Emilia

Emilia is one of the seven young women who form the storytelling company in the Decameron, and one of its most frequent narrators. Across several days she tells stories of a poor woman’s fatal encounter with poisoned sage, a woman’s dangerous love tested by Fortune, and clerical presumption exposed to ridicule. Her turn as queen gives her a further role: she sets aside the usual restriction to a single subject, making variety itself the company’s next entertainment.

Identity and Place in the Company

The narrator gives the seven women assumed names rather than disclosing their actual ones, explaining that this protects them from future shame or malicious talk about the stories they tell and hear. Emilia is the fourth name in the sequence, after Pampinea, Fiammetta, and Filomena. The women meet in Santa Maria Novella during the plague, and the company’s move away from the stricken city creates the setting in which Emilia’s tales will be heard. Her importance is not confined to one story: she speaks on the first, fourth, fifth, sixth, and eighth days, and later takes the crown from Lauretta to preside over the ninth day.

The storytelling frame presents women as especially in need of diversion. The narrator observes that women in love may be kept within the narrow limits of their chambers and have fewer opportunities than men to escape melancholy through travel, sport, or business. Emilia’s stories are part of a shared remedy: they offer episodes of desire and misfortune, but also the wit, judgment, and turns of fortune through which characters respond to constraint.

Early Stories: Hypocrisy and Fatal Chance

On the first day, Emilia follows a story praising the courage of the Marchioness of Monferrato. At the queen’s invitation she introduces an anecdote about an honest layman who shames a covetous inquisitor with a chance pleasantry. The inquisitor, though outwardly concerned with religious orthodoxy, is described as attentive to the size of a suspect’s purse; he pursues a wealthy man who had casually boasted that his wine was good enough for Christ. Emilia’s announced emphasis joins comic speech to criticism of religious authority: the story’s target is not merely an individual’s overzealous prosecution, but the gap between a show of devotion and a pursuit of money.

On the fourth day, Emilia returns to Florence with the story of Simona and Pasquino. She explicitly connects it to the preceding account of Andrevuola: both women lose their lovers in a garden and are taken into custody, but their outcomes differ. Simona is a poor young woman who earns her living spinning wool. Pasquino, who supplies wool for his master, falls in love with her; their mutual desire grows until they arrange to meet in a garden, each accompanied by a friend. There, as the lovers sit by a large sage bush and talk of a meal they hope to share, Pasquino rubs a sage leaf against his teeth and gums. He soon loses his speech and sight and dies. Stramba, Pasquino’s companion, accuses Simona of poisoning him. She is taken before a judge, who cannot find evidence that she acted maliciously and goes to examine the body and the place where Pasquino died. The story’s title supplies its grim reversal: Simona uses a leaf from the same bush to demonstrate what happened and dies in the same way. Emilia’s framing makes love’s power cross social rank, while the paired deaths turn an apparently ordinary garden plant into the agent of an unforeseen catastrophe.

Love, Wit, and Clerical Presumption

On the fifth day, Emilia tells of Costanza and Martuccio Gomito, lovers from Lipari. Martuccio asks to marry Costanza, but her father refuses because Martuccio is poor. Martuccio responds by leaving the island with companions, vowing not to return until rich, and turning to piracy off the Barbary coast. Fortune initially favors him, but his desire for still greater wealth brings disaster: Saracen ships defeat his company, take him to Tunis, and imprison him. Emilia introduces the tale with the judgment that love deserves happiness rather than affliction in the end. Its title gives the eventual counterturn: Costanza, believing Martuccio dead, sets out alone in a boat in despair; the wind carries her to Susa, where she later discovers him alive at Tunis. His counsel has won him the king’s favor, and the lovers marry and return wealthy to Lipari. The movement from a father’s refusal on grounds of poverty to the couple’s reunion and prosperity makes Fortune both the cause of separation and the means of reversal.

On the sixth day, Emilia changes from love and catastrophe to a brief comedy of self-regard. Her story concerns Ciesca, a niece who considers herself superior while finding everyone she sees disagreeable. Returning home early from a holiday because the people in the streets have displeased her, Ciesca complains to her uncle Fresco da Celatico. Fresco answers that, if disagreeable people are so offensive to her, she should never look in a mirror. The retort turns Ciesca’s judgment back upon herself, but she fails to understand it and remains unchanged. Emilia presents the joke as a correction that would have worked had Ciesca been capable of receiving it; its final irony is that the lesson is spoken clearly and still goes unheard.

On the eighth day, Emilia introduces another story about women subjected to clerical importunity. Near the cathedral in Fiesole, Madam Piccarda, a young noble widow, lives with her two courteous brothers. The church rector, an old man who is foolish, presumptuous, and disliked, attempts to win her love. Piccarda refuses him, invoking his position as her spiritual father, his priesthood and age, and her own status as a widow. The story’s heading describes the further humiliation that follows: the rector, seeking Piccarda, ends up with her serving-wench, and her brothers arrange for the bishop to discover him. Emilia’s framing and the episode’s reversal make clerical authority no guarantee of restraint; the woman who rejects the rector is presented as discerning, while his presumption brings exposure.

Queenship and Narrative Significance

After Dioneo finishes his story on the ninth day, Lauretta passes the laurel crown to Emilia. Emilia blushes at Lauretta’s public compliment on her beauty, then takes charge of the company’s arrangements for its common entertainment. Rather than prescribe another subject, she compares the storytellers to oxen released from the yoke after labor. The company, she says, has spent many days under the restraint of a fixed rule; a period of wandering freely will restore its strength. She therefore allows each person to tell whatever pleases them, trusting variety to entertain as well as a single theme. The decision changes the structure of the next day’s storytelling, not just its subject matter: the company’s rule is deliberately relaxed, and Emilia leaves any renewed restriction to whoever governs after her.

Her stories likewise range widely, but repeatedly test the distance between appearances and reality. A pious official may be covetous; a seemingly harmless leaf may kill; a clever rebuke may fail when its hearer cannot recognize herself in it; a priest who claims spiritual standing may behave presumptuously. Alongside these exposures, the Costanza story gives love a route through separation and changed fortune. Emilia’s narrative role is thus both comic and serious: she places sudden reversals beside moral judgment, while her brief reign turns that variety into a principle for the company’s own storytelling.