This panel addresses a current pedagogical need to discuss effective approaches to teaching Boccaccio's Decameron, in whole and in part, through the lens of COVID-19 and recent artistic and mainstream appropriations of this 14th-century work. The American Boccaccio Association and the LLC Forum on Medieval and Renaissance Italian Literature have received many requests from their members for guidance on how to teach this seminal literary work and its frame of the Black Death during a moment of great resonance with our current pandemic.

Brenda Rosado will speak about the gendered concepts of shame coded into the Decameron, and how it relates to our current calls for social justice. This Decameron-inspired course treats shame—a tacit endemic—in the classroom. Plagued with shame and its different lexemes and connotations—(dis)honor, (im)modesty, humiliation—Boccaccio’s text invites us to see shame and its cousin emotions, such as fear and guilt, as subjects worthy of study. Moreover, with the new interest in the Decameron since the eruption of the coronavirus in 2020, Boccaccio’s fiction provides us with the opportunity to write critically about shame(lessness) parallels with our ongoing pandemic. Hence, this student-centered course looks at how COVID-19 slowed us down to reflect on gender inequality, racism, and civil unrest. Rosado will share the multimodal, non-traditional compositions, such as activist and creative pieces, inspired by the Decameron and the turbulent 2020-2021 period produced for this course.

Cosette Bruhns Alonso will present on an undergraduate level course which she taught for Brown University. “Decameron: Technologies of Representation, Medieval to Modern,” examines the text in relation to its visual representation and sociocultural reception, considering both medieval and contemporary adaptations.The large number of Decameron-inspired artistic, theatrical, musical, digital, and dance projects emerging during the Covid-19 pandemic present a unique opportunity to extend this study of form and content, as well as text and adaptation, by making use of digital platforms to investigate recurring patterns and ask new questions of the text that take into consideration a broader range of visual data. Analyzing a broad range of visual interpretations enables students to consider changes to the representation of social hierarchy, and racialized or gendered bodies across temporal boundaries, opening new ways for thinking about the text’s sociocultural impact for different generations of readers. Her paper will both reflect on the pedagogical effectiveness of reading the text alongside its visual reception, in addition to the experience of creating a digital project in Scalar. Using the open source publishing platform Scalar, students in this course collaborate to build a visual archive of the Decameron’s artistic reception,drawing from both medieval and contemporary sources.

Catherine Bloomer will offer a method for approaching medieval disease and disability in a single class session on Boccaccio’s Decameron. In-class screenings of clips from The Little Hours (2017) aid students’ understanding and contextualization of the Prologue, parts of the frame narration, and the tale of Masetto da Lamporecchio (3.1). Comedy, both medieval and modern, colors our understanding of the treatment of the disabled. Students are invited to discuss and understand Masetto’s infiltration of the nunnery as a comedic performance of disability which is not only a cover for virility, but also a threat to the disabled community. Students will engage with the medieval treatment and construction of disability particularly through medieval laws against those who, like Masetto, impersonated disability. By impersonating a deaf man, Masetto joins the ranks of the historical able-bodied poor who took labor opportunities intended for the disabled. Students will consider the ability to work as a potential barometer for medieval disability. Her approach particularly engages with the question of whether deafness constitutes disability both in the medieval world and today. Further, the class will use Masetto’s actions as a springboard to consider the insistent literary and cultural topos that disability is funny. We shall tease out the connection of such humor, the impostors or appropriators of disability, and the suppression of disabled voices in literature. Distinctions between natural and acquired disabilities, the confinement of disease, and fear, shame, or stigma regarding disease and disability in the medieval world are all distinctions that are at play in the current COVID-19 pandemic. Students will consider social distancing and restrictive movement in light of the frame narration and the Masetto tale. The paper will also provide insights into utilizing an enabling pedagogy in the classroom particularly in the context of a disabling, body-centric text.