published in thirteen forty eight, a scant two decades
after Dante's divine comedy, and Boccaccio was a devoted Dante fanboy,
everything had changed in that span of time. The de
Cameron is dripping with irony. Uh. Not the ironic punishments

(09:05):
Dante imagined, uh, but what we would probably call something
like ironic detachment. To Piccaccio's unsparing criticism of the Church
seemed more akin to those employed over six hundred years
later by umberto echo in the name of the Rose
than they do to Dante, who had barely been dead
for twenty years by that time. Then again, it shouldn't
be so surprising is that the Cameron was written and

(09:26):
published during the midst of the Black Death, the single
greatest catastrophe to ever befall humanity. And how could the
world ever be the same after you stared not just
your own death, but the total annihilation of your species
in the face, folks, it would fuck you up. Imagine
how crazy COVID made everyone in the world and now

(09:49):
imagine if two point four billion people had died.

Speaker 3 (09:54):
Yeah, like apparently, like ear, your uncle's ready to go
fascist because he couldn't go to Appleby for three months.

Speaker 2 (10:01):
But like the quarter of the world population died. What
happens then, you.

Speaker 1 (10:05):
Know, yeah, you know, who are we going to blame
when we don't have the church to blame? You know,
at least after the Black Death, the people of Europe
could be like, you know what, I know who the
problem is here? And you know they're eventually going to
figure out that they can just start their own church
with communion and white walls, like, I don't know whatever.

(10:27):
We everybody, folks, we know none, I mean, well still
some but you know we're not gonna talk about that, folks. Well,
we'll talk to Protestants later, because you know, at this
point there are no Protestants. There are only uh, there's
only a church that's mad at the people and people

(10:49):
who are mad at the church. And some people are
kind of you know, iffy on that. But you know,
it seems to be fairly common that by this point
there was a lot of I've had enough of this shit.
I don't know what I'm going to do about it.
I don't know how I can change it, because this
is like the ironclad rule of the world. But I'm
going to figure it out. And you know, hey, what
do you know they did find it out.

Speaker 4 (11:10):
At some point.

Speaker 1 (11:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (11:12):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (11:13):
So today we're going to introduce you to Giovanni Boccaccio,
the world he inhabited, the meditextual side of his Decameron,
and the reaction to its publication. But in order to
do all that, we must first address the Black Deaths,
seven years of horror and carnage never seen before or since.

(11:34):
It serves as the backdrop to Boccaccio's life and his
magnum Opus. The plague's importance to the story is so
paramount that the description precedes his rundown of how the
actual story is arranged. Initially, I had something else planned
for this intro, but as I read Boccaccio's own introduction
to the First Day, I was struck by his description
of the plague sweeping through the city state of Florence

(11:57):
in thirteen forty eight. Upon further reading, I discovered that
Boccaccio's description is actually based on an eighth century accounting
of a different plague by a guy named Paul the
Deacon that was adapted to fit the circumstances of Florence
during the Black Death. But you know, that probably shouldn't
be that much of a surprise, because Boccaccio adapted most

(12:17):
of the one hundred stories in the de Cameron from elsewhere,
so he probably should have expected as much. And that's
not a you know, it's not a slide against him,
you know, that's that's what you did. You know, the
Inferno is ripped from it's the Bible. It's the Bible
of Gagan mythology smashed together, you know, And that's fine,
because it's great. You know. What's more, Bokaciu may not

(12:38):
have even been in Florence during the height of the pandemic,
as other evidence indicates he was in Ravenna in late
thirteen forty seven. Even so, Bocachiu has a way with
words that is almost unique amongst medieval writers. And regardless
of whether he was in Florence, the Black Death hit
the boot harder than almost anywhere else on earth. So
he would have seen the end of days regardless. And

(12:59):
so in lieu of another dry description and you know,
numbers and all that, I will read a few selected
passages from the introduction to give you a sense of
the existential dread that destroyed West Asia, the Levant Europe,
and North Africa through the words of someone who lived it.

Speaker 4 (13:16):
I will bounce.

Speaker 1 (13:17):
Around a little bit because reading all of it take
thirty forty thirty to forty minutes, and you know, we're
not doing a you know, audio book. I actually don't
know if I get in trouble for doing an audiobook
of a book that's in public domain.

Speaker 2 (13:31):
I think you can't if it's in public domain.

Speaker 3 (13:34):
But you'd have to like find one of the translations
that was earlier so that it was in public domain,
you know.

Speaker 1 (13:39):
Yeah, because Penguin Press would be like, hey, that's ours,
and I'm like, look, man, you're not what is the
translator's name, You're not g H. McWilliams, Shut the fuck up,
die in a fire. Yep, exactly. So yeah, Baccaccio starts out.
He briefly describes, you know, the Black Death was coming,

(13:59):
they knew coming from the east, they knew stuff about it.
And one thing I do find interesting about this is
the descriptions of how it spread and like you and
you just want to be like it's fleas dude, it's
the fleas. It's the fleas, the thing you're describing, like,
and I mean, they knew about fleas, but like you know,
it's they didn't know this, I guess, yeah, But they're close,

(14:21):
they really are. He says, in the face of its
own rush, all the wisdom and ingenuity of man were unavailing.
Large quantities of refuse were cleared out of the city
by officials specially appointed for the purpose. All sick persons
were forbidden entry, and numerous instructions were issued for safeguarding
the people's health, but all to no avail. Nor were

(14:42):
the countless persons humbly directed to God by the pious,
whether by means of formal procession or in other ways
any less ineffectual. And then he goes on he says,
against these maladies, it seemed that all the advice of
physicians and all the power of medicine were profitless and unavailing.

