Poland: Millennium of the First Coronation

 A Voice from Poland: Missed Opportunities for the Millennium of the First Coronation (1025-2025)

Piotr Toczyski, Maria Grzegorzewska University in Warsaw, Poland

ptoczyski@aps.edu.pl 

Abstract: This brief article examines the cultural and political significance of the millennium of Bolesław the Brave’s coronation in 1025, set against a backdrop of Poland’s semi-peripheral position in European history and the enduring global fascination with the Middle Ages. The analysis explores how foundational dates - especially 966 (Christianization) and 1025 (Coronation) - have been remembered, mythologized, and instrumentalized across Polish history. It revisits the 1966 millennium of Mieszko I’s baptism and the simultaneously ongoing film response to the 550th anniversary of the Battle of Grunwald to highlight tensions between narratives in state commemoration. The text critiques the lack of contemporary cultural production around the Piast dynasty and the missed opportunity to engage with medieval symbolism in inclusive and reflective ways. By tracing how symbols like the royal sword have shifted from unifying icons to contested emblems, the essay calls for renewed engagement with Poland’s medieval and medievalism heritage - one that acknowledges its ambivalence, narrative gaps, and potential for public dialogue. 

The Piast dynasty (966-1370) ruled Poland from approximately 960, though they gained recognition on the international stage only after Mieszko I’s baptism in 966, and remained in power until 1370, with a brief five-year interruption. The millennium of Mieszko’s son’s coronation hits at a time of enduring fascination in the Western world with the Middle Ages, especially the quasi-Middle Ages. The proof is provided by cinema, including series such as Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, The Witcher - and their numerous prologues and epilogues. These are business decisions of American corporations (HBO, Amazon, Netflix), as are the lightsaber duels of Disney’s recent neo-medieval Star Wars series. Of course, there is also a steady 120 years of cinematic Arthurianism in new variants (not so long ago, King Arthur’s ecocritical and self-critical nephew in his encounter with the Green Knight).

It would be difficult to compete with all this for attention without a clear business decision, a political decision - or a sensible combination of both. And it is especially difficult in the semi-periphery, in which we still find ourselves here in Poland. The center’s offerings meet local needs well enough. However, the millennium of Bolesław the Brave’s (Polish: Bolesław Chrobry) coronation presents a significant opportunity for Poland to re-examine its medieval heritage and engage in a broader public discussion about its historical symbols and national identity. Nevertheless, the current socio-political climate and the controversies surrounding national symbols hinder such a unifying conversation, especially in the presidential election year. 

Why 966, 1025 and their millennia matter in Poland

In Poland, two of the first historical dates children learn at school are 966 and 1025. Why? Because they mark two key moments in the story of how Poland became a country. In 966, Duke Mieszko I was baptized - this is seen as the symbolic beginning of the Polish state and its entry into Christian Europe. Then in 1025, his son, Bolesław the Brave, became the first king of Poland. These dates are easy to remember and packed with meaning: One stands for the birth of the nation, the other for the crowning of its independence. However, despite this important beginning, Poland remained a semi-peripheral player in the medieval world. It was neither part of the dominant core powers, like the Holy Roman Empire or France, nor completely isolated on the periphery, but occupied a middle ground, gradually building its influence.

In between those two key dates - 966 and 1025 - there is another important event that often comes up: the Gniezno Congress (Polish: Zjazd gnieźnieński, German: Akt von Gnesen) in 1000. It was a meeting between Bolesław the Brave and Emperor Otto III of the Holy Roman Empire. The event symbolized recognition of Poland’s growing importance in Europe. Otto acknowledged Bolesław as a powerful ruler and ally. So, between baptism in 966 and coronation in 1025, the year 1000 marks Poland’s official welcome into the European ‘club’. It was more than a diplomatic gesture, but a clear indication that Otto regarded the Polish ruler as a partner in shaping the spiritual and political landscape of Europe. Two years later, Otto died, and the situation became more complicated. 

It was only in 1025 that Bolesław the Brave crowned himself the first king of Poland - just a few months before his death. It was a big moment: Poland had been a Christian state for only about 60 years. The coronation meant more than just a title. It was about international recognition, political independence, and showing that Poland could stand on its own next to the other kingdoms of Europe. Bolesław had been pushing for this recognition for years, using diplomacy, alliances, and war to put Poland on the map. The crown was both a reward for those efforts and a powerful symbol of Poland’s rising status. Although Bolesław did not live long enough to consolidate his royal authority, the act of coronation established a precedent that would shape the Polish monarchy for generations.

