Boccaccio’s bawdy Black Death tales will take your mind off coronavirus

When forced to think about the unthinkable, we need a diversion – and the need for entertainment or outrage is normal in the time of a pandemic. As Kevin Childs explains, the way we react to a crisis hasn't changed much in 700 years

Isabella by John Everett Millais, 1849. Keats based his poem on the 'pot of basil' fable (Public domain)

In lockdown the world can become almost a single room. Our minds turn inward, and when so much of what we listen to, watch or read is about symptoms and statistics and far off vaccines, it’s hardly surprising we want to think about something else. Sex, for many, is becoming a preoccupation. Keeping two metres away when we meet makes any sort of intimate touching difficult, transgressive, obsessive, even. When the history of this pandemic is written, will it be filled with tales of sexual encounters, both real and imagined?

Like virtually everything, we’ve been here before. Epidemics, such as that caused by Covid-19, have plagued human society since time began. A particularly devastating pandemic in the 14th century changed the western world forever. Called the Black Death, it was perhaps the deadliest epidemic in human history. It decimated the populations of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. At least a third of the people living in Europe died. In some places, it was far worse. The city of Florence in Italy, for example, may have lost up to 75 per cent of its population.

Whoever it was that walked through the gates of Florence in the early Spring of 1348 probably didn’t know they were sick. Or maybe they just had a bit of a temperature. But they’d brought the Black Death to one of the most populous, tightly packed cities in Italy.