Alibech

Alibech is the young woman at the center of a story in which a religious quest is redirected by a hermit’s sexual deception and ultimately reduced to a joke repeated across a city. At first she seeks a practical way to serve God; in the desert, Rustico recasts sexual intercourse as a sacred duty. The reversal is not simply that Alibech is misled: she learns the euphemism, comes to enjoy what it conceals, and eventually takes the initiative. Her return to Capsa and her explanation of the episode give the story its final, public life.

Identity and departure

Alibech is introduced as a fair and appealing girl among the children of a very rich man in Capsa, a city in Barbary. She is not Christian. Hearing Christians speak highly of their faith and of service to God, she asks how a person might undertake that service with the least hindrance. She is told that those who withdraw from worldly things, like the hermits in the Desert of Thebais, serve God especially strictly. The tale describes her as about fourteen and very simple, and stresses that she acts from childish fancy rather than from a settled, informed purpose.

The next morning Alibech secretly sets out alone, without telling anyone what she intends to do. Her desire persists through several days of difficult travel until she reaches the desert. The distance and solitude make her choice vivid, but they also expose the gap between the purpose she imagines and the knowledge she lacks: she has come looking for a teacher, without understanding the danger of entrusting that search to men who control the terms of her instruction.

Rustico’s lesson and its reversal

At the first hut she finds a holy man, who is astonished to see her and asks what she wants. Alibech explains that she hopes to enter God’s service and find someone to teach her how. The man commends her intention, gives her roots, wild apples, dates, and water, but directs her onward, fearing that her youth and beauty might tempt him. Another hermit sends her on in the same way. She finally reaches Rustico, a young and devout hermit who, unlike the others, receives her into his cell. He makes her a bed of palm fronds for the night.

Rustico has decided to test his own constancy, but the test quickly fails. After his desire overcomes his devout thoughts and practices, he looks for a way to satisfy it without appearing to Alibech to be dissolute. Having established that she has never known a man and is as inexperienced as she seems, he puts his plan into religious language: the Devil is God’s enemy, he tells her, and the service most pleasing to God is to put the Devil back into hell. Alibech asks how this is to be done. Rustico’s explanation makes the sexual act appear to her an act of piety, and she agrees in good faith.

The device depends on Alibech’s literal trust in Rustico’s authority. She initially feels discomfort and remarks that the Devil must be a bad thing if putting him into hell hurts. Rustico reassures her, and the tale says that they repeat the act six times before leaving the bed. The discomfort gives way to pleasure: Alibech concludes that serving God is sweeter than anything else she has done. She begins to visit Rustico herself, urging him to resume the supposed devotional work and wondering why the Devil escapes when hell receives and holds him so well. Her repetition of the lesson turns Rustico’s own metaphor against him: the pupil has adopted the language so completely that she now directs the practice.

Desire, constraint, and return to Capsa

The arrangement becomes unequal in a new way. Rustico lives on roots and water and, as the tale puts it, cannot meet Alibech’s growing demands. He tells her that many devils would be needed to quiet hell, and manages to satisfy her only sometimes; she is dissatisfied because she thinks she is not serving God as diligently as she wishes. The story makes the joke depend on the contrast between her fervor and his dwindling capacity, while retaining the original deception that has shaped her understanding of what she is doing.

Their dispute is interrupted by news from Capsa. A fire has killed Alibech’s father, his other children, and the rest of his household. Because she is alive, she becomes heir to her father’s substantial estate. Neerbale, a young man who has spent his own substance in dissipation, hears of her survival and goes to find her. Before the authorities can claim her father’s property as an estate without an heir, he brings her back to Capsa. Alibech is taken against her will; Neerbale marries her and, through the marriage, succeeds to her inheritance. Her change of situation is therefore abrupt: the solitary pursuit that took her into the desert ends not through a decision to abandon it, but through her family’s deaths, the recovery of her as heir, and Neerbale’s intervention.

The story’s afterlife and comic force

Back in Capsa, before Neerbale has slept with her, women ask Alibech what she did in the desert to serve God. She answers that she served by putting the Devil in hell and says that Neerbale has committed a grievous sin by taking her away from that service. Asked how it is done, she explains with words and gestures. The women laugh, reassure her that the same service is performed where they live, and say that Neerbale can serve God with her in this way. Their amusement transforms Rustico’s private deception into a shared joke, while Alibech’s earnest account preserves the difference between what she was taught to believe and what the audience understands.

The tale says that the explanation passes from woman to woman through the city and becomes a common saying: putting the Devil in hell is held to be the most acceptable service one can render to God. Dioneo’s closing address extends the joke to his listeners, presenting the phrase as both pleasing to God and agreeable to those involved. The religious vocabulary that first enabled Rustico to manipulate Alibech thus becomes an openly comic double meaning. Alibech is neither shown as a convert nor given a later account of her life beyond her marriage and the public retelling. Her significance lies in the story’s progression from innocent inquiry, through a false lesson she comes to repeat on her own, to a proverb whose meaning is understood differently by its speaker, its hearers, and the storyteller.