Back in 1966, the thousand-year anniversary of Mieszko I’s baptism - the symbolic start of Polish statehood - sparked massive nationwide celebrations. But it was more than just a historical moment. The communist government and the Catholic Church each wanted to own the narrative. On the one hand, the post-war communist state framed the 966 baptism as a step toward Polish independence and unity under secular leadership. On the other hand, the Church emphasized its spiritual meaning and continuity through the ages. These two competing anniversaries turned into a symbolic debate over who gets to define Poland’s roots. Despite the political tension, the millennium left a lasting mark. It showed that history isn’t just about what happened, but about how we choose to remember and use historical events. One of the biggest and most visible parts of the 966 anniversary in communist Poland was the "1000 Schools for the Millennium" campaign. Instead of building churches, which the state obviously was not keen on, the authorities launched a massive school-building project. The idea was to mark the thousand-year anniversary of the Polish state not with religious monuments, but with education and progress. And it worked - by the mid-1960s, hundreds of modern schools had popped up all over the country, and many are still standing today. For the ruling party, it was a way to offer a secular, forward-looking counter-narrative to the Church’s religious celebrations. For everyday people, it often meant something much simpler: a new local school, closer to home, and a sign that the state was investing in their children’s future. 

Simultaneously, Aleksander Ford’s Knights of the Teutonic Order (1960) became one of Poland’s most-watched films, attracting 32 million viewers by 1987. Produced to commemorate the 550th anniversary of the Battle of Grunwald and aligned with the communist state’s nationalist agenda, the film adapted Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel as both patriotic spectacle and propaganda. It portrays a stark moral divide: noble Poles versus villainous Teutonic Knights, using visual contrasts and simplified characters to reinforce political messages. Though criticized for its ideological bias and lack of depth, the film’s grand scale, emotional moments, and technical innovations secured its popularity both in Poland and abroad (e.g. Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, France). Knights of the Teutonic Order was the first Polish blockbuster, produced with the involvement of the highest state authorities of the time, including the leader of the Polish communist party, Władysław Gomułka. 

The film’s production coincided with escalating tensions between Poland and the Federal Republic of Germany. Polish state media widely reported that West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had appeared at a state anniversary ceremony wearing a cloak resembling that of the Teutonic Order. As a result, the black cross on the knights’ robes in the film was intended as an allegory for the swastika, and the Polish-Teutonic conflict served as a metaphor for the contemporary diplomatic dispute between the two nations in the post-war period. 

How millennia and medievalisms are troubling for Poland

Since the screen adaptation of the Battle of Grunwald (1410) - somehow remaining related to the visuals of the German chancellor in a Teutonic cloak - a convincing film epic about the Jagiellonians dynasty (1386-1572) has not been produced. Serious Piast dynasty’s film story was not attempted. The propaganda of People’s Poland reached out to Piastism and Piast Concept, creating the groundwork for the idea of the so-called Recovered Territories of Poland’s post-1945 Western borderland.

Before (since 1920s) and afterwards, the sword of the Brave, famously (but untruly) chipped at Kyiv’s gate, both independently and interdependently found its way into magazine titles and onto specific jacket lapels. Sword of the Brave (Polish: Mieczyk Chrobrego) is a nationalist symbol in Poland. It depicts the royal coronation sword, Szczerbiec, wrapped in a ribbon in Poland’s national colors. First used in the interwar period by the nationalist parties, it became so politically charged that wearing it was penalized and legally debated already in the 1930s, but still used by nationalist groups and even in the 21st century banned from UEFA Euro (2008) events due to its association with extremist ideologies. Its return was noticed by the press in unusual circumstances, when one of the police officers checking the IDs of participants in the so-called anti-fascist picnic had a nationalist emblem pinned to his uniform vest. At that time (2019), a nationalist march was passing through Warsaw.

