As some of you may know, I currently live in Shanghai, which means that the setting of The Decameron has become beautifully relevant to me all of a sudden. In Boccaccio's collection of tales, seven young women and three young men have hidden themselves away behind a deserted villa's walls to sit out the Black Plague as it ravishes 14th century Italy. While the Corona virus isn't quite as horrifying as the Black Plague (at the moment at least), it has been enough for all of us to be put on extended leave. Hence, I will be spending the next ten days hidden away in my own apartment, desperate to amuse myself and to forget what's happening outside. My tiny apartment may not be a villa and I may be there on my own (+ cat), but it is the place where I will be joining Boccaccio's hideaways.

As some of you may know, I currently live in Shanghai, which means that the setting of The Decameron has become beautifully relevant to me all of a sudden. In Boccaccio's collection of tales, seven young women and three young men have hidden themselves away behind a deserted villa's walls to sit out the Black Plague as it ravishes 14th century Italy. While the Corona virus isn't quite as horrifying as the Black Plague (at the moment at least), it has been enough for all of us to be put on extended leave. Hence, I will be spending the next ten days hidden away in my own apartment, desperate to amuse myself and to forget what's happening outside. My tiny apartment may not be a villa and I may be there on my own (+ cat), but it is the place where I will be joining Boccaccio's hideaways.

The Seventh Day

Our cast:

Ladies:                            Men:
Pampinea                        Panfilo
Fiammetta                      Filostrato
Filomena                         Dioneo
Emilia
Lauretta
Neifile
Elissa

Dioneo is our second storyteller king and today we look at wives who fooled their husbands

The Tales

The first tale is told by Emilia and in it a wive convinces her husband that her lover is truly a 'fantasima', a kind of cat monkey creature, which is how she successfully sneaks him away. Filostrato follows with a hilarious tale in which her husband scours a tub for her lover while he has his way with her. Elissa continues in the third tale where a wife cleverly hides her affair under the guise of curing her son of worms. (It is actually weirder than it sounds.) The fourth tale is told by Lauretta and shows us a husband and wife respectively locking each other out of their house until she so roundly embarrasses him in front of their neighbours that she can do as she pleases from then on. Fiammetta's fifth tale sees a jealous husband disguise himself as a priest and still failing to discover his wife's affair.  The sixth tale is Pampinea's and it sees a wife handling her husband, lover and a pushy man all at once thanks to her wit. Filomena is next and it involved intrigue in gardens and, again, a clever wife. Neifile tells the eighth and most violent tale, in which a poor maid gets beat up instead of her mistress, so the latter can prove that her husband is a horrible person. Panfilo tells the penultimate tale in which a wife has to complete three challenges before succeeding in her affair. Dioneo tells the final tale in which one man returns from the dead in order to assure his friend that sleeping with your godchild's mother in not a sin.

Argos, Greece - the setting of the ninth tale.

It's interesting how cuckolding seems to be a major theme of The Decameron and many medieval tales in general. On the one hand there is this idea that true love should come above all, no matter the marital status or rank of the people involved. This is almost akin to the concept of 'courtly love', except that unlike that medieval tradition, the love here is very much physically enjoyed. Which leads us to the other hand, where it seems that there is nothing enriching, per se, to these tales. What counteracts this last statement is when Boccaccio's characters, enriched and purified by love, become rather philosophical. There is not a lot of that in the tales of 'The Seventh Day' as they mainly focus on the various intrigues and tricks by which the wives get away with their affairs. We have pretend healing, priestly disguises, cracks in walls, fantasima' and pear trees that give carnal visions. There is no denying that the tales are fun and race by, but there is also not a lot to gain from them.

Neifile's tale is the most interesting, even if it is the one that made me cringe the most. A wife has an ingenious system where she ties a thread to her toe, which her lover then pulls from outside to wake her up. One night, her jealous husband discovers this and chases the lover away. While he is out of the house, the wife convinces her maid to take her place in the bed, promising to reward her. This poor made is beaten black and blue and then shaved, before the husband goes to his wife's family house to gather her brothers for another round of verbal abuse. The wife, without a single scratch on her, receives them and regales them with tales of her husband's drinking and raging. Her mother joins in, saying they never should have wed her to a merchant. Everything is settled by the brothers who tell him to not do it again. The husband is so flabbergasted he has nothing to reply and the wife is free to do as she pleases. Thankfully the tale also mentions the maid is nursed to health and handsomely rewarded. The tale plays with class difference, showing the contempt with which the aristocratic families treat the nouveau riche, the merchant class. But what is most astounding is the sheer violence of it and the contempt with which the wife is treated until she can make her case.


Interesting Fact:

Today's second tale, as well as a good few from the previous days, was taken by Boccaccio from Lucius Apuleius' The Golden Ass from the second century. The Golden Ass is also known as the Metamorphoses, which should not be mistaken with Ovid's similarly titled work. In this work, a man named Lucius experiences a whole range of trials and tribulations of a bawdy nature in pursuit of feeding his curiosity about magic. He accidentally turns himself into an ass, hence the title, and then goes on a journey.

The story was adapted from a Greek original which has unfortunately been lost, but many of the inset tales, told during Lucius' journey, are very famous. Among these is the tale of Cupid and Psyche and the tale of the tub, which Filostrato tells today. The Golden Ass was a precursor to the genre of the episodic picaresque novel, which centres around the adventures of an appealing yet roguish character. An example of this genre is Don Quixote.

Set Up for the Eighth Day:

Dioneo selects as our new queen Lauretta who, not wanting to be retaliate against today's topic chooses the following theme:

'the tricks that people in general, men and women alike, are forever playing upon one another.'

Filomena then sings a song which has everyone suspecting she is in the midst of enjoying a raunchy affair of the heart herself, although we don't get any particulars on this.

Since, in The Decameron, we've reached another Thursday, the 'Eighth Day' of storytelling will be delayed for two days until their Sunday. Since I have no need to go to church and can wash my hair on any day, I will be back tomorrow for 'The Eighth Day'.