(15:03):
Perhaps the nature of the illness was such that it
allowed no remedy, or perhaps these people who were treating
the illness, And he goes on to say that he
thinks there's been a ballooning of medical professionals who don't
know anything about medicine. Maybe they were ignorant of the
causes and were not prescribing the appropriate cure. But then

(15:25):
he kind of gets into the heart of the matter
and like where things really break down for them, because
it's not just the death, it's the circumstances of it
that made them feel acutely alone in a way that
I think is probably reminiscent of how a lot of
people feel today. But what made the pestilence even more
severe was whenever those suffering from it mix with people

(15:48):
who were still unaffected, it would rush upon these with
the speed of a fire, racing through dry or early
substances that happened to come within its reach. Nor was
this the full extent of its evil. Not only did
it infect healthy persons who conversed or had any dealings
with the sick, making them ill or visiting an equally
horrible death upon them, but it also seemed to transfer

(16:10):
the sickness to anyone touching the clothes or other objects
which had been handled or used by its victims. And
he goes on to talk about there were basically three
approaches that he saw in Florence to this. There were
the people who were like Uh, we have to become flagelets.
We have to get closer to God. We have to

(16:30):
do that. There were the people who were like, uh,
we're gonna fucking drink like there's no tomorrow, because hey,
there might not be, and you know, that seems good
to us. And then there were the people who kind
of tried to go about their daily lives in whatever
way they could and didn't really do go to either
extreme like that. But you know, he basically says that

(16:55):
they all died. They all died in the same novels.
It didn't matter which way you choose. You choose, you know,
it didn't matter if you prayed more to God or
if you went closer to the devil. And this is
you know, kind of feeling out like, hey, what is
is divine punishment? Is that not a thing? What? You know? Yeah,

(17:16):
they're probing it, you know, they're probing it. And I
really find that interesting. He goes on to say it
was not really a question of one citizen avoiding another,
and of people almost invariably neglecting their neighbors and rarely
or never visiting their relatives, addressing them only from a distance. Hey,
modern life, this scourge had implanted so great a terror

(17:37):
in the hearts of men and women that brothers abandoned brothers,
uncles their nephew, not neph and uncle god, sisters their brothers,
and in many cases wives deserted their husbands. But even
worse and almost incredible, was the fact that fathers and
mothers refused to nurse and assist their own children, as
though they did not belong to them. Now, this is true,

(17:59):
This is not the myth that medieval people didn't care
about their kids. However, I would probably argue that a
lot of that myth kind of comes from this you
know and misinterpreting, like statistics and stuff. But you know,
and he says, as a result, as a result of
this wholesale desertion of the sick by neighbors, relatives, and friends,

(18:20):
and in view of the scarcity of servants, there grew
up a practice almost never previously heard of, whereby a
woman fell ill, no matter how gracious or beautiful or
gently bred she might be, she raised no objections to
being attended by a male servant, whether he was young
or not, nor did she have any scruples about showing
him every part of her body as freely as she

(18:41):
would have displayed it to a woman, provided that the
nature of her infirmity required her to do so, and
this explained why those women who recovered were probably possibly
less chase than the period that followed. I don't know
about his editorializing after at the end there, however, I
do find it very interesting that he seems to pinpoint
this is the point where like women and men became

(19:03):
much more comfortable mixing together and showing their bodies in
not just a married sexual or you know, sexual circumstance. Yeah,
only got a couple more here, folks. Later on he
talks about how there's a breakdown in like funerary practices
and how it used to be like if somebody died,

(19:25):
there would be like a procession of hundreds of people
through the streets, maybe even thousands. You know, it's like
their cousins and their brothers and seven cousins sixteen times
removed and all that shit. And it just broke down.
And now you know, if your body gets thrown anywhere,
it gets thrown in a ditch on the roadside, because
they don't have consecrated holy ground anymore, which is when

(19:47):
this is when that stopped being a thing. For the
most part. Even in these circumstances, however, there were no
tears or count candles or mourners to honor the dead.
In fact, no more respect was according to dead people
than would nowadays be shown toward dead goats. For it
was quite apparent that one thing which in normal times
no wise man had ever learned to accept with patient resignation,

(20:12):
even though it struck so seldom and unobtrusibly, had now
been brought home to the feeble minded as well. But
the scale of the calamity caused them to regard it
with indifference. People stopped fearing death. That is what this did,
all right.

Speaker 3 (20:28):
This is gonna help it. It's just gonna happen. Why
bother being afraid of it?

Speaker 1 (20:31):
Yep, yeah, yeah. He talks about the countryside, how the
same afflicted them. They just kind of fell in the
fields and died. But then he returns to the city.
He says, what more remains to be said, except that
the cruelty of heaven, and possibly in some measure also
that of man, was so immense and so devastating that
between March and July of the year in question, what

(20:53):
with the fury of the pestilence, and the fact that
so many of the sick were inadequately cared for or
abandoned in their hour of need, because the healthy were
too terrified to approach them. It is reliably thought that
over one hundred thousand human lives were extinguished within the
walls of the city of Florence. Yet before this lethal
catastrophe fell upon the city is doubtful whether anyone would

(21:13):
have guessed it contained so many inhabitants. Ah, how great
a number of splendid palaces, fine houses, and noble dwellings,
once filled with retainers, with lords and ladies, were bereft
of all who had lived there, down to the tiniest child.
How numerous were the famous families, the vast estates, the
notable fortunes that were seen to be left without a

(21:34):
rightful successor. How many gallant gentlemen, fair ladies, and sprightly youths,
who would have been adjudged hail and hardy by Galen,
Hippocrates and a Scallapius, to say nothing of others. Thank you,
having breakfasted in the morning with their folk, acquaintances and friends,
sucked in the same evening with their ancestors in the

(21:56):
next world folks. The Black Death, it fucking sucked. So
it was bad eleanor talk about dry numbers of the
Black Death before roughly roughly a third of the years
estimated four hundred and forty million people or about one
hundred and forty five million, two hundred thousand died in
the span of years of seven years. But let's turn
the focus away from that now and how this affected

(22:18):
the social order at the time. Yeah. Yeah, so it
seems like there was when the plague hit a place,
there was just complete breakdown of all social norms and
institutions during these outbreaks, like it didn't matt like it
didn't matter, you know. Pauper was king, King was popper.
People fucked, they drank, they you know whatever.

Speaker 3 (22:41):
Yeah, certainly we know that to be true. Like there's
rather a lot of partying going on. Some of this
is of course hyperbole that he goes on about it,
I mean, and that's fair because you know, he's just
being like basically he's he's exaggerating slightly for poetic effect.

Speaker 1 (22:59):
You know.

Speaker 3 (22:59):
So for example, we know that with plague victims, they're
not actually just thrown in like a ditch, and there
is like we know, for example, that they line them
up real carefully.

