The COVID-19 pandemic sparked creativity in many people stuck at home, and this creativity brought people in the twenty-first century closer to people in the fourteenth century. Beginning in 2020, a number of interesting adaptations of Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century Decameron emerged. These adaptations were a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Boccacio’s text, written between 1348 and 1352—in the wake of the Black Death in Florence—follows ten Florentine elites as they flee to countryside villas in order to escape the plague. For ten days, they tell each other stories to pass the time. Several adaptations of the Decameron, such as The New York Times’s Decameron Project (2020) and Harper Collins Italia’s Nuovo Decameron (2021), were collections of stories meant to mimic the ten elites’ stories in the source text. However, Netflix’s 2024 television series adaptation, The Decameron, focuses entirely on the frame narrative—the interpersonal relationships between the elites and their servants—rather than on the stories they are telling.

Boccaccio’s Decameron has been called “the privileged text of the contradictory, rich, and unpredictable experiences of life.” Netflix’s Decameron, while it is interested in the contradictions of how we experience life in the twenty-first century, is perhaps even more interested in how we mediate those rich, unpredictable experiences through memes, screens, and filters. The show is clearly designed as a wry commentary on our own pandemic era, its inequities, and its instabilities. But in providing this commentary, rather than using the fourteenth century, it relies on what Megan L. Cook has called dirtbag medievalism. Rather than seeking “some type of connection with the medieval past that is both intimate and authentic,” Cook argues, “dirtbag medievalism is a vibe.” This definition neatly encapsulates, in my view, the strategies embraced by Netflix’s Decameron. In watching it as a medievalist, I was often struck by how historical accuracies were snuck in: references to Boccaccio’s tales are frequent, and many of the show’s jokes—about medical theory, about relics, about sexual desire—are layered in ways apparently designed to be appreciated by viewers who know a considerable amount about the fourteenth century. Far more often, however, the show expects a range of pop culture literacies from its audience, gleefully concocting a vibes-based version of the premodern past, where baroque music, nineteenth-century ideas about sexuality, and decidedly contemporary ideas about gender and social inequalities coexist.