Love in the Decameron

Love in the Decameron is at once an affliction that calls for consolation, a force capable of overturning ordinary conduct, and a subject through which the tales examine the unequal freedoms of women and men. The Proem makes love the book's personal origin and its declared service: stories are offered not simply to entertain but to ease distress and help readers judge what to avoid and what to pursue.

The Proem: suffering turned into consolation

The author presents himself as someone who has known the burden of love. From youth, he says, he was consumed by a passion whose intensity exceeded what his social condition seemed to warrant. He does not blame the beloved woman for his suffering. Rather, his own disordered desire would not remain within reasonable bounds, and it caused him more anguish than the circumstances required. The conversation and consolation of a friend helped him endure that distress.

The passion gradually abated, not through argument, counsel, shame, or fear, but through the passage of time. Its pain has become pleasure in recollection, while the memory of those who comforted him remains and gives rise to a sense of obligation. Now that he considers himself free of love's bonds, he turns what he received into an act of service: if those who once helped him no longer need comfort, he can offer it to others who do.

That offer is directed particularly to women in love. The Proem argues that women often keep their feelings hidden, constrained by the wishes and commands of fathers, mothers, brothers, and husbands, and confined for much of the time to their chambers. Unoccupied and unable to speak openly, they may revolve between desire and reluctance until melancholy deepens their distress. The book's hundred stories, told over ten days by seven ladies and three young men, are meant to provide both pleasurable diversion and useful counsel. Their love-chances include happiness and grief, placing delight and instruction side by side rather than promising that passion will always end well.

Unequal freedoms and women's constrained choices

The Proem's account of confinement gives the stories' lovers a social context. It contrasts women's restricted routines with the range of diversions available to men: men may travel about, hunt, fish, ride, game, or trade, each activity offering some respite from troubled thought. Women, by contrast, are described as having fewer means to redirect their attention. The contrast makes storytelling itself significant: shared narrative offers a form of company and mental movement where ordinary life may withhold both.

The ladies' discussion of leaving during the plague makes that constraint explicit in another register. Pampinea proposes that they depart together and seek diversion, but Filomena cautions that a company of women may be unable to govern itself without guidance. Elisa likewise invokes men's authority while pointing out that most of the women's male kin are dead or dispersed, and that inviting strangers could expose them to scandal. Their exchange shows how a desire for safety and freedom has to be negotiated through gendered expectations and reputation, not simply acted upon.

Several tales turn that problem into direct conflict. In Prato, Madam Filippa is found by her husband, Rinaldo de' Pugliesi, with Lazzerino de' Guazzagliotri. A statute threatens death by burning for a wife caught in adultery, applying the same penalty to her as to a woman who sells sex. Rather than deny what happened or flee into exile, Madam Filippa appears before the provost and faces the accusation. The episode presents her love as a source of courage in a legal order that exposes women to a severe and unequal punishment; its announced consequence is that her prompt answer leads to a change in the statute.

Other women respond to unwanted desire rather than defend a chosen attachment. Madam Piccarda, a young widow, rejects the rector of the church near her estate when he presumes to ask for her love. She invokes his position as her spiritual father, his priesthood, and his age, as well as her own condition as a widow, to insist that his desire is unfitting. Her refusal sets personal boundaries against a man who assumes that his passion entitles him to hers.

Rank, restraint, and the limits of desire

The tales do not treat desire as automatically virtuous simply because it is powerful. Fiammetta introduces the story of the Marchioness of Monferrato as an example of a woman's discretion in resisting the love of a man of higher condition. The King of France becomes enamoured of the marchioness before he has even seen her, on the strength of praise for her beauty and nobility. The story's announced answer is a dinner of hens and a series of sprightly words: through the meal and her speech, the marchioness curbs his extravagant passion. Desire meets not submission but a controlled, intelligent response.

A second example shifts the test of restraint to a king. Charles the Old confides to Guy de Montfort that he intends to take not only Ginevra the Fair but also her sister Isotta the Blonde from their father. Guy rebukes the plan as a betrayal of the hospitality Charles has received, and recalls that violence against women helped open the kingdom to Charles in the first place. Military victory over Manfred, he argues, is less worthy than mastery over oneself. The scene distinguishes the ability to desire from the right to act on desire: a ruler's passion becomes a political and moral danger when it threatens the honor and security of those who trust him.

