re: #408 SanFranciscoZionist

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.”?

i imagine in that kind of society if you think about raping somebody you carefully consider what their relatives would be likely to do to you afterwards