Lent

Lent is presented in the Decameron not through an account of its observance but through the way its place in the religious calendar can be invoked, manipulated, and mocked. In the story of Ricciardo di Chinzica and Bartolomea, the judge folds Lent into a seemingly exhaustive schedule of abstinence to avoid sexual relations with his young wife. After Bartolomea is taken by Paganino da Mare, she turns that same calendar against her husband: with Paganino, she says, even Lent does not interrupt their nights together. The season thus becomes a pointed contrast between rules used to deny her desire and the life she chooses for herself.

Lent in the judge’s calendar

Ricciardo di Chinzica is a wealthy judge in Pisa, but the narrator describes him as much more gifted in legal wit than in bodily strength. He had sought a beautiful young wife and married Bartolomea, one of the fairest young women in the city. After their wedding, he taught her a calendar that made abstinence seem nearly continuous. He represented the days of the year as sacred to one or more saints, and added fast days, Ember Days, the vigils of Apostles and other saints, Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, phases of the moon, and Lent. The list was so extensive that, by his account, the couple should abstain on almost every occasion.

The narrator links this fabricated regimen to Ricciardo’s weakness and to his preference for legal study over conjugal life. The calendar gives his refusal the appearance of religious diligence: instead of admitting that he cannot or will not satisfy Bartolomea, he presents marital intimacy as something barred by a succession of holy days. Lent is therefore one item in a larger contrivance, not the subject of a separate discussion of religious practice. Its force in the tale comes from its familiarity as a recognized period of abstinence and from its place in Ricciardo’s accumulating excuses.

The story makes the scheme especially comic by comparing the judge’s treatment of his wife with the treatment of agricultural work. Ricciardo, the narrator observes, would never have expected the farmers who tilled his land to keep as many holidays as he allowed the man who had the use of Bartolomea. The comparison exposes the self-serving nature of his calendar: he demands restraint from his wife while expecting productive labor from his tenants. His religious schedule is less a consistent rule than a domestic restriction imposed on someone with little power to contest it.

Bartolomea turns the calendar against him

Ricciardo’s system governs Bartolomea’s life until a sea outing changes her circumstances. At a country estate near Monte Nero, the couple go fishing in separate boats. The boats drift offshore, and Paganino da Mare, a corsair, overtakes the one carrying the women and takes Bartolomea aboard. Ricciardo sees her being carried away but cannot prevent it. Paganino, who has no wife, decides to keep her and treats her honourably as his wife at Monaco.

When Ricciardo eventually finds her, he asks her to return to Pisa. Bartolomea does not deny knowing him or that he is her husband. Instead, she explains why she will not come back: during their marriage, his scrupulous attention to saints’ days, fasts, and calendar exceptions left her with little of the intimacy she wanted. In Paganino’s household, she says, Friday, Saturday, vigils, Ember Days, and Lent do not interrupt their nights together. The point is not that she has forgotten what Lent signifies; it is that the observance that structured her former deprivation has no power over the life she now prefers.

Her reply also reverses Ricciardo’s claim to be protecting her honour. He argues that she should return to Pisa as his wife rather than remain with Paganino, and warns that Paganino may eventually cast her off. Bartolomea counters that she felt like Ricciardo’s whore in Pisa, while she considers herself Paganino’s wife in Monaco. She also rejects the idea that her relatives’ reputation should outweigh her own judgment, recalling that they showed little concern for her when they arranged her marriage. The calendar enters this confrontation as evidence of the difference between the two relationships: in one, observances repeatedly served as barriers; in the other, she describes uninterrupted sexual companionship.

Sacred time and the storytelling calendar

A separate episode in the Decameron places religious observances within a collective schedule rather than a marital dispute. When Neifile becomes queen of the storytelling company, she proposes that the group refrain from telling stories on Friday and Saturday. She associates Friday with reverence for the day of Christ’s Passion and Saturday with customary practices of washing, fasting, and rest in preparation for Sunday. A note to the text clarifies that Friday was a fast day and Saturday a day of simple food. Neifile’s decision is thus connected to the weekly religious calendar; her stated reasons do not identify Lent as the cause of this particular pause.

That distinction matters. Ricciardo invokes Lent as one component of his personal catalogue of excuses, while Neifile’s plan concerns the company’s shared observance of particular weekdays. The episodes place private and communal time side by side without treating them as identical. In Ricciardo’s household, the calendar is used to restrict a wife’s access to intimacy. In the company, religiously marked days shape when storytelling will resume and when the group will move elsewhere. Lent belongs to the first episode’s explicit list; the Friday-and-Saturday rule supplies a broader context for the book’s attention to religious time, not another direct mention of Lent.

Narrative significance

The tale’s treatment of Lent depends on contrast rather than exposition. Ricciardo turns sacred dates into obstacles and presents his abstinence as orderly and pious; Bartolomea uses the same vocabulary to make his failure as a husband unmistakable. Her answer converts a calendar of prohibitions into a measure of what she lacked and what she now chooses. Because Lent appears amid a crowded list of exceptions, its particular observance is not explained in detail. Instead, the list’s comic excess makes the husband’s strategy visible, while Bartolomea’s refusal gives the final force to her own account of married life.

Lent’s brief appearance consequently links religious custom to questions of authority and desire without making the season itself the target of the joke. The sharper target is Ricciardo’s use of a sacred calendar to impose a one-sided arrangement. Bartolomea’s response exposes the gap between the language of observance and the lived terms of their marriage, and her decision to remain away ensures that this reversal has a concrete outcome.