Speaker 2 (23:11):
Are you in a ditch?

Speaker 1 (23:12):
Yeah, yeah, but you're not thrown. You are carefully placed
in a ditch. And also like it like most.

Speaker 3 (23:20):
Of the corpse up they they like they they're they're
gonna cross your arms. They're gonna like do their best
to line you up nicely. Yeah, I mean, can they
get a priest to come say something?

Speaker 2 (23:32):
Maybe not.

Speaker 3 (23:32):
And we definitely know that that is true because like
one of the things that happens in this period is
the church is like you're all deputized.

Speaker 1 (23:40):
To like you can, yeah, your own fucking dirt, leave us.
I'm alone.

Speaker 2 (23:45):
I'm just sorry. Just one second, I have got a
package one tick y know.

Speaker 3 (23:50):
It's so funny. Cabbage thinks she's a guard cat. Like
if a package comes.

Speaker 2 (23:54):
To the door, she's out there like, hey, hi, motherfucker right,
it's like you all right?

Speaker 1 (23:59):
She now at it.

Speaker 3 (24:00):
No, but she just like has to go she has
to like go up, oh yeah, yeah. And she hears
the doorbell ring or like someone knock on the door.
She's like running over there, like I don't know what
the plan is exactly, but she's got a supervise so anyway,
like yeah she found it, good girl.

Speaker 1 (24:16):
Good job, cabbage, thank you. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, as
we were saying, there are a couple of embellishments in here.
There's absolutely no way that one hundred thousand people died
in Florence because the population of the city was estimated
to be like one hundred thousand before and it probably
experienced like sixty percent, right, or.

Speaker 2 (24:36):
So sixty thousand people die.

Speaker 1 (24:38):
Yeah, but I mean you know you can, yeah, you can.
You can forgive him for not for you know, not
doing that. You see six and ten of everybody you
know die and you're just like, dead man, I don't
tell you that's ever.

Speaker 3 (24:53):
And also okay, like let's also like some things that
we definitely know are true, like you know, saying like
there aren't enough priests just to say rights for the dead.
So suddenly everyone is deputies to hear last confessions, Like
everyone is deputies to kind of like do some of
the cross stuff. They're just like loc bra we're doing

(25:13):
our best here, right, you know.

Speaker 1 (25:16):
Yes, this was the first time that lay people were deputized,
So you know who did who did the preachers first?
Was it the Protestants or the Catholics. Who was it
Catholic Church. I'm just kidding, go out.

Speaker 2 (25:31):
Even ladies could if there was no man around.

Speaker 1 (25:35):
That's farther than the fucking Protestants. For the most part,
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (25:40):
Is there still a fucking real hierarchy in place? Yes, yes,
I want to. They're like literally, any dude, we'll do uh.

Speaker 3 (25:50):
But you know that they do kind of admit that
women are a sort of people here.

Speaker 1 (25:55):
Well, can I ask like when you say there's I mean,
obviously there's still a real hierarchy in place, but like
while this is going on, do we know like if
people were just like fuck the priest, fuck, you know,
and they were like, yeah, there is.

Speaker 3 (26:07):
A lot of fuck the priest, I mean like yeah, yeah,
because it's because like one of the things that kind
of happens, right is that you get a lot of
the church being like, well, this is you motherfucker's fault,
and then there's a lot of people being like, I
feel like you were driving, so like if God is
punishing us, so surely you guys were in charge.

Speaker 2 (26:26):
So like, what the fuck?

Speaker 1 (26:28):
If this is a family sedan, your dad and mom
driving in the front seat, I'm in the back seat
in a in a car in a car seat, you know,
like I'm going Google goga.

Speaker 4 (26:41):
What are you doing?

Speaker 3 (26:42):
Yeah, So there is rather a lot of criticism of
that particular move on the church's part, and you know,
we get it, that makes sense, right, but it is
it is a move that they try.

Speaker 2 (26:54):
They're like your.

Speaker 3 (26:55):
Fault for sin, you know, and a lot of people
just are are kind of like, look, bra I'm fright
to go near other people, right. So there's like not
a lot of church going happening in some people's cases,
and there is a lot also kind of a sudden
movement of people. So like old orders where you kind

(27:17):
of have your local member of the clergy who's looking
in on you breaks down right, yeah.

Speaker 1 (27:25):
Yeah. So when the order was restored, you know, he
says from March to July, so you know, July and Florence.
You know, after this has been after this has passed through,
Like did people have to kind of be prodded to
go back to the old ways or were they like,
well that was fun time to go back to the
fields or it.

Speaker 3 (27:45):
Takes a while for people to kind of lie. So
one of the things is in terms of like the fields,
people people go back to the fields.

Speaker 2 (27:52):
Because it's like how the motherfucker going to eat?

Speaker 1 (27:54):
Right, Yeah, that's true. They're like, look, I might have
been a miller or a cobbler before, but we got
to have that wheat dog.

Speaker 2 (28:04):
Yeah bruh, Like I gotta be bringing in that sorghum crop.

Speaker 1 (28:07):
You know, bringing in the sheaves, bring them.

Speaker 3 (28:10):
So we have a lot of like the peasants kind
of return pretty quickly because you know, they're like, I
know how.

Speaker 2 (28:18):
Food gets made. But another thing that happens is, you
know sometimes shit just doesn't go.

Speaker 3 (28:23):
Back to normal, right, Like we lose whole villages where
they're just like that doesn't exist anymore. And those people
oftentimes go to cities, yeah, which replenishes like the city
population because you kind of can't just go pick up land,
you know, because you're technically not free now, Like who's

(28:44):
gonna come check in on you?

Speaker 2 (28:46):
Is the question.

Speaker 3 (28:47):
But it's more the point of like it's more difficult
to go and then get land somewhere where you're not
attached because like obviously those serfs over there are gonna
be like.

Speaker 2 (28:58):
Uh, let's trying to do thought, But with this the
that's the thought. The thoughts.

Speaker 3 (29:16):
They're gonna they're gonna snap that land up, right, They're
not gonna be like, oh yeah, hey, like people from
two villages overcome on it, Like that's not gonna happen.
So those guys go and replenish the cities, and this
is like, you know, kind of brave new world.

Speaker 2 (29:30):
Chance to do something completely new.

