Disguise and assumed identity

Disguise and assumed identity recur in the Decameron as acts of social navigation: a changed name, costume, manner, or story can open a way into a place otherwise closed, postpone violence, or make another person misread what has happened. These performances are not all alike. Ginevra’s male persona enables her survival and eventual public vindication, while the horsekeeper’s imitation of a king enables sexual deception. In other stories, concealment protects a family secret or gives a presumed-dead lover a chance to return. The device therefore turns on both what a disguise makes possible and who bears the consequences when it is believed.

Identity as a Means of Survival

After Bernabo orders Ginevra killed, the servant charged with the murder spares her and leaves her in a valley with money. She changes into his clothing, makes linen breeches from her shift, cuts her hair, and sets out dressed as a sailor. When she meets a Catalan gentleman, she presents herself as a male servant and takes the name Sicurano da Finale. The disguise is not simply a costume: it gives her a name and social role under which she can travel without revealing the identity that has put her life at risk.

Ginevra’s new position develops through service. The Catalan takes her to Alexandria and presents falcons to the Soldan; the Soldan, impressed by Sicurano’s manner, asks for the servant and takes her into his own household. Sicurano earns his favor in turn. Because she learns the language and performs her duties well, the Soldan later appoints her governor and captain of the guard at the merchants’ fair in Acre. A performance first adopted to escape a murder order becomes a source of authority across successive courts.

The disguise also lets Ginevra investigate the accusation that destroyed her former life. At Acre, she recognizes her purse and girdle among the goods displayed by Venetian merchants and learns that they belong to Ambrogiuolo of Piacenza. She does not reveal herself at once. Instead, she arranges for Ambrogiuolo and Bernabo to be brought before the Soldan, where Bernabo recounts that he believed his wife dead and that she had supposedly been eaten by wolves. Only after both men have spoken does Sicurano disclose the truth.

Ginevra kneels before the Soldan, sheds her masculine voice and manner, and identifies herself as the woman who has wandered in disguise for six years. She opens the front of her clothing to show her breast, making recognition a public and bodily fact rather than merely a claim. The Soldan’s astonishment gives way to praise. At Ginevra’s request, he pardons Bernabo; she accepts her husband’s apology, while Ambrogiuolo is condemned to die exposed in the sun, smeared with honey and bound to a stake. The Soldan restores Ginevra to women’s dress and attendants, gives her the property belonging to Ambrogiuolo, adds gifts worth more than ten thousand doubloons, and sends the couple home to Genoa. Her assumed identity has preserved her life and brought the concealed truth into the open.

Concealment, Access, and Deception

Masetto of Lamporecchio chooses a different performance for a different purpose. Hearing from Nuto that a convent needs a gardener, he wants to work among the nuns but expects that his youth and appearance may prevent his being hired. He reasons that the convent is far away and that nobody there knows him; if he can pass as deaf and mute, he expects to be accepted. He arrives dressed as a beggar with an axe, asks for food through gestures, and demonstrates his strength by quickly splitting logs that Nuto had left undone.

The bailiff keeps Masetto for work, and the abbess agrees to employ him after hearing that he is a poor deaf-mute who might serve the convent without playing the fool with the young women. She orders that he receive shoes, an old hood, food, and kind treatment. Masetto overhears the exchange while pretending to sweep the courtyard. His feigned muteness thus answers the convent’s wish for a useful worker who seems sexually harmless, while concealing the desire that brought him there. The episode begins by challenging the belief that religious clothing or hard agricultural labor extinguishes human appetite; the disguise exposes the gap between the convent’s expectations and the bodies and desires within it.

The horsekeeper’s impersonation of King Agilulf makes that gap more dangerous. He has secretly watched the king visit Queen Theodolinda and learned the signs by which the visit is recognized: the king’s mantle, a lighted taper, a small wand, and the knocks at her chamber door. Before attempting the deception, the groom washes himself in a bathhouse so that the smell of the stable will not betray him. He then imitates the king’s clothing and ritual, enters the queen’s room without speaking, and sleeps with her while she believes him to be her husband.

When the real king arrives soon afterward, Theodolinda remarks that he has already visited and taken pleasure with her. Agilulf understands that someone has imitated him, but recognizes that neither she nor anyone else has discovered the substitution. The episode makes disguise depend on repeated signs rather than an exact likeness alone: clothing, gesture, silence, and the queen’s expectation combine to make the imposture persuasive. The same concealment that grants the groom access also leaves the queen unaware of the deception. In contrast to Ginevra’s self-protective performance, his assumed identity serves his own desire at another person’s expense.

A jealous husband’s plan to hear his wife’s confession similarly uses clerical appearance as a means of access. Disguised as a priest, he listens as his wife gives him to believe that she loves a priest who visits her nightly. While he keeps watch at the door for the supposed visitor, she brings her lover in over the roof and lies with him. Here the disguise is part of a contest of concealment: the husband’s false religious role and mistaken surveillance are answered by the wife’s concealed route into the house. The story’s framing condemns jealousy without cause and presents the wife’s counter-strategy as a response to confinement.

The Returning Lover and the Revealing Sign

Tedaldo Elisei also returns under an assumed identity, though his disguise serves not seduction but intervention. After seven years away, he hears in Cyprus a song he had composed about his love and takes it as a reason to return to Florence. He sends his goods ahead from Ancona and follows secretly with one servant, dressed as a pilgrim returning from the Holy Sepulchre. At his former beloved’s closed house, he fears she may be dead or gone; at his brothers’ house, he learns that they are mourning a man mistaken for him and that Aldobrandino Palermini has been imprisoned for the supposed murder.

Tedaldo maintains his pilgrim identity when he meets the woman. He speaks with her about the friars and the wrong done to him, and she acknowledges that she had helped bring about his estrangement. She believes he is dead, so his claim that Tedaldo is alive sounds impossible. He then produces a ring she had given him on the last night of their former intimacy. The object establishes a private history that his pilgrim’s clothing had concealed. When she recognizes it, Tedaldo removes his gown and hat and speaks in the Florentine manner; she recognizes him, first with terror, then with joy. His disguise has allowed him to approach her as a trusted religious stranger, but the ring makes the concealed identity legible and turns presumed death into reunion.

Performance, Constraint, and Recognition

The stories place disguise against a social world in which identity is shaped by clothing, rank, household authority, and restricted movement. The opening defense of storytelling for women describes lovers constrained by the wishes and commands of fathers, mothers, brothers, and husbands, often confined to their chambers, while men can seek diversion outdoors. Pampinea proposes that the women leave the city during the plague; Filomena cautions that they need other guidance to keep their company from dissolving, and Elisa observes that their male relatives have largely died or fled. This framing makes concealment and mobility more than theatrical tricks: they answer conditions in which safety and action are unevenly available.

Not every threatened woman in these stories resorts to a false identity. Madam Filippa, accused after her husband finds her with Lazzerino, chooses to appear before the provost and confess rather than flee into exile or deny the truth. Madam Piccarda, resisting an unwanted rector, states directly that she will not love him as he demands. Their choices clarify the range of responses represented in the book: concealment can protect, expose, or deceive, but it is not the only form of agency. Across the tales, a disguise succeeds when others accept its visible signs; it ends when an object, a remembered gesture, a public confession, or a contradiction forces recognition. The resulting reversals reveal how fragile social certainty can be, and how sharply the value of concealment depends on the purpose it serves.