From my brief college days I recall the comment that because of the importance attached to the number ten many Medieval and Renaissance thinkers regarded the square of ten as "perfect" (the comment was made during discussion of the Divine Comedy, but of course that led right into the Decameron. ) I haven't read the whole of it, because I only read what I have that one time and we had a lot of ground to cover from Gilgamesh and Job down to the Enlightenment, but found Boccaccio a lot more enjoyable than Chaucer. It's difficult not to see the latter as derivative, not only in terms of presentation but in presenting a cross section of humanity the author analyzes through the lens of his work.

Good review; thanks. Backtracking a bit, The Epic of Gilgamesh might be a good future choice; it's another work that hasn't received a lot of attention due to its relatively recent rediscovery and the obscurity of Sumerian, yet it's influence on world literature is seminal. The links it forms between Old Testament narratives and the works of Homer (which have many similarities with Gilgamesh that were thought original for centuries) make fascinating fodder in themselves, but my old Plan II professor started with Gilgamesh solely and simply because of his contention virtually every piece of literature since can be viewed as a retelling of its basic tale of anognorisis through conflicts and journeys literal or metaphorical. Certainly the story of a semi-divine king who spurns a goddess of lust and war (an association preserved in the Greek tales of Ares and Aphrodite) and ends up questing for a talisman of immortality after her retribution would be fitting for a SF/Fantasy site.