Speaker 3 (29:32):
So that's like kind of cool, but you've also like
lost your whole community and you're probably.

Speaker 2 (29:37):
Really fucked up by that, so that's kind of bad.
You know. Obviously, the church.

Speaker 3 (29:42):
Has a vested interest in like just kind of keeping
things ticking over and sometimes like nobles and royals will
very specifically kind of prod people into doing what they want,
you know, militarily, and then you know, you get.

Speaker 2 (29:57):
Places like Progue who are like, what.

Speaker 3 (29:59):
Was something I don't I don't hear anything, So it's
like it all it all depends.

Speaker 1 (30:04):
Right, Bohemia, Poland and one other part of North Germany
magically unaffected I or not unaffected, but didn't have anything
like the other deaths.

Speaker 2 (30:19):
You know, because God loves us.

Speaker 1 (30:21):
That's true. Yeah. If anything from the rest of history
tells us, it's that God loves the Poles in.

Speaker 3 (30:29):
The Slova he happen to us?

Speaker 4 (30:32):
Never God, uh jeez.

Speaker 2 (30:35):
No.

Speaker 1 (30:37):
I actually have read like counter things about like why
it was that it didn't get there, and like, uh,
I don't know. I mean, like I had no idea.

Speaker 2 (30:50):
There's a ganetic thing.

Speaker 3 (30:52):
There's a genetic argument which I like to bring up
just because I like to use it to explain all
of my fucking problems with allergies that I've got from
like my check and Slovak side of the family, where
there's this idea that people who have allergies because you know,
you've got a hyperactive immune system that just attacks you
constantly because it's a little bitch, and there's this idea

(31:15):
that they were better offending off the Black Death because
your mean sis was just like what's that over there?

Speaker 2 (31:19):
Hey? But no, you know, and it's like, bro, I'm
like allergic to air.

Speaker 1 (31:24):
So yeah, you know, it's.

Speaker 2 (31:28):
Probably just you guess I'm just saying it because it's.

Speaker 1 (31:30):
Full scale, yeah, full scale breakdown. It hit Italy, Constantinople,
parts of England, parts of France, it like decimated them.
It killed like fifty percent of the people in the
levant like Morocco, you know, all Egypt Egypt got fucking annihilated.

(31:55):
The population of Cairo didn't recover until like sixteen hundred
or something. It was real bad. But yeah, you know,
we we've talked before about the you know, long term
ramifications of the Black Death afterwards, you know, like peasants
were able to to to scrape a bit more for themselves,

(32:18):
you know, you know, standards of living rows in some
cases because there was you know, more land and all
that over time. But was there any were there any
immediate things that happened that just never went back at all.

Speaker 3 (32:31):
I mean, one of the kind of immediate things that
happens that doesn't go back is just the kind of
level of suspicion that's incredibly.

Speaker 2 (32:41):
High, Like you get a lot of blame place at
the door of the church.

Speaker 3 (32:49):
Let's just say that that it doesn't you don't really
put that cat back in the bag.

Speaker 2 (32:54):
Yeah, And I think that that really hurts people.

Speaker 3 (32:58):
I would say that one of the things that begins
to happen is people start being more interested in like
nice things you have, more interesting kind of like consumer
culture and stuff like that, because they're.

Speaker 2 (33:09):
Like, bitch, I might die at any moment.

Speaker 1 (33:10):
I want some cloth, give me those pointy toad shoes.

Speaker 3 (33:16):
Yeah, there's a lot more. There's a lot more of that.
So like we see a fashion get really outlandish very quickly,
and things of this nature. So yeah, a little bit
more emphasis on nice things and luxuries as it were.

Speaker 4 (33:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (33:36):
Yeah, So the last thing, you know, just from my
own curiosity, Boccaccio implies the widespread breakdown of sexual mores
at the time. Is this attested to in the historical record?

Speaker 3 (33:48):
I mean, it's really difficult to say, because people talk
about it all the time, and so I'm assuming it
must be true. But it's also difficult to say if
they're just like doing it to talk about people fucking
because they love to do that. I'm assuming yes, because
you know, you get like a lot of sermons written
about it, you get a lot of chronicles saying this,

(34:09):
you get rather a lot of people handwringing.

Speaker 2 (34:12):
So I'm gonna go ahead and say, yeah, like they
were fucking.

Speaker 1 (34:15):
Yeah, there there was an uptick uptick in hand jobs
and everybody just like the world ended. Yeah, we started
with the Black Death because that's what the camera in
itself starts with. But now we're going to turn, as
we always do with these introductions to the author and
mettextual aspects of the book. So first the author Eleanor,

(34:38):
who is Giovanni Boccaccio, and uh, why he so horny?
Why he loved so he's so horny?

Speaker 3 (34:46):
Okay, so noted Florentine, but very interestingly, he actually moves
to Naples at kind of a young age because his
dad is in banking and basically down in Naples they're
having the reign of Frederick the Wise, who's an Anchovin,
which is quite funny, and there's kind of like rather

(35:06):
a lot of wheeling and dealing going on down there.
So Stead it's like, yo, there's money to be made.
Come on, everybody, We're moving to Naples. And he's meant
to be a banker like his dad, but he fucking
hates it, like shout out an anti capitalist king. And
so then he's like, look, I'm gonna study canon law instead,
and like he gets sent off to school, but he

(35:27):
also hates that.

Speaker 1 (35:31):
He's like, man, I just want to I just want
to hang out for a living. Can I get a
job just hanging out? Yeah? Writing poetry?

Speaker 3 (35:38):
Yeah, So he gets the closest thing to that, which
is like he begins to write poetry. So he gets this,
you know, nice little education where you know everyone at
the time is super hard for doing more Greek texts
and things. There's more Greek texts floating around the Italian
peninsula at this point in time. I wonder why Venice
looking in your direction.

Speaker 1 (36:00):
Man. They were ripping. They were ripping the copper out,
they were ripping, they were they were taking the crown jewels,
they were taking the horses of Saint Mark. They were
stealing every fucking thing they could. They were taking the
papers out of like they were taking manuscript just hauling them.
They're like the ship out.

Speaker 3 (36:19):
Of here, Like I can't even read this ship yet,
but I'll get to it.

Speaker 2 (36:22):
I'll learn.

