Open AccessCzarna śmierć i lekcja życia – dwie odsłony
Author(s) -
Piotr Salwa,
AUTHOR_ID
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
tematy i konteksty
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2719-8561
pISSN - 2299-8365
DOI - 10.15584/tik.2021.3
Subject(s) - sublime , pilgrimage , power (physics) , politics , motif (music) , distancing , novella , plague (disease) , punishment (psychology) , sociology , law , philosophy , aesthetics , theology , literature , history , political science , art , ancient history , social psychology , covid-19 , psychology , medicine , physics , disease , quantum mechanics , pathology , infectious disease (medical specialty)
The essay confronts two ways in which the Black Death motif is used in two 14-Century Italian collections of novellas. In Giovanni Boccaccio’s “Decameron” the pestilence means the crisis of civilized forms of collective life, the decay of social relations and moral disarray. The protagonists in a sublime way reconstruct various forms of “art de vivre” distancing themselves from the brutal reality. Giovanni Sercambi perceive the plague as a divine punishment that strikes the entire society for collective sins. The only way of salvation is a pilgrimage-penance, and later the acceptance of a new political regime, in which all the power belongs to a preposto, elected for life, and the citizens are interested only in their private affairs and respect of severe moral principles.