And that was it. Although resurrections of Antoni Golubiew’s serious and intellectual novels (written mainly between 1947-1956) about the Brave exist (discussions about them and films don't). There has also been no solid adaptation to the legendarium of Lech, Siemowit, Popiel or the Wawel Dragon outside the world of award-winning Allegro ads. Thus, the cultural background to discuss Poland’s origins and mythmaking would be there. One could, for example, turn to a very interesting work by a Lublin-based medievalist Czesław Deptuła on the Cracow conflict between the Skalka and Wawel as a mythical metaphor for the two centers of power - symbolized by Krak, Krakus, dragons. For the time being, we are left with a global spectacle in this role - the Targaryen fratricidal battles from Game of Thrones.

 From elsewhere in Poland, the role of knights - including the misguided ones, the ronins - is held (yes, yes) mainly by twentieth-century soldiers, policemen and even former secret police officers (after the trilogy about “Pigs”) - soon the premiere of “Assassination of the Pope”, from which I expect to remain on the same sheet of mytho-landscape. And as the quintessential honorary hero - Hans Kloss (once a captain, once a Hauptmann) and several of his doubles. These are also references to the ethos of chivalry, emblematic of the Middle Ages.

Therefore, let’s not be surprised that Boleslaw the Brave as a symbol does not have it easy at all in such a global and local environment. One would have to do the necessary homework on mythologization and demythologization. For it to make sense for the millennium of the coronation (and it could have), a major public discussion should have started a good five years ago. It could, for example, have come out of the world of museums, a cultural congress. However, this would have been a very labor-intensive undertaking. Let me illustrate it with an example of the Brave’s royal sword. 

I remember well how, in the second half of the nineties, on the corner of Ujazdowskie Avenue and Wilcza Street in central Warsaw, a sad gentleman vendor traded books from unfolded polka dots. A large sign in paint in the background of his workplace proclaimed “Either Szczerbiec - or stand.” Above referred as Brave’s Sword, Szczerbiec is a ceremonial sword used to crown most Polish kings between 1320 and 1764. Today, it is the only surviving piece of Poland’s medieval crown jewels and is kept at Wawel Castle in Kraków. Its hilt is decorated with Christian symbols, floral designs, and magical inscriptions, and the blade contains a slit with a small Polish coat of arms. Though often called “the Notched Sword,” the blade is smooth - the name refers to a sword meant to notch others. A legend claims King Bolesław I the Brave chipped it against Kyiv’s Golden Gate in 1018, but the gate was built later, and the sword itself comes from the 12th or 13th century. Still, the story lives on - illustrating how legends shape cultural memory even when the timeline doesn’t quite align. National symbols like Szczerbiec blend myth with documented fact.

‘Szczerbiec’ refers to the magazine named after the sword. Either the vendor agrees to sell the nationalist magazine Szczerbiec (founded in 1991), or their bookstand will be damaged or removed. The magazine in question was on the stand. This kind of pressure reflects the tactics sometimes used by fringe nationalist groups in post-communist Poland to assert dominance in public spaces and intimidate those not aligned with their ideology. The presence of the sign behind the vendor’s stand suggests that he may have been forced to comply, highlighting an atmosphere of fear and ideological bullying. And that’s probably how the conversation about the Middle Ages in the measure of twenty-first-century Poland would have ended.

It is a pity that today the atmosphere for the Brave and his sword as unifying symbols is not yet there. And it is a potentially capacious symbol - both of pride, and shame, and history, and myth, and an honest conversation about ambivalence. And also about reception and non-reception - what we want more of and what we want less of. For now, we are taking away the opportunity for such conversations. Maybe next time.

Danahay and Howey, Neo-Victorianism and Medievalism

Danahay, Martin and Ann F. Howey, eds. Neo-Victorianism and Medievalism: Re-Appropriating the Victorian and Medieval Pasts (Lieden: Brill, 2024), ISBN 978004677876 322pp. eBook and HB RRP €105.00

Reviewed by:

Stephen Basdeo, Leeds Trinity University

Martin and Danahay and Ann F. Howey tell us that “Medievalism in culture emerges in the early nineteenth century” (4). One of the book’s central premises is therefore incorrect, for such a statement would surprise the sculptors of the Saxon deities at Stowe Gardens (commissioned in 1727), and Thomas Arne, the composer of England’s great patriotic song “Rule Britannia” (from the masque Alfred, in 1740, relating the life and deeds of one of England’s greatest monarchs). Georg F. Handel, who wrote Rinaldo (1711), would raise an eyebrow, as would John Dryden, who translated some of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Fables: Ancient and Modern and wrote King Arthur; or the British Worthy (1691), which was later turned into an opera by Henry Purcell. Readers of “true” crime would likewise be surprised, given that they could read, in any number of criminal biographies, stories of Robin Hood, Thomas Dun, and that very noted thief, Sir John Falstaff.