Speaker 1 (36:23):
And they and they didn't even and they didn't And
even though they did that, there was still like when
when when Constantinople fell, they were like, Wow, all of
this new knowledge we just found out. The Greeks were like,
we've known this for six hundred years. What's wrong with you?

Speaker 2 (36:37):
Jesus Christ?

Speaker 1 (36:38):
I wonder, I thought, you guys, Wait, you guys just
dominated US military, militarily, financially, religiously, and economically. And you
mother and like they probably were like you mud farming peasants.
Fuck yeah, you'd be so mad if you took an

(36:59):
l like that.

Speaker 2 (37:00):
God embarrassing, embarrassing.

Speaker 3 (37:02):
So like, yeah, I mean that is one hundred percent
what's going down at the moment. And so he's like
getting all trained up. But then he moves back to
Florence and he kind of gets caught up in politics,
like events overtake him. He becomes really involved in Florentine government,

(37:22):
and as a result of that, he's sent on lots
of diplomatic missions for the Florentines. So, for example, when
Pope Urban the fifth comes down to Rome because he's like,
you know, thinking about like he visits Rome anyway from Avenue,
and Charles the fourth is like, you're gonna state you
get to stay in Rope.

Speaker 2 (37:41):
You gotta stay in Rome, and he's.

Speaker 3 (37:42):
Like no, it fucking absolute looks, but like you know,
it's it's Bocaccio who goes and meets him. Bocaccio gets
sent around, like to varying different cities.

Speaker 2 (37:52):
He like gets sent up to the German Lands.

Speaker 3 (37:54):
He gets sent like to do things for Florence, and
as a part of this he also meets Petrarch, who
is kind of like doing his like big tour of
the Italian lands, being like, shit fucking sucks.

Speaker 2 (38:05):
Does anyone want to do anything about it?

Speaker 3 (38:07):
Ah?

Speaker 2 (38:08):
Oh, okay, okay, cool, cool, cool, cool cool cool.

Speaker 3 (38:11):
Well, I'm gonna write some things talking about this particular
time that are gonna be wildly misconstrued by people in
the nineteenth century.

Speaker 2 (38:17):
So uh yeah.

Speaker 3 (38:20):
Like so he's doing like all of these diplomatic things
and and he gets like set back to the pope repeatedly.
And this is kind of confusing because like there are
rumors that he kind of like takes the cloth at
a point in time, but we don't have any evidence
of it, but he is super involved with the papacy,
so it's kind of like what's going on over there right,
like really really difficult to say. But anyway, he decides

(38:43):
he's gonna be an author. The first thing he writes
is the day mliary bus Clary, so like the famous women,
and then he writes yes, yeah, because he's like, ladies, ladies,
I'm a feminist.

Speaker 1 (38:57):
The earliest sum is nough. I'm just kidding, as you
please do not. But yeah.

Speaker 3 (39:02):
Then then he gets around eventually to ride into the
camera and he kind of starts in like thirteen forty nine,
I want to say, but it takes him a really
really long time, and this kind.

Speaker 2 (39:14):
Of becomes his magnum opus, right, like this is this
is his thing, so.

Speaker 3 (39:21):
It becomes kind of like the thing about him. And
he's working on it for like twenty five years. Like
I mean, because the motherfucker is a brick, let's be real.
So that's not too surprising when you see the book.
But yeah, he's just like a really interesting guy in
that he has his fingers in a lot of different pies.
He's got sort of like one toe in every single world, right,

(39:41):
Like he's in politics, he's in the church, he understands banking,
he is a poet.

Speaker 2 (39:46):
He's meeting up.

Speaker 3 (39:47):
With all of these people who are influential thinkers at
the time, and that's just really particular and interesting. So yeah,
like a real, a real interesting late medieval guy.

Speaker 2 (39:59):
He's a weird little one. I like him.

Speaker 1 (40:01):
Yeah. He also famously maybe the reason that we all
know about and envision Hell as Dante's Inferno, because he
was Dante's bravest soldier. He loved Dante. He was the

(40:21):
person who first called it the It's called the divine
comedy now because Boccaccio called it that as opposed to
his own human comedy. You know it.

Speaker 4 (40:33):
He he just he.

Speaker 1 (40:34):
Fucking loved Dante. He and Petrarch both loved Dante. And
you know it's wild because you know, Dante is extremely,
extremely sincere and all this stuff. And I mean, maybe
Boccaccio cared about, like cared as deeply about his mortal soul.
I don't think we can know that, but he certainly

(40:58):
didn't like he Even Dante's ironic denunciations and punishment of
the church and his punishments of the pope are in
a different tenor than the way.

Speaker 4 (41:09):
Boccaccio talks about it.

Speaker 1 (41:11):
Boccaccio's like snide when he talks about it. Dante's more
like sad, like, well, I missed, I missed, I missed
the real the real deal.

Speaker 3 (41:20):
Yeah, and it's interesting. It shows us how we've kind
of moved on. And I think also this is the difference.
Like he he fanboys Dante, but he considers himself a
devotee of Petrarc, so he kind of sees himself as
en meshed with Petrarch's kind of vision of a new

(41:42):
future for the Italian peninsula, and Petrarch is not a
fan of the church at the time for French reasons, right, right,
So you know, like things have kind of like wrapped up.
And this is also one of the big things that
we've got to keep in mind when we are comparing things,
like even in this like couple of years, by the
time we've got to by the time it got to Bocaccio,

(42:08):
he is in the middle of the Babylonian captivity, right,
like the papacy, like is here baby, and so like
Dante meanwhile, he was just like I don't know, like
a pope's live in room?

Speaker 1 (42:20):
Am I? Right? Am I? Right?

Speaker 3 (42:21):
So you know, like things things kind of like have
changed massively. So you get a bit more unhappy, don't you.

Speaker 1 (42:28):
Yeah, Like yeah you do, yeah, And uh yeah, he
you know, he's obsessed with Dante. He copies out, uh
the the text of the Divine, the whole Divine comedy.
He's the first one that does it. And uh, you know,
he just he loved Dante. And so like, you know,

(42:51):
if you like that vision you have of hell in
your head, you can thank Bacaccio for at least one thing,
a couple more things on Bocaccio. Should we think less
of this work because it's mostly a retelling of existing
stories and tall tales?

