Marital infidelity

Marital infidelity in the Decameron is not presented as a single moral or legal problem: it can provoke prosecution, become the occasion for comic deception, or expose how jealousy and confinement distort married life. The stories repeatedly place women’s constrained domestic circumstances beside their resourcefulness, while contrasting secret affairs with relationships that are eventually recognized as marriages.

Gender, Marriage, and the Storytelling Frame

The work’s defense of storytelling for women gives this subject a social frame. Women in love, the narrator argues, may be confined to their chambers by the wishes and commands of fathers, mothers, brothers, and husbands, with fewer means than men to escape melancholy through movement, work, or diversion. Men, by contrast, can go abroad to hunt, fish, ride, trade, or otherwise distract themselves. The stories offer women readers a form of consolation and a way to consider the varied accidents of love and fortune.

The frame also registers doubts about women’s capacity to govern themselves. During the company’s departure from plague-stricken Florence, Filomena warns that a gathering of women may come apart without men to guide it, and Elisa agrees that women’s enterprises seldom succeed without male direction. The tales of infidelity complicate that assumption. In the Seventh Day of the Decameron, the stories are expressly devoted to tricks women play on husbands, for love or self-preservation, whether the husbands know of them or not. Their plots repeatedly make the supposedly disorderly household a place of observation, planning, and quick judgment.

Adultery, Exposure, and Law

Madam Filippa’s case makes the danger of adultery explicit. In Prato, a statute prescribed burning both for a wife caught with a lover and for a woman who sold sexual favors. Her husband, Rinaldo de' Pugliesi, discovers her with Lazzerino de' Guazzagliotri, becomes furious, and then turns to the law to secure the death he had refrained from inflicting himself. Though friends and relatives urge her to deny the charge, Madam Filippa appears before the provost and chooses to acknowledge the truth rather than flee into exile. Her story’s stated outcome is that a prompt, pleasing answer saves her and brings about a change in the statute. The episode thus makes a wife’s sexual conduct a public legal matter, while presenting her speech as a means of resisting the punishment sought by her husband.

Other tales make exposure a threat to be managed inside the household. Peronella, a poor woman whose husband earns a living as a mason, has arranged to meet a lover after her husband leaves for work. When he unexpectedly returns, she claims that she has sold their vat to the man concealed inside it. The lover emerges as if to inspect his purchase, then gets the husband to scrape the vat clean and carry it to his house. The deception turns a practical household object into cover for the affair and converts the husband’s return from discovery into unwitting assistance.

In another story, a jealous husband disguises himself as a priest and hears his wife’s false confession that a priest visits her at night. He keeps watch at the door for the imagined clerical lover, while his wife brings her actual lover into the house over the roof. When she later assures her husband that she could deceive him even if he had a hundred eyes, he accepts her as virtuous and abandons his suspicion. The result is not simply a successful concealment: the husband’s jealousy is made to serve the deception, and his confidence in his wife gives her greater freedom.

Improvisation Against Jealousy and Discovery

The Seventh Day also includes Madam Isabella, who is with her lover Leonetto when Messer Lambertuccio, who desires her, arrives. When her husband unexpectedly returns, she sends Lambertuccio away with a knife in his hand; the husband then escorts Leonetto home. The situation turns on managing successive men who might expose or endanger the affair, rather than on a single planned alibi. The husband’s involvement in getting Leonetto safely away underscores how readily appearances can be manipulated within the household.

Lydia’s affair with Pyrrhus pushes deception into the husband’s presence. Nicostratus sets Pyrrhus three tests of Lydia’s devotion, and she performs all three. She then takes her pleasure with Pyrrhus while Nicostratus is present and persuades him that what he has seen is not real. The episode makes the husband’s perception itself the object of the trick: the lovers do not merely evade his watch but induce him to disbelieve the evidence before him. Pamfilo introduces the story with a caution that passionate love may embolden people to attempt what reason would not advise, emphasizing the role of fortune in Lydia’s success.

Fra Rinaldo’s affair with Madam Agnesa likewise exploits a socially legitimate connection. He has become godfather to her child, a position that gives him a pretext to speak with her and pursue his desire. When her husband finds the two closeted together in her chamber, they make him believe that Fra Rinaldo is exorcising worms from his godson. A religious and familial role supplies the cover for sexual intimacy, turning the appearance of spiritual service into a means of evading discovery.

Secret Love and the Boundaries of Marriage

The tales also distinguish adultery from love that is secret for other reasons. Andrevuola and Gabriotto meet in her father’s garden and secretly become husband and wife, despite the difference in their social standing. Their meetings are concealed from her family, but the narration identifies them as spouses; secrecy alone does not make their relationship adulterous. In the story of Ricciardo and Caterina, the young lovers are discovered together, and Caterina’s father requires Ricciardo to take her as his lawful wife. He agrees, and the couple later celebrate a public wedding. The discovery therefore resolves their clandestine courtship through marriage rather than exposing an existing wife’s affair.

Other marriages reveal how consent and social authority complicate the category further. Gillette de Narbonne cures the king and asks for Bertrand de Roussillon as her husband; the king commands Bertrand to marry her, though Bertrand objects to her social rank. In the story of Teodoro and Violante, the discovery of Teodoro’s parentage leads the two families to agree to their marriage, which both young people desire. These cases do not portray adultery, but they show that the stories distinguish private desire, family arrangement, public recognition, and marital status rather than treating them as interchangeable.

Across these plots, infidelity is both a sexual relationship and a contest over who controls its meaning. A husband may invoke law, watchfulness, or authority; a wife may answer with concealment, an improvised explanation, or a performance that makes the evidence seem unreal. The stories’ comedy depends on reversals in knowledge and power, but their stakes include punishment, reputation, and the terms on which women can act within marriage.