Medievalism was so popular in the century preceding the nineteenth that even the brilliant Henry Fielding turned to it to produce the Arthurian Tragedy of Tragedies; or the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (1730). This was also the great age of the gothic novel beginning with the Castle of Otranto (1764). Shakespeare, his histories and tragedies, owe their status as classics largely to the labours of David Garrick, while scholars such as Joseph Ritson (of Robin Hood fame), Sir John Hawkins (A History of the Science and Practice of Music), Thomas Warton (History of English Poetry), Samuel Johnson and George Steevens (who edited Shakespeare), as well as Thomas Percy (famous for his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry) diligently researched and published their enquiries into various aspects of English medieval literature and culture. Finally, nameless ballad sellers and chapmen sold songs and poems of medieval British worthies in broadsides and chapbooks. I appreciate that a dedicated book on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century medievalism is yet to be written, but it did not begin with the Victorians and the idea that it did should not be a central premise of the book’s introduction.

Upon such weak foundations and generalisations does Danahay and Howey’s Neo-Victorianism and Medievalism: Re-Appropriating the Victorian and Medieval Pasts (2024) begin, in an introduction titled “Neo-Victorianism and Medievalism—Why together? Why now?” The authors do not provide even a brief answer to this question despite the book’s aims to unite “all the contributions to the fields of neo-Victorianism and medievalism gathered in this volume” and ask “to what end is the recourse to history used, and what does it tell us about contemporary values?” (3). But editors don’t provide an answer to their key question because none of the chapters (with one or two exceptions) really bring neo-Victorianism and neo-medievalism together. What we have in this volume are papers of two different stripes: neo-Victorianism papers and medievalism papers and rarely do the two meet.

The chapters are perfectly good in themselves and might have been more appropriately published as single journal pieces. Karl Fugelso’s first chapter—which does discuss neo-medievalism and neo-Victorianism—provides a journal editor’s perspective on the question of what constitutes neo-medievalism, medievalism, and the medieval period. It was certainly refreshing to see Fugelso pour cold water on the idea of a non-western Middle Ages given the recent tendency to “globalise” the period (50). Indeed, as a Brazilian colleague once quipped: “If we’re going to have a global middle ages, why not a global pre-Aztec period?”[i] I also agree with Fugelso’s remark that it is largely pointless to separate neo-medievalism and medievalism, for, as anyone with even a passing interest in the field would likely know: “medievalism encompasses all responses to the Middle Ages” (53). Still, there’s nothing in Fugelso’s chapter which answers either of the key questions: “to what end is the recourse to history used, and what does it tell us about contemporary values?”

Valerie B. Johnson makes a compelling contribution to Robin Hood studies by examining how, and in what settings, Maid Marian trains to become an outlaw in Robin Hood films. In doing so, this is one of the few chapters which does answer the key question of what medievalism in the present tells us about contemporary values regarding the status of women in medievalism and popular culture generally (190). Another excellent contribution, and which meets the book’s aims, is Howey’s discussion of the Charlotte M. Yonge novel The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), and its manner of making the idea of knighthood relevant in the Victorian age. That being said, Yonge’s novel is hardly neo-Victorian but actually Victorian, published during the reign of that great monarch.

After Fugelso’s chapter there is a piece by Claire Nally which examines a neo-Victorian novel titled the Wonder (2016)—which does not mention medievalism at all but is certainly a chapter which made me want to read The Wonder in full. Then follows “Digital White Supremacy, White Rage, and the Middle Ages: Rebooting the Alt-Right through Medieval Studies” by Dorothy Kim who once again tells the story of her dramatic and seemingly never-ending battles with the Alt-Right in the United States. She begins by describing the Charlottesville far right protest in 2017 and then claims that her chapter will “map” the “alt-medieval ecosystem.” The only problem is that though she uses the verb “to map” with regard to these far right groups, Kim merely lists them and spends so little time on each group’s characteristics with the result that one feels Kim should have aimed for depth rather than breadth, focusing on one or two groups at most, perhaps within one country. Curiously, in Kim’s “alt-medieval eco-system,” she cannot seem to find a single far right medievalist group in the United Kingdom, which perhaps would have been worthy of comment given that, apparently during Brexit, says Kim, the Crusades were invoked to legitimise the far right support of it. Yet Kim offers no supporting citation for this assertion (96). Even if one conclude that Kim indeed mapped these groups, the question remains: What is to be done? Medievalists know that these groups exist in the United States and elsewhere, but what do we do with this information? Kim offers no solution on this score. Is it the implication that we as academics are somehow not doing enough publishing or public engagement? This is left unclear. Finally, it is not clear how any of this relates to neo-Victorianism, thus the chapter does not speak to the book’s aims.