Speaker 2 (43:07):
No, I mean, like, motherfucker, Oh now we're mad.

Speaker 3 (43:09):
At medieval people for writing like medieval people, I think, not,
all right, Like, this is what they do, this is
what this is what the Canterbury Tales is, this is
what we see with that blow, this is how they
tell stories. So I just don't think that we can
get down on them for like having a preferred format.

Speaker 2 (43:28):
So I just don't think that that really works as
a criticism, you know.

Speaker 3 (43:32):
And yeah, it's not the way that we write now,
but okay, so what and also sometimes we do, you know,
also sometimes we do have short story collections, and that's
kind of the way to think about this is as
a collection of short stories.

Speaker 2 (43:45):
And there's nothing wrong with that as a literary genre.

Speaker 3 (43:48):
It's just that this is how medieval people do it,
because if you think about it, you're not always going
to have like someone who's literate around the shop.

Speaker 2 (43:56):
And so what you're going to be doing is you're
gonna have someone.

Speaker 3 (43:59):
Telling thesees to groups of people, you know, at mar
ease and for fun, and you know you're not gonna
be all.

Speaker 2 (44:06):
Like, well, I'll come back tomorrow night.

Speaker 3 (44:08):
And pick up where we left off chapter twenty three, right,
But you can skip around and you can do different
stories at different times.

Speaker 4 (44:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (44:17):
Lastly, what is it about Bacaccio's writing that makes him
feel kind of unique and different to basically everything that
came before? And is this the first novel in your opinion?

Speaker 2 (44:30):
That's a great question. I suppose that. I think so
the first place.

Speaker 3 (44:35):
One of the things that is different about it is
it has like the intellectual rigor. It's got the it's
got the chops, baby, it's got references to classical literature.
This is a motherfucker who knows his mythology. This is
someone who's really on top of things, and he can
do it all Like right, he's got rains, he can
do funny, he can do sad, he can do tragic,

(44:57):
he can do scary, like he can do all these
different things.

Speaker 2 (45:00):
And so it really shows.

Speaker 3 (45:03):
Him as someone who has talent on a huge scale
and is able to bring about lots of different lots
of different emotions in his audience. And I think that
that is what really kind of sticks with us. In
terms of being the first novel, I think I'd probably
actually go for the Divine Comedy first, just because I

(45:23):
do think that it kind of hangs together almost novelistically,
because of like the point of view that we get
from the main character. But I understand why people say this,
because I think that this is kind of more intended
for a broader audience, so it's kind of like more
aware of itself.

Speaker 1 (45:40):
Yeah, yeah, I think it's either this or you know,
maybe Don Quixote, which is you.

Speaker 2 (45:46):
Know, we love Savantes, don't we?

Speaker 1 (45:48):
Yeah, which is you know almost is that fifteen hundreds? Yea, yeah,
yeah it was, you know, it was a couple of
hundred years later, you know. But yeah, it's it's it's all,
it's all a rich tabestry because it's all coming together,
you know, you can't you can't have one without the other.
Moving on to the meditextual stuff. So in his prologue,

(46:10):
Boccaccio refers to the book by the subtitle Prince Galahut
aka Galahad. What does a figure of our theory and
legend have to do with this book?

Speaker 2 (46:20):
So I think that this is kind of like.

Speaker 3 (46:24):
A reference to making beautiful things out of like sinful ones, right,
because Galahad quite famously he is Lancelot's bastard son. Yeah,
you know, so there you go, and he also becomes
like the successful Grail night all right.

Speaker 2 (46:41):
So we talked about this in.

Speaker 3 (46:43):
Our theory on a series. You know, they're constantly going
through who is the new superhero Night, and first it's
like Key, and then it's Lancelot, and then and then
he gets Galahad, right, And Galahad is the one who's
able to focus up on religion and you know, askew
himself to such a point.

Speaker 2 (47:02):
That he's able to like get the Grail. So congratulations.

Speaker 3 (47:05):
And I think it's kind of like a reference to
like coming through temptation or like coming through these like
sinful things in order to create something beautiful and pure.
And that's kind of both a reference to what is
going on at the time and also a reference to
kind of what he's intending to do with this literature,
is like, yeah, you know, we're doing these kind of
like body things, but this is this is giving us

(47:28):
a window into humanity, which is beautiful indeed.

Speaker 1 (47:32):
Indeed. Yeah, So to put it mildly, the de Cameron
caused quite a stir upon release it.

Speaker 4 (47:42):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (47:43):
Well, and we've had a we have a question from Gassey,
who has asked what was the initial reaction to the
de Cameron on its publication? What is it considered especially scandalous? Uh?
What with most of the stories involving sex and usually adultery,
as well as a solid helping of last me against
the Church, usually as a part of the first two
Uh so, yeah, Eleanor was were they mad about the

(48:06):
anti clericalism or the sex thing or maybe both?

Speaker 3 (48:10):
I mean so interestingly at first they're like, oh my,
that's so much sex.

Speaker 2 (48:13):
Can I gety?

Speaker 3 (48:14):
You know, it's very like initially in the fourteenth century,
it's very much like there's like some fifty shade stuff
where it's.

Speaker 2 (48:23):
Like, oh, have it for Ben, Can you believe there's
this sexy book?

Speaker 3 (48:27):
I can't believe it because for the fourteenth century, this
is the standard level of antialism, Like this is not
this is not anything that I don't expect to see
off like my boy Meleach. It's just like much more
amusing when BaCaCO is doing it right, Like it's very
very funny. So there is some like, oh, well, this

(48:47):
is just a sign of the times isn't everything is
falling apart. Oh we're so immoral now, ubbity bubby bob.
But you know that doesn't stop it selling like hotcakes.
In fact, it just helps it to increase in fame.
Now what weapons though, is like a hundred years later
the church is like, wait a minute, but that makes

(49:07):
perfect sense, right, because like, first of all, when this
comes out, the church is.

Speaker 2 (49:11):
Like, I don't know, man, everyone's fucking dying. I don't
know what to tell you. And we are.

Speaker 1 (49:15):
Like they weren't prohibiting anything at that point. They were
like they were fending off angry mobs.

Speaker 3 (49:21):
They could not prohibit people from like going up outside
the papal.

