Eighth Day of the Decameron

The Eighth Day of the Decameron, governed by Lauretta, makes deception its organizing theme: women trick men, men trick women, and men trick one another. Its leisurely Sunday schedule gives the company a setting for this return to comic invention, while the stories show wit operating within unequal relationships and against unwanted advances.

Place in the Frame Narrative

The day follows the close of the Seventh Day, when the company had been dismissed for the night. The collection’s larger frame presents storytelling as solace, especially for women whose love and melancholy may be confined within the narrow space of domestic life. Its hundred stories encompass joyful and painful affairs of love as well as other turns of fortune, accompanied by songs from the women; the Eighth Day’s concentration on tricks gives that consolatory project a sharper, comic edge.

Lauretta presides over the day. The frame introduces its theme as tricks women play on men, men on women, and men on one another, making deception not the preserve of one sex but a contest of ingenuity among several. After the company gathers at the fountain following the day’s other activities, Neifile is called upon to begin the storytelling.

The Sunday’s Routine

The day opens on Sunday morning, as the rising light reaches the mountain summits and the retreating shadows make the landscape visible. Lauretta and the company walk first through dewy grass, then visit a nearby church and hear divine service at about half-tierce, or half past seven in the morning. They return home for a cheerful meal, then spend time singing and dancing before Lauretta dismisses them so that anyone who wishes may rest.

After the sun has passed noon, the company reconvenes beside a beautiful fountain for its customary storytelling. This rhythm of movement, worship, eating, music, rest, and tales gives the day a clear shape: the stories do not interrupt a continuous labor but occupy a deliberately protected interval of leisure. The opening’s measured progression also contrasts with the schemes and sudden reversals that the day’s theme invites.

Tricks, Power, and Ingenuity

The theme’s breadth matters. By including tricks between men as well as between women and men, the frame sets up deception as a social practice that can be used in different directions, rather than as a simple opposition between male and female cunning. The stories’ comic premises can therefore test who has power in a given encounter, who can read another person’s intentions, and who can turn a difficult situation to advantage.

The day’s program also connects its comedy to the collection’s recurring interest in women’s restricted circumstances. The frame describes women in love as more confined than men, often held within their chambers and subject to the wishes and commands of family members. In this context, a woman’s ability to answer an importunate man with discretion or a counter-scheme belongs to a wider contrast between constrained circumstances and practical intelligence; the frame does not, however, make every trick a remedy for that inequality.

Madam Piccarda and the Rector

One of the day’s stories begins in Fiesole, where Madam Piccarda, a young and beautiful widow of noble birth, lives for most of the year in a modest house on her estate near the cathedral. Her two brothers live with her. Although she is not well provided for, the story places her within a household and a local religious setting that bring her into contact with the cathedral’s rector.

The rector, already old but described as presumptuous and foolish, becomes enamored of her and asks her to return his love. Madam Piccarda refuses. She invokes his position as her spiritual father and his priesthood, his age, and the discretion expected of a widow; she also makes clear that she will not love him in the manner he demands. The story is introduced as one in which she will use him as he deserves, so her refusal establishes the conflict between clerical presumption and a woman’s judgment. This opening gives the day’s broad theme a specific form: an attempted imposition meets a deliberate answer, and the ensuing tale is framed around the woman’s counteraction.