Giovanni Boccaccio completed the Decameron around 1353, a collection of one hundred novellas framed by a group of ten young Florentines who retreat to the countryside to escape the Black Death. Boccaccio's vivid opening description of plague-ravaged Florence is one of the most powerful eyewitness accounts of the epidemic and depicts the complete collapse of social and moral order. The Decameron became one of the most widely read works of medieval Italian literature and an influential model for frame-narrative storytelling across Europe.

The Decameron established a direct literary convention — the plague as creative frame — that would persist through Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and into modern pandemic literature. Boccaccio's willingness to treat suffering, death, and the insect-borne catastrophe of his age as the occasion for comic, erotic, and morally complex storytelling legitimised secular narrative and influenced the English literary tradition profoundly. Chaucer almost certainly knew the Decameron, and its shadow falls across the General Prologue's portrait of the plague-era world.