Natural Right of Self-Preservation

The Natural Right of Self-Preservation is the principle Pampinea uses to defend the women’s departure from plague-stricken Florence. She argues that protecting one’s life is a natural right, and that a retreat made without injury to anyone is not a betrayal but a legitimate response to mortal danger.

The Principle and Its Argument

Pampinea grounds her proposal in the idea that honest use of one’s rights does not wrong another person. She reasons from the laws, whose purpose is the well-being of mortals: if those laws allow that people may be killed without fault while trying to preserve their lives, then people may all the more take measures to protect themselves without offending anyone. The point is not that every means is justified, but that self-preservation is a recognized claim and that a peaceful departure falls within it.

The Plague as a Test of the Right

For Pampinea, the danger is not abstract. The women hear continually of people dead or near death, encounter the sick and the dead, and find the city’s ordinary protections failing. Public authority has lost much of its force because its executors are dead or ill; people previously condemned to exile range about, while opportunists mock the survivors’ distress. At home, the household has dwindled until a woman may find only her serving-maid remaining, and the familiar rooms seem haunted by the terrifying appearance of the departed. These conditions make continued exposure a choice with grave consequences, not a neutral act of loyalty to the city.

From Principle to Collective Action

Pampinea proposes that the women take their maids and necessary provisions and stay in one country place, then another, enjoying what the season affords until they learn what outcome Heaven has reserved for them. The countryside offers birdsong, green hills and plains, fields of grain, trees, more open skies, fresher air, and a greater abundance of necessities; because houses and inhabitants are fewer, its troubles seem less oppressive. Yet it is no guarantee of safety: Pampinea acknowledges that country people die too. Her comparison is about relative exposure and distress, not escape from death itself.

She also answers the charge that leaving would mean abandoning others. In her account, the women’s relatives have already left them alone, whether by fleeing danger or dying, as though the women did not belong to them. Departure therefore does not desert a functioning community that is caring for them; it is a measured response to abandonment and danger. The proposed movement is to be honorable and restrained, not an occasion to exceed the bounds of reason. By making self-preservation the basis for collective action, Pampinea recasts retreat as a lawful exercise of agency rather than a shameful failure of courage.