The next chapter to focus only on one of the book’s aims is Hadley’s “Three Phases of a Statue,” examining the recent public debates over, and vandalism of, monuments to Queen Victoria in Montréal. The word medievalism does not appear in this chapter (though if I missed this reference, I am happy to be corrected). Hadley’s aim, however, is to debunk “popular arguments that monuments stand outside history;” (131) I am unconvinced, however, that anyone, either for or against the statues of the Queen-Empress in Canada, actually would argue this and, having served on my home city of Leeds’s statue’s and monuments review, much of the debate usually hinges on a misunderstood notion of “erasing history.”

Marie-Luise Kohlke's examination of “Janus-Faced Neo-Victorianism” in the Penny Dreadful TV series makes a rather overstated case for seeing medievalism in a series set during the nineteenth century on the basis that it features witches and spiritualism and has an overall gothic feel to it. According to Kolhke, “extant criticism on Penny Dreadful evinces a curious lack of explicit concern with the show’s reliance on the Middle Ages” (140). Could the “curious lack of concern” not simply be owing to the fact that there is indeed little or no medievalism in the series and therefore contemporary critics are pursuing more fruitful lines of enquiry? It would also have been nice if the author had at least acknowledged what a penny dreadful actually was in the Victorian era. Penny Dreadful is largely an urban gothic series; the heir of mid-Victorian British penny bloods and nineteenth-century French feuilletons, such as George W.M. Reynolds’s Mysteries of London (1844–48)—which features spiritualism and a witch-like “Old Hag” but is hardly medieval—Mysteries of the Court of London (1849–56), and Eugene Sue’s Mystères de Paris (1842–43). As such, the author might have consulted the numerous works on the urban gothic.[ii] This genre, in the British case especially, in a very roundabout way, adapted the conventions of the gothic novel in the previous century and transplanted them on to the social novel.

Amy Montz then offers an examination of the “steampunk novels” of Gail Carriger and those novels’ utlimate failure to denounce the British Empire’s exploitation of subject peoples. The novels are referenced and discussed in full—though Montz also offers quotations in which Carriger does indeed denounce the empire (230)—though there are no primary or secondary sources or even events cited to support the point on exploitation and, taking a look at the bibliography, there is not a single history book on the British Empire cited either. Quite clearly, this is unacceptable in any scholarly work which touches upon the history of the empire, even if that history is then refracted through the fictive lens of modern steampunk novels. The next steampunk chapter by Mike Perschon educates us all on the fact that steampunk is not exclusively Victorian (257), with a focus on the movie Mortal Engines. The film is also examined in the succeeding chapter by Kevin and Brent Moberly—a chapter which, to give due credit, does refreshingly discuss neo-Victorianism and medievalism together (279–285).

