re: #396 Decatur Deb

If the Renaissance had not been filled with precocious lovers, there would have been no one for the Enlightenment. They had the plague years to get through.

I had quite an argument with a professor I had freshman year, who insisted that the frame story of Bocaccio’s Decameron is clearly supposed to be fantasy, since young women would never go off with young men unchaperoned like that. “It would be an invitation to rape,” she announced.

Well, possibly, but given that the streets of Florence were stacked with corpses, and the plague was taking everything in its path, am I really supposed to believe that the young ladies were not thinking, “Sure, but they’ve got a cart, and they’re leaving town—survival is of the essence.”?