Boccaccio's highly entertaining and occasionally bawdy fourteenth- century classic Decameron, which has influenced Shakespeare, Chaucer, Melville, Calvino, and countless other writers, offers contemporary readers a range of literary pleasures and philosophical insights. In this creative and engaging reading of the book, Richard Kuhns presents original ways of interpreting and discovering the hidden meanings of Decameron. Kuhns approaches the work from a variety of literary, philosophical, and historical perspectives. He argues that Decameron contains a theory of storytelling within the stories themselves, showing that a philosophy of the genre can be expressed in the process of telling. Kuhns reveals the ways in which Decameron's comic and sexual elements lead into philosophical debate and moral argument. In uncovering the meanings of sexual metaphors in the work, Kuhns also shows how Boccaccio viewed the relationship between storyteller and audience in sexual terms. Finally, Kuhns suggests that Decameron is one of the first self-conscious creations of "A Total Work of Art." Throughout the stories, Boccaccio draws on trecento Italian culture, integrating painting, poetry, musical performance, and dramatic scenes into his work.