Gualtieri’s trial of Griselda’s patience is a sequence of calculated deceptions in which a husband turns his authority over his wife, children, and household into an ordeal of obedience. He tells Griselda that his people resent her humble birth and the children born to her, then makes her believe that their daughter and son have been killed and that he will put her away. Griselda endures each apparent loss without open resistance. The final reversal reveals that the children survived and that the supposed new bride is their daughter; the reunion restores the family, but the story also presents Gualtieri’s methods as excessively harsh.

Background and First Test

By the time the ordeal begins, Griselda has already astonished the people around her. Though born to Giannucolo, a poor man who tended sheep, she has become gracious, diligent, and beloved as Gualtieri’s wife. Her conduct has reversed the judgment that he acted foolishly by marrying beneath his rank: people now recognize her worth, which her rustic clothing had concealed. After she gives birth to a daughter, Gualtieri decides to test her patience through prolonged tribulation.

He first tells Griselda that his vassals are discontented with her low extraction, especially now that she has borne children who might inherit his position. She replies without changing countenance, acknowledging that she had been unworthy of the dignity he bestowed and leaving him to act as he thinks best for his honor and comfort. Gualtieri is pleased that she shows no pride in her elevation. Soon afterward, he claims more specifically that his people cannot tolerate the newborn girl. He sends a servant who has been coached to imply that the child is to be put to death.

Griselda understands the servant’s unfinished message as an order to kill her daughter. Though she feels anguish, she takes the baby from the cradle, kisses and blesses her, and hands her over. She asks only that the child not be left to beasts and birds unless Gualtieri has ordered that too. The servant reports her response to Gualtieri, who marvels at her constancy. Instead of killing the girl, he sends her to be raised secretly by a kinswoman in Bologna, without disclosing whose child she is.

The Second Child and Public Repudiation

Griselda later gives birth to a son. Gualtieri again claims that his vassals object: they supposedly cannot bear the thought that a grandson of Giannucolo might become their lord. He tells her that he may have to put her away and take another wife rather than risk being driven from his domains. Griselda says that he should satisfy his own wishes and have no concern for her, since nothing matters to her except his pleasure.

Gualtieri repeats the earlier deception, sending for the boy and making it appear that the child will be killed. Griselda responds as she did when the daughter was taken. Gualtieri marvels, recognizing that her submission does not come from indifference: he has seen how fondly she treats the children when permitted. The people, who believe the children dead, condemn him as barbarous and pity Griselda. When women express sympathy, she answers that what pleases the children’s father pleases her too.

Several years after the daughter’s birth, Gualtieri makes his supreme test. Before his people, he declares that he can no longer bear to have Griselda as his wife and says that he acted foolishly in marrying her. He claims that he will seek a papal dispensation to put her away and marry again. Some men of standing rebuke him, but he gives them no explanation. Griselda imagines returning to her father’s house and perhaps to tending sheep, while another woman takes her place beside the man whose happiness she still desires. She grieves inwardly but prepares to bear this apparent reversal as she bore the earlier ones.

Gualtieri then produces counterfeit letters from Rome, claiming that the Pope has permitted him to dismiss her. In front of witnesses, he tells her that her family’s humble standing is unsuitable beside his ancestors’ nobility and orders her back to Giannucolo. Griselda accepts the return of the status she had always regarded as a loan. She gives Gualtieri the ring with which he married her and points out that she needs neither paymaster nor packhorse to carry away the dowry she brought, since he received her naked. She asks only for a shift, as she cannot take back the maidenhood she brought into the marriage.

The Shift and the Staged Wedding

Gualtieri allows her one shift, refusing the pleas of those present to give her a gown. After more than thirteen years as his wife, Griselda leaves barefoot, bareheaded, and dressed only in that garment. Those who see her depart weep and lament. Giannucolo, who had never believed that his daughter’s marriage to Gualtieri could last, has kept the clothes she set aside on her wedding morning. Griselda puts them on and resumes the small duties of her father’s household, enduring what she takes to be the return of hostile fortune with a steadfast heart.

Gualtieri next announces that he has chosen a daughter of the Counts of Panago as his new bride and prepares a wedding feast. He summons Griselda back, not as a wife, but to arrange the rooms, prepare the food, and receive the guests, saying that she is more practiced than anyone in the household at such work. Although his request wounds her, she agrees. In her coarse homespun clothes, she sweeps and orders the chambers, arranges hangings and coverings, prepares the feast, and invites the local ladies. On the day of the celebration she welcomes the guests with a cheerful expression and the bearing of a high-born woman, despite the mean clothing she wears.

The apparent bride arrives from Bologna with her six-year-old brother and a company of gentlefolk. The girl is now twelve and is described as extraordinarily beautiful. Gualtieri has arranged for his kinsman to present her as the bride without revealing her identity. Griselda welcomes the young woman and praises both her and the boy. The guests admire the supposed bride and think Gualtieri has made a good exchange, while Griselda continues to behave generously toward the children whose supposed deaths she has mourned.

Revelation and Judgment

Seeing that neither the apparent new marriage nor the humiliations have altered Griselda’s conduct, Gualtieri decides that the test has gone far enough. He knows her submission is not mere lack of understanding: he considers her quick-witted. In front of everyone, he asks what she thinks of the bride. Griselda praises the girl’s beauty and hopes that she is as discreet as she is beautiful, then asks Gualtieri not to inflict on her the suffering he imposed on his former wife. She reasons that the girl, being younger and delicately raised, could scarcely endure what Griselda herself endured from childhood hardship.

Gualtieri then reveals that the young woman is Griselda’s daughter and the boy her son. He says that he had both children raised in Bologna, and that the trials were intended to test her and to secure the peace he feared he might not have in marriage. He embraces and kisses Griselda, who weeps with joy; the daughter is initially stunned. The women take Griselda to a chamber, remove her poor clothes, and dress her magnificently in her own garments. She rejoices with her children, and the company celebrates for several days. Gualtieri also raises Giannucolo from his labor into a position befitting his status as the marquis’s father-in-law.

The ending does not leave the cruelty of the ordeal wholly unexamined. The people celebrate the family’s restored happiness and judge Griselda supremely wise, while still considering Gualtieri’s tests excessively harsh, even intolerable. The narrator likewise praises the extraordinary endurance Gualtieri demanded but closes with a pointed counterfactual: he might have deserved a wife who answered his treatment by making him regret it. The reunion therefore resolves the deception without making the suffering disappear; Griselda’s patience is celebrated, while the conduct that tested it remains open to censure.