The same distinction appears in the story of two suitors who love Francesca de' Lazzari against her will. Living in Pistoia while banished from Florence, Rinuccio Palermini and Alessandro Chiarmontesi pursue her without knowing of each other's attachment. Francesca has sometimes listened to their messages, but wishes to withdraw from both men's importunities. She devises a service involving a sepulchre, requiring one suitor to enter it as if dead and the other to bring him out as if dead. Neither completes the condition, and her stratagem frees her from both without compelling her to choose a man she does not love. In this plot, ingenuity supplies an escape where ordinary refusal has not ended the pressure.

Passion as bodily force and plot engine

The stories give love physical consequences, not just abstract claims of loyalty. Lisa, the daughter of Bernardo Puccini, sees Pedro of Aragon at a public festival and falls passionately in love with him. Her awareness of the gulf between her condition and his gives her little hope, while Pedro has not noticed her. As her passion grows, melancholy follows melancholy; she becomes ill and visibly wastes away. Her parents try physicians and medicines, but she believes her love hopeless and sees no reason to continue living. Before she dies, she asks for Minuccio d'Arezzo, a singer and musician welcomed at court, and confides her secret to him so he can help her make Pedro aware of it. The episode connects concealed desire to bodily decline, then makes disclosure a possible act of intervention.

In Pinuccio's story, mutual love is checked by fear of dishonor. He and a young woman of about fifteen or sixteen have repeatedly met with success in their secret attachment, but he worries about bringing reproach on them both. As his desire grows beyond his ability to master it, he devises a way to spend the night in her father's house, hoping to reach her without anyone knowing. He travels with his trusted friend Adriano, arranging the journey so that the pair can present themselves as wayfarers overtaken by night. The careful staging of their arrival shows how courtship operates within a household whose routines and sleeping arrangements shape what lovers can risk.

The book also distinguishes chosen love from sexual appetite disguised as authority. In a story introduced as another instance of women suffering the importunities of clergy, a rector pursues Madam Piccarda despite her clear rejection. In another tale, the abbot who has drugged Ferondo exploits the latter's absence to sleep with Ferondo's wife. When Ferondo wakes after ten months in the tomb, he believes that the abbot's prayers, those of Saint Benedict, and his wife's prayers have released him from purgatory. He returns home convinced that his wife has conceived his child; the boy is named Benedict Ferondi. The device depends on the gulf between the husband's belief and the hidden sexual arrangement. It marks a comic and morally compromised use of desire, sharply unlike the Proem's language of love as an intimate suffering deserving compassion.

Storytelling, speech, and love's varied outcomes

Love becomes legible in the collection through stories that do not all reach the same kind of resolution. A lover may endure unreturned passion, as Lisa does; a woman may resist a powerful man's advances, as the Marchioness of Monferrato does; or a determined woman may use a difficult test to escape men she does not love, as Francesca does. In these contrasts, passion matters not only for its intensity but for the choices and pressures surrounding it: rank, marriage, household authority, law, and the possibility of speaking safely.

Speech itself can change the direction of a love story. Fiammetta praises the discretion of women who keep themselves from being taken by the love of men of higher condition, while the story of Madam Filippa makes a woman's prompt answer the means by which a cruel statute is changed. Madam Piccarda's refusal gives reasons as well as a boundary; Guy de Montfort's rebuke turns a king's desire toward self-restraint. Such scenes do not make words a substitute for action. They show words working on the conditions that govern action, sometimes defending a person, sometimes exposing a wrong, and sometimes preventing desire from becoming abuse.

The collection's governing promise is therefore not that love guarantees happiness. Its stories offer women pleasure and counsel precisely because love may bring both glad and grievous chances. The Proem's author writes from a suffering that has eased but not been forgotten, and makes remembered consolation the basis for a larger act of consolation. Within the tales, love can narrow a life to illness and inward turmoil, but it can also summon courage, ingenuity, disclosure, or restraint. The stories keep those possibilities in view together, allowing readers to take pleasure in love's reversals without mistaking intensity for justice or a happy ending for a universal rule.