What do you do in your spare time to relax/unwind? Honestly, my students! I love to teach young people with intellectual curiosity and a thirst for knowledge. I hope the book will remind readers of the power of the written and spoken word. What is the one thing you hope readers take away from your book? I lived in an apartment just 5 minutes away (in Rome), yet I had to present my passport and reading card to the Swiss Guard every morning because the library was technically in Vatican City (so I was crossing an international border every day). Using the Vatican Library was quite an experience. I felt very privileged to be trusted with such delicate, fragile works. On several occasions, I requested an early printed book or manuscript that had not been handled for hundreds of years. I’ve spent quite a bit of time conducting research in Italian libraries and archives while preparing the manuscript for this book. Tell me about a particularly special moment in writing this book. It is not uncommon to read about how science and medicine leave their mark on creative writing however, my mission with the book was to demonstrate how literature (specifically storytelling) has also impacted medical culture.
The book intersects the boundaries of literature and medicine. Why is this book important in your field? What does it contribute to the current body of knowledge on its topic?
Seven hundred years after Boccaccio proposed storytelling and the spoken/written word as a valuable tool for plague prevention, we still recognize the healing and transformative power of language. The Silence=Death Project in the fight against AIDS. I also look at how numerous imitators of Boccaccio's work from the fourteenth-eighteenth centuries (Sacchetti, Sercambi, Malespini, and Argelati) have adopted Boccaccio's narrative model as a recipe for both physical and psychological health during subsequent outbreaks of epidemic illness. My study focuses on the prophylactic function that Boccaccio attributes to his stories in the Decameron. I analyze how Giovanni Boccaccio is the first writer to unite the literary topos of narration during a life-threatening situation with an historical epidemic context: the plague of 1348. Specifically, my book concerns the tradition of storytelling in times of epidemic illness. The central theme of my book is the preventative and healing power of the word.
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