In 1348, the Black Death struck Florence with extreme mortality and social disruption. Boccaccio later used this crisis as the frame for The Decameron, imagining young Florentines leaving the city to tell stories in the countryside. The catastrophe helped make vernacular storytelling feel urgent and realistic, not just courtly or learned.
After the plague year, Boccaccio started composing The Decameron in Tuscan Italian (a major literary vernacular). He built a carefully structured collection: 10 storytellers over 10 days, producing 100 tales. This design helped the work circulate in pieces and as a whole, which mattered for how it was later copied in manuscripts.
By about 1351, Boccaccio’s work on The Decameron reached a more stable form, even though revision continued afterward. This mattered because early copyists needed a working text to reproduce, and small differences between copies could accumulate. The result was a developing “manuscript tradition,” meaning a family of handwritten copies with related but not identical readings.
Scholars commonly place the work’s composition and revision across 1349–1353, with multiple phases rather than a single clean endpoint. This multi-stage writing process helps explain why different manuscript branches exist: later copies sometimes reflect later authorial choices, while earlier copies can preserve older states. The book’s popularity made copying worth the time and expense of parchment and labor.
As The Decameron circulated, it helped elevate Tuscan vernacular prose as a serious literary medium, not only Latin. Copying the text by hand also invited readers to add headings, marginal notes, and other “paratext” that shaped interpretation. These habits created a living manuscript culture around the work, where reading and copying influenced each other.
Around 1369–1371 (often dated about 1370), Boccaccio produced the manuscript known as Hamilton 90, now in Berlin. It is recognized as an autograph witness (in Boccaccio’s own hand) and includes corrections and alternative readings. Because it shows authorial revision, Hamilton 90 became a central reference point for reconstructing the text’s late form.
Giovanni Boccaccio died on December 21, 1375. After his death, the text could no longer be adjusted by the author, so copyists and readers became the main forces shaping what versions survived. This is a key turning point in the manuscript tradition: authority shifts from authorial rewriting to scribal transmission and scholarly comparison.
In August 1384, Francesco d’Amaretto Mannelli finished copying The Decameron (and Corbaccio) in Florence, in the manuscript now known as Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Pluteo 42.1. Mannelli’s copy is famous for its extensive glosses (explanatory notes) and organized apparatus. These features show how late-1300s readers studied Boccaccio closely, not just for entertainment.
By the 1380s, manuscripts like Pluteo 42.1 show readers turning The Decameron into a text for sustained analysis, with marginal commentary guiding meaning. Glosses could explain difficult passages, clarify names, or add moral and rhetorical framing. This “scholarly” style of vernacular manuscript culture helped the work move toward classroom-like settings and long-term canon status.
As more copies were made, differences in spelling, wording, and even phrasing spread across the tradition. Some changes came from errors; others were deliberate “improvements,” censorship, or attempts to clarify meaning. This period matters because later editors had to compare many manuscripts and decide which readings were closest to what Boccaccio wrote.
By about 1400, The Decameron existed mainly as a network of handwritten witnesses rather than a single fixed form. Readers encountered the work through specific codices—some plain, some heavily annotated—which influenced how the stories were understood. This endpoint highlights the manuscript era’s legacy: the work’s survival and meaning depended on scribes, patrons, and readers as much as on the original composition.
Boccaccio's Decameron and Its Manuscript Tradition (1348–1400)