On Monday 7 February 2022, we read an extract from Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi [The Betrothed]; we used an annotated edition by Roberto Fedi and Vasco Gaiffi (Milano: Mursia, 1993) and read pp. 636-642, that is the beginning of chapter 23. This reading was accompanied by “The Mask of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe and represented the “historical” part in a session entitled “Gothic and historical plague narratives in the nineteenth century.”

Manzoni’s novel is the most widely read in Italian schools; all students in the peninsula will have been exposed to it. Together with Dante’s Divine Comedy, it is still a source for a number of quotes and examples of antonomasia (the use of a proper name to express a general idea) in the Italian language. As it is the case for Dante, the reason for Manzoni’s importance in the school canon is language: after a first version published in 1827, the Milanese Manzoni thoroughly revised the text, to the point of rewriting the novel entirely, after purposely spending some time in Florence to learn the Tuscan language as it was spoken there and, as he put it, “sciacquare i panni in Arno” [rinsing his wash in the river Arno]. It was not his personal fancy: it was a complicated matter widely discussed in the process of the national unification. The text as we read it today dates from 1840-42.

The Betrothed is a historical novel and the first modern novel in the Italian literary tradition. Inspired by Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (which Manzoni read in a French translation), it tells the story of Renzo and Lucia, two young lovers who are prevented from marrying because Don Rodrigo, the local tyrant, desires Lucia. The novel is set in Lombardy in the late 1620s, during the Spanish rule, and one of its most notable parts is the description of the plague that devastated Milan in 1630. Manzoni used historical documents to give a precise account of how the emergency of the bubonic plague was (mis)handled. The description of the plague’s outbreak is one of the most memorable things in Manzoni’s accurate historical description, but since we will explore this aspect through Camus’ La peste [The Plague], here we concentrated on the fictional account of how Don Rodrigo, the baddy, finally dies. Manzoni masterly describes the gradual realisation of his condition:

“He felt himself growing hotter and more restless. He brought his thoughts back to the season, the wine he had drunk, his debauched existence, and he would have only been too glad to blame them for everything. But these ideas were spontaneously replaced by a thought which in those days was associated with all of them, which invaded his mind from every direction, which had cropped up in every speech made at the wild party he had just left, because it was easier to joke about it than to ignore it – the thought of the plague.”

[Listen to this extract in Italian]

While he takes his time to describe Don Rodrigo’s infection and death at length, indulging in the account of all symptoms and thoughts and dreams of this character , Manzoni accelerates dramatically when it is the turn of Griso, Don Rodrigo’s servant:

“Griso stayed behind to make a further rapid choice of whatever might be useful to him; then he packed everything up in a single bundle and went off. He had been very careful not to touch the monatti, nor to let them touch him. But in that last rapid search, he had picked up the clothes which Don Rodrigo had left by the bed, and had given them a shake, without any other thought except that of seeing if there was any money in them. The following day, however, he did have occasion to give the matter some further thought; for as he sat guzzling in a tavern, he was suddenly overtaken by a trembling fit, his eyes were dazzled by the light, the strength left his limbs, and he fell to the floor. His companions deserted him, and he fell into the hands of the monatti, who stripped him of what clothes he had on that were worth having and threw him on to their cart. He died on the way to the lazaretto where they had taken his master.”

[Listen to this extract in Italian]

Don Rodrigo and Griso—deaths from plagues at different speeds.

On Monday 7 February 2022, we read “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1842, which we took from the book of The Complete Stories by Poe, with an introduction by John Seelye (London: David Campbell, 1992), pp. 604-609. This reading was part of a session devoted to “Gothic and historical plague narratives in the nineteenth century,” and constituted the “Gothic” part, whereas the historical one was represented by Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi [The Betrothed], from which we read an extract.

The situation from which Poe’s story starts is very similar to Boccaccio’s frame narrative for the Decameron, which we read last week: there is a plague, and to escape it, a group of young people retires away from where the pestilence rages most furiously. Whereas Boccaccio recounts an historical event – the “Black Death” of 1348 and its effects in the city of Florence – Poe does not give us a precise setting: “The ‘Red Death’ had long devastated the country”. Which country? This is the very beginning. “No pestilence had even been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its avatar and its seal – the redness and the horror of blood.”

If he leaves us uncertain about the time and the place of the narrative, Poe, however, gives us plenty of hints to understand where Prospero’s initiative is taking.

“But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these he retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys.”

[Listen to this extract, read by Philip Rouse]

There is something sinister in this story from the very beginning: Prospero’s fearlessness and his friends’ gaiety are too much in contrast to the fury with which the plague rages. Similarly, their seclusion in the castellated abbey is somewhat too deep:

“A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair from without or of frenzy from within.”

[Listen to this extract, read by Philip Rouse]

While they are leaving outside the plague, they are also imprisoning themselves. They think they are safe (“[…] security […] within. Without was the Read Death”), but in fact they do not give themselves any way out, as the reader discovers little by little, with a growing sense of unease – that sense of unease that Poe masters so well. Like Prospero, the reader is caught in the trap, but unlike him, he sees it: when will the Red Death come?

On Monday 31 January 2022, in a session entitled “Florence, 1348: The Black Death,” we read from Boccaccio’s Decameron, focusing on the Introduction to the First Day . We read the Italian text from Vittore Branca’s 1992 edition and the English text from the 1903 translation by M.J. Rigg.

Both can be found here as part of the Decameron Web project at Brown University. This reading was the first in a series on literary plagues (the others being Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Mask of the Red Death,” Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi [The Betrothed], Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, and Albert Camus’ La peste).

Famously, at the beginning of Day 1, Boccaccio describes the plague of 1348 in Florence, which spread like a fire (“just as fire devours things dry or greasy when they are brought close to it”). He describes not only the physical effects of the plagues, starting with its typical gavoccioli (swellings), but also its moral effects on the population:

“how citizen avoided citizen, how among neighbours was scarce found any that shewed fellow-feeling for another, how kinsfolk held aloof, and never met, or but rarely; enough that this sore affliction entered so deep into the minds of men and women, that in the horror thereof brother was forsaken by brother, nephew by uncle, brother by sister, and oftentimes husband by wife; nay, what is more, and scarcely to be believed, fathers and mothers were found to abandon their own children, untended, unvisited, to their fate, as if they had been strangers.”

[Listen to this quote in Italian]

From the 1348 plague originates the frame narrative in which all the stories of the Decameron are contained: because, “on a Tuesday morning […] [in] the venerable church of Santa Maria Novella” in Florence, seven young ladies decide to seek refuge in the countryside—and there, they tell all the stories of the Decameron. Not just the seven young ladies, though: before leaving Florence, they make sure that three young men join them, because:

“We are sensitive, perverse, suspicious, pusillanimous and timid; wherefore I much misdoubt, that, if we find no other guidance than our own, this company is like to break up sooner, and with less credit to us, than it should. Against which it were well to provide at the outset.”

[Listen to this quote in Italian]

Their description of the gentle sex would not please women and feminist of today. But can’t we also see a remarkable sense of agency in this “provision” that these women make for their retreat in the countryside?

One last point: many, of course, have recalled Boccaccio’s description of the plague during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, one of the most interesting ways to reconnect with the Decameron was to re-enact it. Among the most notable outcomes of this idea are the New York Times’ Decameron Project (2020), in English, and the Nuovo Decameron (Harper Collins Italia, 2021), in Italian.