The Decameron
The Decameron by Boccaccio is a text read by all Columbia College first years during their second semester of Lit Hum. With little reputation to proceed it, the book appears to be a fearfully weighty late medieval tome. In fact, it turns out to be a collection of picaresque stories filled with wild clergy sex and scatalogical humor. All of these are told in the context of a "frame narrative" in which several friends escape plague-addled Florence for the countryside, where they wile away their days almost certainly tripping on something, taking advantage of their convenient gender balance, and founding the genre of the literary pastoral.
