Sunday

Sunday marks the resumption of storytelling after a pause shaped by the week’s religious and domestic customs. In the company’s schedule, it is not simply another day: it joins worship, rest, and the return to collective narration, while Neifile makes it the occasion for setting a new theme.

Weekly and religious setting

Neifile explains that Friday should be given to prayer rather than storytelling, since it commemorates the Passion of Christ and is a fast day. Saturday is also reserved from tales: women customarily wash their hair and remove the dust and dirt accumulated during the week, while many fast and refrain from work in reverence for the Virgin and in preparation for Sunday. The two-day pause thus combines religious observance with bodily care and rest.

The importance of Sunday’s repose also appears in an argument about women’s lives. Fiammetta observes that wives may spend the week confined to domestic duties and household concerns, yet jealous husbands deny them the holiday leisure available to other people. The distinction between working days and days of repose is presented as part of both human and divine law, with God’s rest on the seventh day serving as its example. Sunday therefore stands for respite that ought to be shared, not withheld through domestic control.

The return to storytelling

After the company has spent four days in its present location, Neifile proposes moving elsewhere so that newcomers will not intrude. The company is to assemble there on Sunday after sleeping; the intervening pause gives its members time to rest and consider what they will tell. Sunday becomes the hinge between a period of withdrawal from storytelling and a renewed, more deliberately organized gathering.

Neifile also uses the return to impose a theme. The company is to recount how people have acquired something greatly desired or recovered a lost good through diligence. The rule gives the next round of tales a shared focus while preserving Dioneo’s privilege to tell a story outside the assigned theme. Sunday thus restores the storytelling routine and sets its direction at once.

Narrative significance

The schedule makes the day’s function visible through contrast: Friday and Saturday suspend narration, while Sunday brings the company back together. Rest is not treated as empty time; it prepares the narrators to resume, and Neifile’s choice of a theme about diligence turns the return into a fresh beginning. Across the company’s ordered days and the wider defense of weekly leisure, Sunday links communal recreation with the right to relief from ordinary labor.