Speaker 2 (49:25):
Palace and Avenue on and yelling you fucking suck and.

Speaker 3 (49:27):
That like basically, like you know, he revises it kind
of one more time in the thirteen seventies and then
by thirteen seventy eight year in the middle of the
of the Western Schism, right, so like when the Western
Schism happens, I'm sorry, they do not fucking care what
is going on in terms of literature.

Speaker 2 (49:45):
They do not have time for this.

Speaker 3 (49:47):
Then when they finally get the band got back together,
they're like, hold on a fucking second. And it's at
this point in time that they've also got all these
problems with hoosites, they've got problems with lollards, they've got
problems with you know, people who have just completely been like, yeah,
we're not even fucking Catholic anymore, and you can go
fuck yourself.

Speaker 2 (50:04):
And so suddenly they're like, whoa, whoa, what's all this
anti clericalism?

Speaker 1 (50:08):
Hey, yo, wow, oh you guys are still mad at
us for that whole it's your fault about the Black
Death they come on. That was like a century yeah, exactly,
and so we're just a little guy.

Speaker 3 (50:20):
Yeah, and so it you know, there's there's the Bonfire
of the Vanities.

Speaker 1 (50:26):
Yeah, it was turned in the first one. The Bonfire
of the Vanities was a real thing. I always think
that's neat.

Speaker 3 (50:32):
So I think it's nice. I think that's really great.
And so they're like, well, let's get let's fucking go.
But it's very important to point out that this is
like in fourteen ninety seven, so it's like one hundred
and ten years after the fucking fact, right, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (50:44):
And we tend to do this thing of.

Speaker 3 (50:45):
Collapsing time when We're like, oh, and then the church
immediately condemned it, and I'm like that's a pretty slow immediate, right, yeah,
And this is where everything fucking starts going downhill, because
we're we're about to hit the Early Modern period. You know,
by many accounts, were in the Early Modern period.

Speaker 1 (51:03):
By the time we at this point, you are twenty
years from uh Lutherans, you know, Lutherans, Yeah, twenty years
from lu got.

Speaker 3 (51:10):
The Columbian Exchange going already, you know, we've got hoos sites.
So it's like, really, you know, fucking Columbus has fallen.

Speaker 1 (51:19):
Columbus sailed yie old ocean blue by that point. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (51:23):
So basically the only person who hasn't got the memo
that we are in a new era is the Germans
at this point. So you know, it's like, yeah, so
it's very much a kind of early modern backlash, whereas
in the Middle Ages they're like, so true, how rivaled?

Speaker 2 (51:38):
Right?

Speaker 4 (51:38):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (51:39):
O oh you.

Speaker 4 (51:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (51:43):
Officially, it was challenged by clerics for some time after
The Bonfire of the Vanities was officially placed on the
band books list, which is known as the Index Liberum
Prohibitorum when it was created in fifteen fifty nine, but
again that was created in fifteen fifty nine, so you know,
they might have looked down upon certain books before that,

(52:05):
but the official thing didn't come out. Despite this, the
book was extremely popular, and a new version was commissioned
by Pope Gregory the eighth and fifteen seventy three, wherein
all the clerics were replaced by secular individuals. But that
wasn't good enough, so an even more heavily revised edition
was done less than a decade later, under Pope's sexist

(52:28):
the fifth.

Speaker 3 (52:30):
I love this, it's so it's so fucking name. This
is like Renaissance Pope to a t. It's like, this
is what they're spending your money on. They're like, I
like the Sexy Book, but you can't criticize me anyway.

Speaker 2 (52:43):
I'm off to the orgy.

Speaker 4 (52:44):
Boo boo yah boooo, right, Like.

Speaker 3 (52:46):
You know, like these these motherfuckers, all right, you're selling indulgences,
making the biggest and ugliest like Vatican you've ever fucking seen,
and just like fucking their page boy, And they're like, well,
I want to read the Sexy book.

Speaker 2 (53:00):
You can't be bad.

Speaker 1 (53:01):
I'm gonna jerk off to this, but you can't yell
at me in it exactly. Yeah, I'm reading this with
one hand, but you can't.

Speaker 2 (53:07):
You can't. But just so you know, I am not
all clerics, so is.

Speaker 1 (53:11):
This very uh yeah, not all clerics, you know. And
he's wearing like a miter well like a well like
a yeah, a page is like sucking him off in
like a in a in like a hot tub of champagne.
How do you invent a hot tub? Back? Then shut off? Look,
what didn't Champagne really fuck up the hot shut up?

(53:32):
Shut the fuck anyway?

Speaker 4 (53:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (53:35):
Uh. The book itself is classic. It's been adapted dozens
of times since its released. Most notably is that it
is one of the direct uh so called Italian humanist
inspirations for Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and thus is a direct
inspiration for Dan Simmons's excellent sci fi novel Hyperion. Uh.

(53:58):
You can read the first one. It's amazing, The second
one's pretty good, a third and fourth one that's real
late century sci fi writer, problematic stuff. But you do
you you're an adult. You guys are adults. But yeah,
the first one is really excellent, though you get the shrike.
We love the shrike. He puts us on the tree.
He puts us on the tree of time so we

(54:18):
can think about our sins for you know, for eternity.
It's great. We love him, folks. Yeah, anyway. The individual
stories have also inspired many adaptations and retellings of their own,
such as Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well, works by Molier, Lord,
Alfred Tennyson, Percy B. Shelley, Jonathan Swift, and even one

(54:39):
by Martin Luther, which of course is about a Jew
converting to Christianity and try to trying to convince the
Jew not to Yeah, it's fine, he and Philip melichthon
it's real like self insert poor Man's Dante hours. It
also served as the inspiration for a number of films,

(54:59):
but specifically two famous ones, both known as The Camera Nights,
one from nineteen twenty four and the other from nineteen
fifty three, and a recent Netflix adaptation released in twenty
twenty four, amongst many others.

Speaker 3 (55:12):
I haven't watched that yet, and I haven't either. Oh yeah, yeah,
it looks good.

Speaker 1 (55:15):
I just you know, yeah, I've heard I've heard mixed things, uh,
but also heard it sexy.

Speaker 2 (55:21):
So you know, well, that well you know that's that's
the the Cameron base.

