Nastagio Witnesses the Punishment of the Cursed Woman is the turning point in Nastagio degli Onesti’s courtship: an encounter with a recurring supernatural punishment becomes a spectacle he deliberately stages to frighten the woman who has rejected him into marriage. In Filostrato’s tale, the scene converts a private romance into a public lesson, and ends with the women of Ravenna said to be more responsive to men’s desires thereafter.

From unreturned love to the pinewood

Nastagio has spent heavily and persistently pursuing a woman of the Traversari family, while his hope of winning her remains poor. His friends and relatives, concerned that he may exhaust both himself and his fortune, urge him to leave Ravenna. He eventually agrees, but rather than journey to France, Spain, or another distant country, he settles at Chiassi, about three miles from Ravenna. There he continues his lavish way of life, hosting different groups of friends for dinners and suppers.

As May approaches, Nastagio enters a pinewood alone, absorbed in thoughts of the woman who has treated him cruelly. The hour is late in the day, and he has walked about half a mile without thinking of food or anything else when a woman’s cries interrupt his reverie. He sees a naked, dishevelled woman running through the undergrowth, torn by briars, with two Mastiffs biting at her and a mounted knight in dark armour pursuing her with a sword. Nastagio has no weapon; he takes a branch as a club and moves to defend her.

The knight explains the repeated punishment

The knight calls Nastagio by name and warns him not to interfere. He identifies himself as Guido degli Anastagi, once a fellow citizen of Nastagio, and explains that he had loved this woman more passionately than Nastagio loves the Traversari woman. Driven to despair by her hardness, Guido killed himself with the sword he now carries. The woman later died, having rejoiced at his death and, according to Guido, neither repented nor believed her cruelty sinful. The knight says that both were condemned: she must flee, and he must pursue and kill her as an enemy rather than love her as a mistress.

Guido describes a punishment that repeats rather than concludes. Whenever he catches the woman, he runs her through, opens her body, removes her heart and entrails, and feeds them to the Mastiffs. She then rises as if nothing had happened and begins the flight again. The encounter in the pinewood occurs every Friday at that hour, Guido says, though he hunts her elsewhere on other days. The years of her punishment are proportioned to the months in which she was cruel to him. His account changes Nastagio’s role: instead of an armed rescuer, he becomes a frightened witness to a violence presented as divine justice.

Nastagio watches as Guido overtakes the woman, pierces her, cuts open her body, and gives what he removes to the dogs. Before long she rises and flees again toward the sea, pursued by the knight and the Mastiffs, until they disappear from sight. Nastagio remains caught between pity and fear. Then he recognizes that the spectacle recurs on a schedule and considers how it might serve his courtship.

A banquet turns witnessing into spectacle

Nastagio asks his friends and relatives to invite the Traversari woman, her parents, and other women to dine with him the following Friday. He does not tell the guests what they are to see. Instead, he arranges a magnificent banquet beneath the pines, at the very place where he witnessed the punishment, and seats the woman he loves directly opposite it.

As the last course arrives, the woman’s cries are heard. The guests rise, and the woman, Guido, and the Mastiffs appear before them. Some rush forward to help, but Guido’s explanation and the terrifying scene make them draw back. He carries out the same punishment again while the assembled company watches. Women who were related to both the dead woman and the knight remember their history and weep as though the violence were being done to them.

The banquet thus repeats the earlier encounter but changes its audience and purpose. What Nastagio first saw alone in the wood becomes a public event arranged for the woman he wants to persuade. The supernatural recurrence supplies the spectacle; his careful choice of place, timing, guests, and seating turns it into a calculated intervention.

Fear, consent, and the ending

The Traversari woman understands the punishment as personally relevant. Having seen and heard everything, she remembers her own cruelty toward Nastagio and imagines herself already fleeing before an enraged lover with the Mastiffs at her heels. That same evening, she sends a trusted chamberwoman to tell him she is ready to do what he wishes. Nastagio agrees, but asks to have his desire fulfilled honourably by taking her as his wife. She accepts, tells her parents she is willing, and the couple marry the following Sunday. They live together happily for a long time.

The tale presents the marriage as the immediate result of fear, not as a change brought about by an expressed discovery of mutual affection. Nastagio’s condition that the union be honourable redirects the outcome toward marriage, but the scene that obtains her agreement is one of terror and bodily punishment. The final consequence broadens beyond the couple: the narrator says that the women of Ravenna, frightened by what they have seen, become more amenable to men’s desires than they had been before.

Narrative role and significance

Filostrato introduces the episode as a short love story whose impediments are no worse than sighs and a brief fright, and whose ending is happy. That light framing stands beside the graphic spectacle at the story’s centre. The contrast makes the change in the woman’s response structurally decisive: a romance stalled by rejection advances through an apparition that turns private fear into public warning.

The episode also depends on repetition. Guido’s account explains the pattern; Nastagio’s first sight verifies it; the banquet reproduces it before the intended audience. The repeated punishment is both the supernatural mechanism of the story and the instrument of Nastagio’s plan. Its ending preserves that troubling double meaning: the wedding is described as happy, while the broader social effect is women’s increased compliance after witnessing a woman’s suffering.