Analyzing key takeaways from Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th-century The Decameron.
First Day
First Story
A wicker Ser Cepperello is dying and decides to trick a friar into giving him a confession. He manages to do this well, by lying and positioning himself as someone who lived an entirely clean life. The friar, moved, grants him his confession and so after his death, is somehow made into a saint, Saint Ciapelletto.
Boccaccio comments on the absurdity of the Catholic Church’s distribution of penance in order to absolve sinners. At this point in history, it became a real issue where the church would then charge people to grant these penances, putting the whole process into question when people would knowingly sin because they have the means to pay the Church for their penance. In fact it is this frustration that led Martin Luther to pin his 95 Theses on the church door, leading to the Christian sect of Protestantism. To tell this story right around the Bubonic Plague tells us Boccaccio may have seen priests and friars offer these left and right, questioning their overall validity.