For Danahay, President Trump’s tenure and the subsequent age of “epistemological crisis” is an appropriate framing narrative for an exploration of William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), for the conditions which led Morris to write his utopian masterpiece have parallels with the Trump’s era of “fake news” (289). The chapter does not adequately situate Morris’s writings in their wider context, apart from a cursory comment that he was “respond[ing] to social change [and] … radical changes in the means of production that created a concomitant upheaval in modes of communication. Steam, the telegraph and eventually electricity restructured Victorian society” (289). Well, yes, innovations did occur in that period, though the traditional dating of the Industrial Revolution, from c.1760–c.1840, only includes three years of Victoria’s reign. On steam power: Newcomen’s steam engine was first installed in a Dudley coal mine in 1712; by 1800, there was at least 2,500 steam engines used in various coal mines, mills, and manufactories. As for the dominance of the steam-powered railways in the Victorian age, little need be said beyond the fact that Morris’s novel came a long time after the “Railway Mania” building and speculation boom of the 1840s, and that by the end of the century Great Britain had a railway network of over 20,000 miles.[iii] And yes, “eventually” electricity did transform Britain, but I’m not sure how relevant the point is to a discussion of a novel published in 1890, when it was only in 1888 that the government granted electricity supply franchises to 64 private companies and 17 local corporations but even this had little immediate effect; by 1919 only 6 per cent of households had electricity. This is because, given the cost and difficulty of its supply, most late-Victorian consumers opted to remain with gas power; even by 1938 only two thirds of houses had electricity.[iv] The specific things which Danahay claims Morris was responding to were simply facts of life by the latter’s time. On the point about fake news, Danahay reprints the first page of the 11 January 1890 issue of Commonweal and argues that, because the first instalment of News from Nowhere is printed on the first page where news would normally be, indicates that Morris wanted his novella to be seen as a news item, and thus it constitutes an early attempt at deliberate fake news (292). And yet, the full title of the story is printed on its first page: News from Nowhere; or, an Epoch of Rest. Being some chapters from a Utopian Romance. I am sure the quite well-educated Commonweal readers would have known, three lines into the story, that they were reading a work of fiction upon seeing the word “romance.” What follows after in the same chapter is a discussion of steampunk and alternative history, and the whole might better have been divided into two chapters—one on Morris and one on steampunk—for the two are an awkward fit together and no firm link is made between the two.

Thus the collection ends, leaving readers with praise for a few chapters, critiques of several others, and still without any firm answer to the volume’s key questions. Medievalism and neo-Victorianism are not “united” in any meaningful way because the chapters, while mostly sound in themselves, do not speak to the book’s overall aims.

Stephen Basdeo

 

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[i] Thanks to Luiz Guerra for this point.

[ii] On the urban gothic see Richard C. Maxwell, ‘G. M. Reynolds, Dickens, and the Mysteries of London’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 32: 2 (1977), 188–213 and Richard Maxwell, The Mysteries of Paris and London (University Press of Virginia, 1992)

[iii] Michael Freeman, ‘Transport’, in Atlas of Industrialising Britain, 1780–1914, ed. by John Langton and R.J. Morris (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 88.

[iv] Carol Jones, ‘Coal, gas, and electricity’, in Atlas of British Economic and Social History since c.1700, ed. by Rex Pope (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 68–95.

Decameron -- Netflix 2024

"Oh, Giovanni, where are you, Giovanni?” A Review of Netflix’s Eight-part Adaption of Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron                                                                                                                Reviewed by:                                                                                      Kevin J. Harty                                                                                      La Salle University                                                              harty@lasalle.edu

One of the masterpieces of Renaissance Italian literature, Boccaccio’s The Decameron is an ars narrativa.  It offers any adapter or screenwriter an overabundance of source materials—a fact that seems to have escaped those responsible for this eight-part Netflix Summer 2024 series. In the series’ fourteenth-century source, ten nobles—seven women and three men—fleeing plague-ridden Florence, seek shelter in a villa in Fiesole where, over the course of two weeks, they tell 100 tales to pass the time and amuse and enlighten themselves.  Both immensely popular and immensely controversial in its own day, the Decameron has had a remarkable afterlife.  From the start, the Catholic Church took a dim view of the work—too many tales with priapic priests, fornicating friars, and nymphomaniac nuns—not to mention lascivious lay people and sexually exploited servants.  The Decameron was supposedly among the titles burned in Savonarola’s (in)famous “bonfire of vanities.”  It ended up on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum several times, even after some judicious ecclesiastical editing that replaced the less-than-chaste clergy with additional lascivious lay people.  

Outside ecclesiastical circles, The Decameron has remained immensely influential.  Chaucer borrowed from it, as did Lope de Vega, Shakespeare, Middleton, Martin Luther, Molière, Swift, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson—the list goes on and on. The story of patient Griselda has proven especially intriguing, adapted by Chaucer (perhaps by way of Petrarch), Lope de Vega, Apostolo Zeno in an early eighteenth-century opera with multiple scores, and, most recently, Caryl Churchill in her 1982 play Top Girls. Translations of The Decameron in part or whole into English began in the sixteenth century.  More encompassing adaptations include Marguerite de Navarre's sixteenth-century Heptaméron and, most recently and perhaps not surprisingly, multiple literary anthologies commissioned in response to the shutdowns occasioned by the ongoing COVID pandemic, such as those sponsored by the State Theatre of Australia, The New York Times Magazine, and the San Diego Decameron Project.