Speaker 1 (55:25):
It is the de camera. Yeah, as long as people
are fucking it could be like, oh yeah, I hate
like you're fucking You're like, God, I hate clerics. God
they suck so much.

Speaker 2 (55:34):
Like the camera don't come yet.

Speaker 3 (55:37):
Okay, I'm thinking about how I hate fucking hate clerks.

Speaker 2 (55:40):
Oh god, fuck hewn. It's supposed to work the opposite way.

Speaker 1 (55:48):
Yeah, we're supposed to talk about that first. Oh no,
now this is a horrifying fetish we oh god. Lastly,
the book itself, uh setting in characters, so yeah, set
thirteen forty eight, just outside Florence at the deserted villa Schifanoia.
I have no idea. This is a villa. It's a

(56:10):
lovely villa that you can still I think it's private now,
but still there to this day in what is now
Faya Sol the dramatics persone. We got seven women named
who he names is like, He's like, I'm not going
to tell you their names. Okay, fine, we'll call this
one Pampania, Fiametta, Philimina, Amelia, Loretta, Nephili and Alyssa. And

(56:38):
three men named Panfilo, Dioneo, and Filo strato eleanor is
there anything we need to know about any of them specifically?

Speaker 3 (56:48):
Not really, they're like interchangeable ggs. I mean to a
certain extent, he's kind of like written himself into it
a little bit, like you know, he's got his own
personal Mary Sue in that way that everybody likes to
do it right, you know.

Speaker 2 (57:05):
It's it's basically gonna.

Speaker 3 (57:08):
Be though your standard sort of like sexy kind of stories.

Speaker 2 (57:11):
But yeah, I mean one of them is Bocaccio.

Speaker 1 (57:14):
Yeah, congratulations, it's long. It's long been. It may may
have been happening in the Middle Ages too, but in
the early modern period people were like, oh, Penphilos Bocaccio,
I got it, Like like oh, oh, I see, like
you didn't cover that very well, now, did you.

Speaker 3 (57:29):
It's yeah, basically, I mean it says a lot about
society that there's like seven women and three men, you know.

Speaker 1 (57:37):
Yeah, yeah, I mean yeah, they don't really have like
they you'll hear about like oh this character is like
one note or something like that. These are no note characters.
They are here to voice the story and for you
to imagine in your head like somebody been like once
upon a time and he goes do do do do,

(57:59):
and you see the like you know, you don't. It
doesn't matter if phil Amina or you know, Dioneo said it,
you know.

Speaker 3 (58:09):
You know, yeah, it's like, you know, there are there
is some speculation that there's like seven women because it's like,
you know, maybe maybe this is the liberal arts. Maybe
it is you know, the cardinal and theological virtues, which
are like you know, you know, the ones like temperance

(58:29):
and fortitude and justice and prudent and faith and hope
and charity blah blah blah blah, you know the ones.
But you know, seven is just kind of like the thing.
And it's like, you know, there's how many muses are there,
you know, it's it's stuff like this.

Speaker 2 (58:43):
So and and then like yeah, and then you get
like three dudes.

Speaker 3 (58:47):
Like there's been some kind of like, oh, maybe this
is about the division of the soul and their appetite
and spirit and reason. And I'm like, okay, well which
one is fucking boccaccio?

Speaker 1 (58:55):
Right?

Speaker 3 (58:56):
Yeah, you know, so I think it's it's maybe like
a little far fetched. It all so fundamentally you don't
really need to know that because they are interchangeable.

Speaker 1 (59:05):
Really, yeah, yeah, yeah, it. It doesn't matter who you
imagine as how you imagine these characters. They are as
interchangeable as possible. I think really the only info we
get on them is that Pampania is the oldest one,
Like he says that in the intro, and that's pretty
much it. And you know, other than that, they all

(59:27):
just sound like uh, Lacroix beverage names. God, there's Pamponia
and Philomena, and you're like, man, that's great, just give
me some fucking you know, folks, that is the de Cameron.
It is uh, it's gonna be a lot of fun.

(59:48):
I'm going to go ahead and preface this right now.
There's a lot of sex in this There's a lot
of fucking. If that embarrasses you, that's fine, I understand.
I can't listen in a place where you can't hear that.
These episodes are probably going to be very not safe
for work and very not safe for your kids or

(01:00:09):
like someone you don't want to have an awkward conversation
with listening. I'm just saying that right now. So you
so you know, I'm you know, I'm sure you do,
but you know, in case you've forgotten, this is like
you know, it's not gonna you know, it's not gonna
be like Dante describing you know, what two lovers did.
It's like so anyway, I was really getting in her guts.

Speaker 2 (01:00:29):
And yeah, yeah, exactly, Okay, cool.

Speaker 4 (01:00:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:00:32):
So I just want everyone to know that. Uh, you know,
I don't think any of you have a problem, but you.

Speaker 2 (01:00:37):
Know, it's gonna be very medieval looks. I don't know
what to tell you.

Speaker 3 (01:00:40):
These people love to talk about sex and they're a
lot more chill with it than we are. And it's
not our fault, so don't so stop yelling at us.

Speaker 2 (01:00:49):
I'm not the papacy.

Speaker 1 (01:00:50):
So that's right, that's right, Well, folks, that is uh,
that's gonna do it. Uh, you know, for this intro
to the camera. We'll be back next month. I don't
know how many stories or how many days we'll cover.
We're not covering all the stories. You know, if there

(01:01:11):
is if there are a couple that you are really uh,
if you really like them, please respond in this or
posting the discord or d M or whatever. Uh, you know,
just let us know. Well, you know, we're going to
try to get We're going to try to get to
the big ones and you know which whichever one's eleanor
says she likes, because I certainly don't know where you know,

(01:01:33):
what most of them are about anyway. But yeah, we'll
be back. We'll be back with that next time. And
uh yeah that you know, that's the show. Hope you
you guys enjoyed it. You guys who voted for the
de Cameron vindicated, vindicated After we we went through the
Name of the Rose, which was awesome, but you know,

(01:01:54):
now we get the de Cameron, which is also awesome,
So yeah it is. Yes, so we'll be back next
time with that. But yeah, thank you all for listening,
thank you for subscribing. We'll see you next time.

Speaker 2 (01:02:05):
Bye ye