as run its course. All of the travelers are from good families and are well educated and sophisticated and all of them know each other fairly well. To pass the time, they decide to tell stories and make each member of the party a king or queen for the day. This king or queen suggests the general topics for the tales and, in the course of their journey, there are ten days of narration, each with ten stories, totaling a hundred tales.
The humanistic sense of celebration and revelry in all things of this earth is immediately evident in The Decameron in the common language used by Boccaccio. The story-tellers weave their tales in the language of the variety of characters who are the stories' colorful subjects. This common language of the common folk is far more vulgar than had been used in most earlier literature and is symbolic of the break from the more traditional views of literature as well as symbolic of Boccaccio's different view of what man's goal and purpose should be.
The mass-scale horrors of the plague drove the Italian society away from the Church's
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