Filomena

Filomena is both a governor of the storytelling company and one of its most active narrators: she helps turn a gathering of women fleeing danger into an ordered community of stories, then uses those stories to test ideas about love, cruelty, fortune, and human ingenuity. Her position combines practical authority with a distinctive narrative voice, one capable of framing a tale as a lesson in divine justice or as a demonstration of a woman’s resourcefulness.

Identity and Place in the Company

The narrator names Filomena third among the seven women who meet at Santa Maria Novella, assigning names that correspond wholly or in part to each woman’s qualities. She is described as exceptionally discreet. That discretion becomes especially visible when Pampinea proposes that the women leave Florence and organize a life together outside the city. While the others readily commend the proposal and begin to plan their departure, Filomena urges them not to rush. She doubts that a company composed entirely of women can remain together without guidance, describing women as fickle, wilful, suspicious, faint-hearted, and timid. Her warning is voiced in the gendered assumptions of her time, but its practical concern is clear: enthusiasm alone will not supply the organization needed to preserve the group or its good reputation.

Filomena’s caution also sits within the larger conditions the work gives for women’s lives. The opening describes lovesick women as constrained by the wishes and commands of fathers, mothers, brothers, and husbands, and as spending much of their time confined to their chambers. That account makes the company’s collective movement and self-government significant: Filomena voices doubts about women’s ability to govern themselves even as the women proceed to establish a durable social order of their own.

Governance and the Second Day’s Theme

Pampinea eventually removes her laurel wreath and places it on Filomena’s head, naming her queen for the coming day. The other women and the young men greet Filomena and accept her governance. Her authority is therefore both ceremonial and practical: the transfer of the wreath publicly marks a change in leadership, and Filomena uses her position to give the next day’s storytelling a shared direction.

She proposes that the company tell of people buffeted by varied turns of fortune who finally reach a joyful outcome beyond their hopes. The theme gives the day a strong narrative pattern: reversals and adversity are not erased, but they lead toward an ending whose happiness was not assured at the outset. In this way Filomena does more than select a subject. She gives the storytellers a common structure through which otherwise different tales can explore uncertainty, endurance, and unexpected change.

Tales of Love, Loss, and Cruelty

Filomena’s introductions show how deliberately she can prepare an audience for a story. When she begins the account of Lisabetta and Lorenzo, she connects it to the preceding mention of Messina and first acknowledges her pity for the ill-fated Gerbino and his beloved. The tale then turns to a different pair: Lisabetta, an unmarried young woman, and Lorenzo, a handsome and agreeable Pisan youth who manages the affairs of her merchant brothers. Each becomes attached to the other, and their mutual desire leads them to act on it. The story became associated with a song the ladies had often heard but had never been able to identify with its occasion. Filomena’s narration thus joins a private love story to a piece of shared cultural memory.

In her story of Nastagio degli Onesti, Filomena announces a sharper moral frame. She presents pity as a virtue and cruelty as something divine justice will punish, then introduces Nastagio as a wealthy young man of Ravenna who loves the daughter of a more noble family. His efforts to win her affection do not succeed; she remains proud, disdainful, and unyielding. The contrast between his devoted courtship and her refusal supplies the opening tension for a tale whose promised subject is the punishment of cruelty. Filomena’s framing directs the audience to consider not only what happens to the lovers but also the moral claim through which the tale is offered.

Other story openings reveal her range without reducing all her material to a single lesson. She introduces a tale of two predictive dreams by distinguishing it from the preceding account: the earlier dream concerned something already past, while the dreams she is about to recount concern what is still to come. Elsewhere she begins a story in Fiesole, identifying the city as ancient and ruined but still a bishop’s seat, before focusing on the young and beautiful widow Madam Piccarda and an elderly church rector whose arrogance and desire intrude into her life. In each case, place and premise establish the terms of the coming narrative before its full action unfolds.

Stories of Deception and Ingenuity

Filomena also returns to characters and situations already present in the company’s talk. After a story involving Calandrino and his friends has just been told, she announces another tale about Calandrino, Bruno, and Buffalmacco. Her transition makes storytelling itself feel conversational: one tale calls another into being, and a familiar figure becomes the point of departure for a fresh episode.

When the company discusses jealous husbands, Filomena offers another story on that subject and begins with Lodovico, the only son of a wealthy Florentine merchant living in Paris. His father has kept him out of the warehouse and sent him instead to serve among the gentlemen of the King of France, where he learns courtly manners. Filomena’s opening establishes the social setting and Lodovico’s education as the groundwork for a tale connected to disguise and sexual deception. The available account places her among the narrators who use the company’s recurring concerns—marriage, jealousy, and concealment—to explore how people maneuver within intimate relationships.

Her story of Madam Francesca makes female ingenuity explicit from the outset. Filomena presents Francesca as courted by Rinuccio Palermini and Alessandro Chiarmontesi, while loving neither. Francesca sets each suitor a task involving a dead body and a sepulchre: one must enter as if dead, the other bring him out as if dead. Neither can fulfill the imposed condition, and the stratagem frees her from both men. Filomena introduces the episode as evidence of love’s power to bring people into mortal danger and even into the dwelling places of the dead, while also directing attention to the wit with which a woman can rid herself of unwanted suitors.

Performance and Narrative Role

Filomena’s role extends beyond governing and telling formal tales. At a gathering near the palace, after the company has walked, eaten, rested, and returned to the fountain, the queen asks her to sing. Filomena performs while the company dances to the bagpipe of Tindaro and other instruments. Her song leads the listeners to conclude that a new love has bound her, and they infer from its words that she knows love through experience, not merely by sight. Some envy her on that account. The episode does not confirm the company’s inference as fact; instead, it shows how her public performance becomes material for the group’s interpretation of her private life.

Across these scenes, Filomena repeatedly manages the boundary between experience and its telling. She cautions the women about the difficulty of self-government, accepts the laurel wreath and gives storytellers a common theme, links a tale to a remembered song, and frames other narratives through moral claims or practical wit. Her subjects range from reciprocal love and tragic loss to cruelty, dreams, jealousy, and escape from unwanted courtship. The resulting portrait is not simply that of a discreet woman who speaks when appointed. Filomena helps shape the company’s rules and expectations, while her stories invite its listeners to judge how desire, power, and ingenuity operate in the lives people recount.