Devil

The Devil in the Decameron is not presented in Alibech’s story as a supernatural creature acting in the world. Instead, he becomes the central figure in a monk’s knowingly fraudulent allegory: Rustico teaches Alibech that sexual intercourse is the service of putting the Devil in Hell. The metaphor begins as his device for exploiting her innocence, but Alibech learns its terms, embraces the pleasure it conceals, and ultimately uses the same language to demand that Rustico satisfy her. The Devil’s literary force lies in this reversal, where religious instruction becomes an instrument of sexual deception and then a means by which the deceived woman speaks for herself.

The Devil as a Religious Figure

The tale is introduced by Dioneo on the third day. He presents it as a story about Love’s power, which can make itself felt not only in palaces and luxurious chambers but also in remote forests, mountains, and desert caves. That framing places the encounter between Alibech and Rustico within a larger account of desire, while the story’s religious vocabulary supplies the comic mechanism through which that desire is expressed.

Alibech has gone to the Desert of Thebais seeking a life of devotion. After other holy men direct her onward, she reaches Rustico, a young hermit who receives her into his cell. He initially presents himself as testing his constancy, but, once alone with her, abandons prayer and mortification and begins devising a way to obtain what he wants without appearing debauched. The Devil enters the story not through an independent demonic appearance, but through the explanation Rustico invents for his own desire.

Rustico describes the Devil as God’s enemy, condemned to Hell, and then identifies the service of returning him there as especially pleasing to God. In the allegory he constructs, his own aroused body is the Devil and Alibech’s body is Hell. His claim takes the form of religious instruction, but its purpose is to disguise his appetite as a sacred duty. The gap between the devotional setting and the bodily meaning of his lesson makes the Devil an instrument of clerical satire as well as erotic wordplay.

Rustico’s Lesson and Alibech’s Response

Rustico first asks questions that establish Alibech’s inexperience; the account describes her as never having known a man and as simple as she seems. He then explains his invented doctrine under the appearance of serving God. When he demonstrates, Alibech is surprised by the Devil’s visible form and initially reasons that she is better off because she does not possess one. Rustico answers that she has Hell instead, and asks her to help him relieve his torment by putting the Devil back into it.

Alibech accepts his explanation in good faith. The first encounter causes her some pain, which she interprets as evidence of the Devil’s hostility to God and of the difficulty of putting him into Hell. Rustico reassures her that it will not always hurt. The story says that, at their first sitting, he repeats the act six times before they leave the bed. The repeated physical encounter thus follows directly from the supposed religious lesson: his false account authorizes the very conduct it claims to explain as sacred service.

Over time, Alibech’s response changes. What first caused discomfort begins to give her pleasure, and she recalls the men of Capsa who had told her that serving God was sweet. She comes to regard this service as more delightful than anything else she has done and returns to Rustico of her own accord, urging him to put the Devil into Hell. Her new initiative changes the balance of the scene. Rustico began as the teacher who controlled the meaning of the metaphor; Alibech now invokes that meaning herself and asks for the encounter it authorizes.

The Reversal of the Allegory

Alibech also reasons from the fiction Rustico has taught her. If Hell receives and holds the Devil so willingly, she wonders, why does he keep escaping? The question turns the metaphor into a shared comic logic: Alibech takes Rustico’s false religious explanation seriously enough to draw its implications, while the reader can see the bodily reality it conceals. The Devil is simultaneously the story’s conventional figure of evil and Rustico’s name for the sexual desire he has pretended to discipline.

The arrangement becomes harder to sustain as Alibech’s desire grows and Rustico’s strength fails. He lives on roots and water, and the story sets her repeated requests against his diminishing capacity. When he tells her that his Devil has been chastened and should be left in peace, she answers that her Hell gives her no peace. Since she has helped abase his Devil, she argues, he should use his Devil to quiet her Hell. She has learned to wield his own religious allegory as a claim on his attention. The man who invented the lesson to direct her conduct now finds its terms turned against him.

Rustico can only satisfy her occasionally, and the narrator compares his efforts to casting a bean into a lion’s mouth. The comic comparison punctures the elevated language of spiritual service with a concrete measure of the mismatch between Alibech’s continuing desire and Rustico’s limited strength. At the same time, her complaint makes clear that the story’s joke does not end with her passive acceptance of his teaching: she presses its logic beyond the point at which it remains convenient for him.

Return to Capsa and the Public Saying

The encounter ends through an unforeseen change in fortune. A fire in Capsa kills Alibech’s father and the other members of his household, leaving her heir to his property. Neerbale, who has spent his own substance in pleasure, hears that she is alive and finds her before the authorities can take possession of the estate as property belonging to a man thought to have died without an heir. To Rustico’s relief, Neerbale brings Alibech back to Capsa and marries her, thereby gaining access to her inheritance. Her departure is not presented as a religious conversion or as a consequence of Rustico’s scheme; it follows the destruction of her family and Neerbale’s pursuit of her estate.

Before Neerbale has slept with her, women ask Alibech what service she performed in the desert. She answers by describing the Devil and Hell, and explains her experience in words and gestures. The women laugh at her account, then reassure her that the same service is performed in the city and that Neerbale will serve God well with her. The private deception has become public entertainment: Alibech’s sincere understanding supplies the occasion for the women’s laughter, while their response translates the hermit’s private euphemism into a communal joke.

As the story tells it, the saying that putting the Devil in Hell is the most acceptable service one can render to God passes from woman to woman throughout the city and eventually travels across the sea. Dioneo ends by extending the joke to his listeners, recommending that young women learn the service because it pleases both parties. The Devil’s final appearance is therefore proverbial rather than supernatural. Rustico’s invented theology survives not as a lesson in devotion but as a comic phrase whose meaning the audience readily understands.

Religious Satire and Narrative Function

The episode draws its comedy from the collision between the language of holiness and the conduct of a religious figure. Rustico does not merely yield to temptation: he deliberately gives his desire the shape of a pious lesson, using Alibech’s religious purpose and lack of experience to make his deception persuasive. Yet the tale does not leave the metaphor under his control. Alibech adopts it, recognizes the pleasure it names, and applies it to her own wishes; the doctrine that first served the monk becomes the vocabulary through which she demands reciprocity.

Elsewhere in the Decameron’s first-day religious satire, Abraham returns from Rome condemning the corruption of the clergy and describes its court as a place more diabolical than divine. That broader contrast illuminates the joke without making the Devil an actor in either episode: religious language can be used to expose the distance between professed holiness and actual conduct. In Rustico’s story, that distance is concentrated in one hermit, one invented lesson, and one metaphor that keeps changing hands. The Devil is at once the emblem Rustico invokes, the euphemism that hides his conduct, and the comic device that allows Alibech’s answering desire to outlast his attempted instruction.