Women’s Wit and Agency in Marriage

Women’s Wit and Agency in Marriage is a recurring concern in the Decameron: women speak, bargain, conceal, and improvise within conditions that often give husbands, fathers, and public laws greater power over their lives. Their ingenuity can turn a threatened execution into legal reform or a husband’s suspicion into permission to act, but it does not erase the restrictions that make such strategies necessary. The stories’ comedy and reversals therefore hold two things together: women’s resourcefulness, and the unequal structures against which they must use it.

Confinement and the Need for Counsel

The book’s opening account of its intended readers makes women’s limited freedom part of the rationale for storytelling. The narrator contrasts women, often confined to their chambers by the wishes and commands of fathers, mothers, brothers, and husbands, with men who can seek distraction in hunting, fishing, riding, gaming, or trade. Women’s hidden desires and enforced idleness, the narrator argues, leave them more exposed to melancholy; stories are offered as consolation for those with fewer means of diverting their thoughts. The framing thus presents female readers not simply as an audience for love tales, but as people whose circumstances make narrative pleasure a form of relief.

The gathering that makes the stories possible also registers contemporary assumptions about women’s independence. When Pampinea proposes that the women leave the plague-stricken city, Filomena warns that a company of women without men’s guidance may quickly dissolve, describing women as fickle and fearful. Elisa likewise says that women’s undertakings seldom reach a good end without men’s direction, while also observing that inviting strangers could expose them to scandal. The exchange gives practical force to social rules about supervision and reputation even as the women debate how to act for themselves. The storytelling frame is therefore not a simple declaration of independence: it stages women’s initiative alongside the expectations that qualify it.

Choosing, Promising, and Being Given in Marriage

Several stories distinguish women’s expressed wishes from the arrangements made around them. In the encounter with Alessandro, a woman traveling in the appearance of an abbot reveals that she is a woman and says that she has left home to ask the Pope to marry her. She declares that she has chosen Alessandro and makes marriage the condition of his remaining with her. He agrees; she gives him a ring, and they pledge themselves before an image of Christ. Her initiative is unusually direct, but the scene still places marriage at the center of the relationship she proposes.

Gillette de Narbonne also pursues a marriage she wants through a carefully stated bargain. After curing the French king, she asks him to give her Bertrand de Roussillon, the man she has loved since childhood. The king had promised to marry her well if she succeeded, and she specifies that she may choose her husband, excepting the king’s sons and members of the royal house. Bertrand resists the match, objecting to her status as a healer and to the disparity he perceives between their lineages. The episode makes her skill and her ability to name the reward she seeks consequential, while also showing that the king’s promise and Bertrand’s consent remain central to whether her chosen marriage can proceed.

The stories also show how family protection and marriage prospects may depend on a woman’s place in other people’s plans. The Count of Antwerp, traveling under a false account of his identity with his children, tells a marshal’s wife that Jeannette is his daughter. Moved by the girl’s appearance and manner, the woman offers to take her in and, if she proves an honest woman, to marry her suitably. The count accepts and entrusts the girl to her care. The offer is framed as protection and future security, but the decision about the girl’s placement is made by adults negotiating her prospects.

In the story of Caterina and Ricciardo Manardi, mutual desire unfolds under the protection and authority of Caterina’s family. Ricciardo is treated by Messer Lizio da Valbona and Madam Giacomina almost as a son, while the parents guard their only surviving child and hope for a great alliance. Caterina and Ricciardo fall in love, and she responds to his avowal with one of her own. When Lizio discovers them together, he makes lawful marriage the condition of Ricciardo’s safety and of avoiding shame. Caterina weeps, asks her father to pardon Ricciardo, and urges her lover to accept. Ricciardo agrees; using a ring borrowed from Madam Giacomina, Lizio marries them in the parents’ presence. A public wedding follows days later. The outcome is happy, but its terms are shaped by paternal authority, danger, and the couple’s desire to continue their relationship securely.

