The Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio, tr by Wayne A Rebhorn, review In their sheer abundance and variety the stories themselves, celebrating narrative as an art form, also offer an essential riposte to the idea, cherished by theologies the world over, that all earthly life is simply a sordid prologue to the notional joys awaiting us beyond. Whatever Dante's benign influence or the impact on Boccaccio of the Christian traditions, it is noteworthy how small a part spirituality seems to play in these tales. Take, for example, the last story, the one we know as "Patient Griselda," which Chaucer - who may have met Boccaccio on a visit to Italy - put into the mouth of his Oxford scholar in The Canterbury Tales. This is a "test narrative," the time-honoured fictional trope in which a character is made to undergo a series of trials designed to prove their integrity and worthiness of a prize others fail to win or for which, in Griselda's case, society deems them undeserving. A shepherd's daughter, she is spotted by Gualtieri, Marquis of Saluzzo, who chooses her as his wife. Eminently adaptable, she seems born to be a marchioness but her husband has other ideas. He will test her wifely patience, firstly by removing their infant children from her, then, after several years, by telling her that the Pope has granted him a divorce. Home goes Griselda, without a murmur, to her father's cottage, but Gualtieri has prepared worse torments. Now dressed in her peasant homespun, she is summoned to wait on his new bride, who of course turns out to be her long-lost daughter. Gualtieri, admitting the whole deception, offers the lame and unfeeling excuse that "I wanted to teach you how to be a wife and at the same time to beget for myself perpetual peace and quiet for the rest of my life with you." Griselda's patience is at no stage presented as that Christian submissiveness commended to wives by St Paul. In greeting her husband's supposed child-bride she frankly warns him not to subject the girl to a similar ordeal. In his courtiers" eyes the winner is not the shifty, humbugging Gualtieri but Griselda, possessed of a serene wisdom he will clearly never achieve. As for those whose job is to teach us piety, virtue and the beauty of holiness, such people, for Boccaccio, are often the likeliest sinners. The nuns of a Tuscan convent, led by their abbess, so enjoy the extra services afforded them by the strapping young gardener Masetto that in order not to wear him out they "divide his labours in such a way that he could take care of them all," with "quite a few monklets and nunlets" as a result. A wife cheats on her jealous husband with the local priest, an abbot cuckolds a dim-witted yeoman by persuading him that a marvel-working opiate will afford him a glimpse of Purgatory, and in Boccaccio's native city of Certaldo, Frate Cipolla (Friar Onion) - "the most sociable scoundrel in the world" - peddles dodgy relics to the townsfolk. Even the most earnest young desert hermit can find no refuge from fleshly imperatives. When Alibech, a Tunisian girl in search of God, finds Rustico at prayer in his cell, he gives her instruction in a spiritual exercise he calls "putting the Devil back into hell." So adept a pupil exhausts her teacher, but when she returns home with her glad tidings and explains exactly how the Evil One is sent where he belongs, "they laughed so much that they are laughing to this day." Beauty as well as bawdy has enthralled The Decameron's readers over six centuries. Turn to the fifth story of the fourth day (its given theme is unhappy love) where Filomena tells the tragic tale of Lisabetta, whose lover, the apprentice Lorenzo, is murdered by her brothers for the sake of family honour. Its closing image of the grief-crazed heroine weeping over the pot of basil where she has concealed his head inspired John Keats to write "Isabella." Earlier Shakespeare's eye had lighted on day three, picking out the exploits of Giletta of Narbonne to transform into All's Well That Ends Well. Characters such as Lisabetta and Giletta, steadfast and resourceful, clearly appealed to Boccaccio. Though its three male storytellers are often cynical on the subject of a lady's constancy and sincerity, The Decameron, addressed mainly to a female audience, continuously rejects the medieval stereotype of Eve and her daughters as begetters of sinfulness. This is a book by a man who loved women and whose empathy with them transcended the culture and prejudices of his age. It is 700 years since Boccaccio's death and The Decameron has had numerous English translations, most of them bowdlerised or reliant on corrupt texts. The challenge is to move gracefully between the widely varying idioms employed for different tales and Wayne A Rebhorn is notably successful in handling this, avoiding both an excess of slack colloquialism and the pish-tush-forsooth faux-antique of earlier renderings. His introduction and notes are all we could wish for and the achievement genuinely honours its original. "The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together," says Shakespeare in his Boccaccio play. All the more reason, says The Decameron, for enjoying it while we can. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, tr by Wayne A Rebhorn 1024pp, Norton, t £25.99 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) 0844 871 1515 (RRP £29.99)