With mixed results, filmmakers have embraced The Decameron.  Two Hollywood ventures, (one in 1924 and one in 1953) entitled Decameron Nights, were based on tales by Boccaccio, who in the latter was played by Louis Jourdan.  Pasolini’s 1971 The Decameron, with the director playing Boccaccio, presents nine tales and a rather intriguing complex critical reading of its source.  Two romantic comedies, Virgin Territory (2007) and The Little Hours (2017) nod to Boccaccio’s work, while the 2015 film Wondrous Bocaccio is loosely based on four tales from The Decameron. 

All of which brings us to Netflix’s eight-episode series The Decameron, billed as the “comic sexual romp” of the summer—except that it isn’t very funny, it has too little sex, and it is even more lacking in “romp.”

The basic plot is there.  Nobles, sometimes with servants in tow, flee plague-ridden Florence and other towns in Tuscany for the Villa Santa, each with more of an agenda than simply escaping death.  The villa itself is a prize to be won by marriage or inheritance or force.  None of the characters is at all sympathetic.  They are all caricatures.

Pampinea (Zosia Mamet) is a spoiled harpy intent on marrying her cousin, the always absent Visconte Leonardo, who owns the villa.  The Visconte, it turns out, is absent for a good reason: he has already died from the plague before episode one even begins—a fact not known to any of his guests until much later in the series.  Accompanying Pampinea is her doormat of a servant Misia (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), who spends the whole series looking for validation and love in all the wrong places. Rivaling Pampinea as the series’ most annoying character—though, truth be told, all the series’ characters are annoying in their own ways—is Filomena (Jessica Plummer), whose servant Licisca (Tanya Reynolds) at least has a bit more spine than Misia, and who for a while passes herself off as her mistress who finds herself in turn mistaken for her servant.  That the Netflix series is more interested in the dynamics between servants and masters than in Boccaccio is less than subtly signaled when, early in episode one, the soundtrack of appropriately period music abruptly switches to Depeche Mode’s “Master and Servant.”

Also in residence at Villa Santa is Tindaro (Douggie McMeekin), a wealthy hypochondriac, who has arrived with his quack of a personal physician Dioneo (Amar Chadha-Patel) in tow.  Rounding out the guest list is Panfilo (Karan Gill), another of the Visconte’s cousins who is down on his luck and, therefore, keen to lay claim to the villa, and his, at least initially, overly pious wife Neifile (Lou Gala).  Presiding over this whole circus is Sirisco (Tony Hale), literally the series’ magister ludi, who is steward of Villa Santa, and who is sometimes assisted, and sometimes thwarted, by the villa’s cook Stratilia (Leila Farzad), who has her own claim to the villa through her son, Jacapo (Aston Wray), who was fathered by the Visconte.

Each episode is basically comprised of internecine scheming among the principals—all of whom want to lay claim to the villa, or attempt to assist others to do so.  Sometimes someone will briefly leave the villa, only to return none the nicer or the wiser than when they left. Sometimes outsiders—including the bandit Ruggerio (Fares Fares), who is, of course, yet another of the Visconte’s cousins, and a Savonarola-like friar and his band of brigands—will show up and join the original guests.  Too often, the safe haven proves anything but safe, as plague also becomes an unwelcome guest and takes its toll on the assemblage. From episode to episode, the plot thickens, but, in doing so, the plot of the series also moves farther and farther away from Boccaccio.  Given all their running around, the characters haven’t a moment to spare to tell a tale. Instead, the series turns Boccaccio’s work into a period costume soap opera.  Only in the last minutes of the final episode do viewers bump into Boccaccio.  The surviving principals flee the plague-infested villa—now under the control of the friar and his brigands—and settle into an unidentified pastoral retreat.  As they sit in a circle on the ground, Sirisco proposes to tell a tale.  Knowing viewers will recognize that the tale, which he only begins to tell before the final credits roll, is that of Griselda, whose legendary patience viewers might more than emulate and still never see much from Boccaccio in this summer’s Netflix (more than very loose) adaptation of The Decameron.

The Decameron, created, adapted and produced by Kathleen Jordan, for Netflix; eight episodes, loosely based on Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century work, The Decameron; available for streaming on Netflix as of 25 July 2024.