Speech Against Law and Sexual Double Standards

Madam Filippa’s trial makes female speech a means of contesting law itself. In Prato, a statute orders a woman found in adultery to be burned, applying the same penalty to adultery and the sale of sexual favors. When her husband, Rinaldo de' Pugliesi, finds her with Lazzerino de' Guazzagliotri, he brings a legal accusation rather than killing her himself. Filippa chooses to appear before the provost despite friends and relatives urging her to deny the charge. She admits what happened, then challenges the statute: women were not consulted when it was made, she argues, though it binds them alone.

Filippa asks the provost to establish whether she has denied her husband access to her. Rinaldo answers that she has granted his requests; she then asks what she was meant to do with what remained beyond his needs, rather than leave it unused. The crowd laughs and declares her reasoning persuasive. At the provost’s urging, the people modify the statute so that it applies only to women who take money. Filippa returns home free, while Rinaldo leaves in shame. Her defense does not merely save her from a sentence: it forces public attention onto the law’s unequal terms and helps change them.

Domestic Surveillance and Coded Evasion

Mistress Tessa’s affair with Federigo di Neri Pegolotti shows ingenuity working through signals and improvisation rather than public argument. Tessa is married to Gianni Lotteringhi, whom the narrative presents as credulous and devoted to religious offices. During the summer, she and Federigo meet at her husband’s country house in Camerata. To arrange future visits without repeatedly sending a maid, they use an ass’s skull on a vineyard pole: its muzzle turned toward Florence signals that Federigo may come; turned toward Fiesole, it warns him that Gianni is present.

The signal fails to protect them when Gianni unexpectedly comes to the house on a night arranged for Federigo. Tessa has prepared capons, eggs, and wine for her lover, but forgets to tell the maid to wait and warn him. When Federigo knocks, Gianni hears. Tessa pretends to be asleep, then presents the knocking as a phantom and proposes an exorcism so she can get to the door and warn Federigo. She invents a conjuration that sends the supposed spirit to the garden, where the food and wine have been left. The ruse turns a dangerous interruption into a performance that Gianni accepts; Federigo, hearing it outside, understands that her husband is there. The scene’s comedy depends on Tessa’s quick control of speech and circumstance, but also on the secrecy required by the household in which she acts.

A more severe form of surveillance shapes the story of the jealous merchant’s wife. Her husband confines her so strictly that she cannot attend weddings, church, or entertainments, and is not even permitted to stand at a window. Feeling unjustly suspected, she decides to seek comfort with Filippo, a handsome neighbor. Since she cannot approach him in public, she searches the dividing wall until she finds a crack that looks into his bedchamber, then uses pebbles to bring him to the opening and begin speaking with him.

The wife later exploits her husband’s disguise as a priest to reverse the terms of his investigation. He has secretly heard her confession and accuses her of loving a priest who visits at night. She explains that the priest is her husband: he has become a priest by dressing as one, has access to the house, and lies with her. Her answer exposes the absurdity of his jealousy and of the secret watching by which he tried to discover her thoughts. Convinced that he has been deceived and that she is virtuous, he abandons his jealous vigilance. She then no longer needs to bring Filippo in by the roof and lets him enter through the door. The change is practical rather than a transformation of the marriage into equality: the husband’s withdrawal of control gives her room to act, but the affair still depends on concealment.

Agency Within Limits

Across these episodes, female agency takes several forms: choosing a partner, bargaining for marriage, appealing to a crowd, coordinating with a lover, and redirecting a husband’s suspicion. The means matter. Filippa speaks openly before a court and changes the law; Tessa and the jealous merchant’s wife manipulate the household knowledge and assumptions that constrain them. Caterina can express her love, but the discovery of the couple makes her father’s demand and Ricciardo’s fear decisive. Gillette names the husband she wants, yet the king’s promise and Bertrand’s resistance shape the outcome.

The stories do not treat wit as a guarantee of freedom. Instead, they make ingenuity visible as a response to particular pressures: confinement, reputational risk, family authority, marital control, and laws that treat women differently from men. Their reversals can be comic, but their stakes are concrete. A woman’s well-timed argument may spare her life and alter a statute; a carefully placed sign or a convincing explanation may open a passage through domestic surveillance. Together, these narratives make women’s speech and strategy central to how marriage is negotiated, resisted, and sometimes made more livable.