Compare Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, detailing the circumstances of their individual creations.

What will be an ideal response?

Both Boccaccio’s Decameron (translated as “Work of Ten Days”) and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales are collections of stories that are framed through a narrative of a group of people entertaining each other with individual stories over a period of time. Boccaccio’s tales, written in response to the plague of Black Death, contain vivid descriptions of Florence and its people during the outbreak of the disease. The Canterbury Tales was based on Boccaccio’s Decameron but was framed through a pilgrimage from London to Thomas á Becket’s shrine; the Tales served as a social critique of the “estates” or social rank system of Chaucer’s day.