Deception and Schemes Between Spouses

Deception and Schemes Between Spouses is a recurring pattern in the Decameron’s comic storytelling, most explicitly organized as the subject of the seventh day. Its plots turn marriage into a contest over privacy and control: jealous husbands watch, confine, or seek public punishment, while wives use quick judgment, concealment, and verbal invention to protect their desires or escape danger. The stories make deception more than a private joke; within the frame, it becomes a way to examine unequal power in domestic life.

A Theme Shaped by Its Frame

The collection’s framing gives this subject a particular audience and emphasis. Its prologue describes women in love as more restricted than men: constrained by the wishes and commands of fathers, mothers, brothers, and husbands, they spend much of their time enclosed in their chambers, with fewer diversions available to draw them away from distress. The proposed stories offer those readers consolation and a lively subject for thought. The theme therefore arrives against a background in which women’s limited freedom is not incidental but part of the rationale for telling stories at all.

Within the company’s daily storytelling, the subject is proposed after Licisca’s remarks about married women’s conduct. The ruling speaker makes the next day’s theme the tricks women have played on their husbands, whether for love or self-preservation, and whether the husbands know of them or not. Some of the women object that the topic may not suit them. The speaker answers that, in a time when ordinary law and its judges have fallen silent, discourse may be allowed a freedom that conduct need not imitate. The frame thus distinguishes telling about transgression from prescribing it, while also treating laughter and conversation as forms of relief.

Jealousy and the Struggle for Household Space

The seventh-day stories repeatedly make jealousy a source of the very secrecy it claims to prevent. In one example, Tofano becomes jealous of his wife, Madam Ghita, without being able to give a sound reason. She notices his suspicion and, rather than accept its terms, encourages his fondness for drink until she can rely on his drunken sleep. She then meets a lover in safety, sometimes in her own house and sometimes at his. When Tofano suspects that she is using his intoxication against him, he pretends to be drunk, waits for her to leave, and locks her out on her return. His attempt to expose and punish her makes the doorway a site of control: he keeps her outside and threatens to bring their supposed shame before the neighbours and her kin.

Madam Ghita answers this confinement with a threat built from the husband’s own vulnerability. She says that, rather than endure public disgrace, she will throw herself into a nearby well; if she is found dead, she argues, people will suspect Tofano of killing her in his drunkenness. Her stratagem turns his effort to control the story into a danger to himself. The episode’s comic reversal depends on more than concealment: once force and pleading have failed, she invents a consequence that makes him reconsider who is exposed.

Another seventh-day plot, announced as the deception of a jealous husband, makes surveillance itself the wife’s opportunity. The husband disguises himself as a priest and hears his wife’s confession. She leads him to believe that a priest visits her every night; while he secretly watches the door for this supposed rival, she brings her actual lover into the house by way of the roof. The plan redirects his attention rather than simply evading it. The husband’s assumed clerical role and misplaced vigil become instruments in the wife’s successful deception.

Concealment, Counter-Surveillance, and Comic Reversal

The story of Madam Sismonda and Arriguccio Berlinghieri presents another contest between an adulterous wife and an increasingly vigilant husband. Arriguccio, a wealthy merchant who spends much time away, grows jealous and abandons much of his other business to keep watch over her. The story’s announced device is a piece of packthread tied to Madam Sismonda’s great toe at night, allowing her to learn when her lover comes. One night Arriguccio discovers the signal and pursues the lover; meanwhile, she puts another woman in her bed. Arriguccio beats the substitute and cuts off her hair, then summons Madam Sismonda’s brothers. When his account appears untrue to them, his attempt to establish control leaves him facing their rebuke instead.

The mechanism of the ruse is pointedly material: a thread carries a signal, a room conceals a substitution, and the husband’s pursuit takes him away from the person he means to catch. In these tales, domestic space is not merely the setting for marital authority. Doors, bedrooms, windows, and routes into the house determine who can see, who can enter, and whose account of events will be believed. The wife’s advantage comes from reading those arrangements faster than the husband does.

A related story begins with a poor household in Naples. Peronella and her husband live on a slender income from his masonry and her spinning. Their arrangement for meeting her lover depends on the husband’s customary early departure for work. When he unexpectedly returns and finds the door locked, he initially reads that sign as proof of his wife’s honesty: he takes the locked door to mean that she has protected herself from unwanted visitors. The gap between what he believes and what the household conceals supplies the story’s immediate comic tension. Its framing explicitly presents the wife’s quick deception as something that can preserve her when circumstances suddenly turn against her.

Meaning and Limits of the Pattern

The day’s subject does not treat every trick as the same kind of act. Some plots emphasize the pursuit of secret pleasure; others foreground the danger posed by unjust suspicion or coercive control. In introducing a further story about a jealous husband, the teller argues that wives endure confinement and deprivation of leisure, and condemns jealousy without cause as a threat to young women’s lives. That defense makes the stories’ laughter double-edged: a husband may be mocked for gullibility, but the joke also exposes the pressures that make concealment seem necessary to the woman at its center.

At the end of the seventh day, the next queen broadens the subject from women’s tricks against husbands to tricks played by women against men, men against women, and men against one another. The expansion places marital deception within a wider world of ingenuity and mutual manipulation, rather than treating it as an exclusively female capacity. Yet the preceding stories have made the imbalance in their circumstances unmistakable: jealous husbands can monitor and threaten, while wives often work through timing, disguise, misdirection, and speech. The theme’s enduring tension lies in that contrast between the apparent smallness of a household trick and the larger question of who has the power to define what has happened.