Abstract
In his Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio prescribes storytelling as a means of distraction from the anxieties and suffering associated with the mortifera pestilenza of 1348. Boccaccio pays careful attention to semantics in his work; he confines the discussion of pestilence to the frame tale and avoids evoking the plague thematically, symbolically, and linguistically in the one hundred novelle. This essay examines the power attributed to language in times of epidemic outbreak, in particular, the fear of pronouncing the name of an illness, as if somehow, words possessed the power to make one more susceptible to the malady or to infect. This linguistic aversion to pestilence is analyzed in the story collections of Giovanni Boccaccio, Franco Sacchetti, and Giovanni Sercambi.
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