If you had read the Decameron—or The New Yorker’s Joan Acocella on the Decameron—before 2020, you might have known this even without looking at Instagram. In the mid-thirteen-hundreds, as the Black Death was decimating Europe, the Italian writer Boccaccio imagined just such an escape: seven young women and three eligible men retreat to the countryside, where they go for walks, drink, and sing. In real life, as much as sixty per cent of the population in Florence, Boccaccio’s home town, was dying in agony; in his alternative vision, the characters meet each day to share ten stories on a new theme. The hundred accumulated tales comprise the Decameron, and together contain an era’s worth of comedy and debauchery. Shakespeare owes some of his heroines to Boccaccio, Acocella argues, and now so does Netflix, which on Thursday released an eight-part series adapted from his work. Amid the Decameron’s scandalous scenarios—nuns sleeping with a gardener; infidelity unpunished—the work offers glimpses of an open-mindedness that might seem surprising for its time, a unique window into European thinking just as the Middle Ages tipped into the Renaissance. Not all of Boccaccio’s collection is successful, Acocella acknowledges, but together the stories made a mark. Nearly seven hundred years after they were written, she notes, the Decameron remains “probably the dirtiest great book in the Western canon.”