Please Note: Summer 2020 Course Registration Opens Online on Monday, May 11th at 8AM

Aristotle described the human species as a “social animal,” and that designation is perhaps more relevant than ever today. As people face “stay-at-home” orders due to COVID-19, they experience deeply the craving for human connection and interaction. People are turning to narratives and collective creativity—as evidenced by footage of Italians singing on their balconies with their neighbors—to combat their loneliness and isolation. This is nothing new. When Boccaccio composed his Decameron (1348-51), he described ten youths who fled plague-afflicted Florence to a villa where they told stories over ten days. Boccaccio’s Decameron, a collection of 100 tales, is one of the foundational works of Italian literature, and it served as a model for other European writers such as Marguerite de Navarre and Geoffrey Chaucer. The youths’ storytelling was not a mere pastime, however, but rather it was essential to symbolically rebuild a society that had collapsed. Facing a disaster far worse than the present-day crisis, Boccaccio recognized that the loss of human connection was an additional cost to the loss of life: the need for human bonding is essential, it is the foundation of all human society, and it could be called “love.”

In this course, taught entirely online, we will study the “greatest hits” from Boccaccio’s Decameron, beginning with his dramatic description of the Black Death of 1348 and covering his most famous stories.

Answers to Frequently Asked Questions:

• All Summer 2020 courses will be ONLINE ONLY.
• Courses will be delivered online via the Zoom video conferencing platform. All courses will be password protected and only available to enrolled students.
• All class sessions will be recorded and made available to enrolled students for a limited time to assist those who may not be able to attend the live class times.
• Enrolled students may withdraw from a course and receive a full tuition refund if the request is received before the second class session. (Our normal refund processing fee of 15% will be waived).
• The Humanities Seminars Program reserves the right to cancel any seminar that fails to meet registration minimums. If a course is canceled all students enrolled in the canceled course will receive a full refund.
• Summer registration will open on Monday, May 11 at 8 AM (AZ Time)