A Multilingual Decameron: Stories of a Different World

In Boccaccio's Decamerone (1353), set during the 1348 Black Death epidemic in Florence, a group of men and women confined themselves to a villa in the hills outside the city and entertained one another by telling stories. Written nearly seven centuries later during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, this volume brings together stories written during lockdown by students at the School of Languages and Applied Linguistics at The Open University, UK. Drawing creatively on the various languages taught in the School – Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Scots, Spanish and Welsh – the stories construct a range of different worlds, from unsettling and sometimes uplifting experiences of lockdown, to recollections of childhood and dystopian futures.