Neifile

Neifile is one of the seven young women who gather at Santa Maria Novella during the plague and help establish the Decameron’s storytelling company. Named sixth among them, she becomes one of its most frequent narrators: across the first, second, and fifth through tenth days, she tells stories that move between religious satire, romantic tragedy, comic deception, and the reversals of fortune. Her introductions do more than announce a plot. They guide listeners toward a moral interpretation, even when the story that follows unsettles the very terms of its lesson.

Identity and Place in the Company

The frame narrator presents Neifile as one of seven women who meet by chance in a corner of Santa Maria Novella on a Tuesday morning. They are linked by friendship, neighborhood, or kinship, and have attended divine service in mourning clothes. All are between eighteen and twenty-eight, and the narrator describes them collectively as discreet, noble-born, fair, well-mannered, and lively in an honest way. Rather than disclose their actual names, the narrator gives them names suited to their qualities, partly to protect their reputations from future gossip about the stories they tell and hear. Neifile is the sixth in this adopted order.

She enters the frame not as a solitary protagonist but as a participant in a company whose shared life alternates between conversation, recreation, and narration. Her prominence comes through repeated turns at storytelling and through the way she frames other people’s experiences for the listeners. She can move from an argument about divine providence to a domestic trick, a tragic love, or an absurd lie, adjusting her interpretive language to each tale rather than remaining confined to one subject.

Early Stories: Providence, Fortune, and Love

On the first day, after Pamfilo’s story of Ser Ciappelletto, the queen asks Neifile to continue the storytelling. Neifile takes up Pamfilo’s claim that divine goodness regards human errors when they arise from ignorance, then extends the point: the corruption of people especially obliged to bear witness to faith can itself become evidence of divine goodness. Her tale concerns Abraham, who visits Rome at Jehannot de Chevigné’s urging. There he sees churchmen consumed by lust, greed, gluttony, and the buying and selling of sacred offices and goods. Disappointed by their conduct, Abraham returns to Paris; yet he concludes that Christianity’s continued growth despite its leaders’ efforts to undermine it shows that the Holy Spirit must support the faith. He asks to be baptized, and Jehannot has him baptized at the Church of Our Lady of Paris, where he is named Giovanni. Neifile’s framing makes the tale’s reversal pointed: the churchmen’s example should repel a prospective convert, but their failure instead confirms his belief in the religion they discredit.

On the second day, under Filomena’s rule, Neifile begins the day’s stories at the queen’s request. The available account establishes her place as the first narrator of a day devoted to people who, after being buffeted by varied misfortunes, reach a joyful outcome beyond their hopes. This turn situates her within the company’s recurring movement from trouble toward resolution, even though the surviving evidence here does not detail the particular events of her tale.

Her fourth-day story turns from providential irony to the destructive consequences of trying to govern love by calculation. At the king’s command, Neifile introduces the story of Girolamo and Salvestra by warning against those who presume their judgment can oppose human nature. Love, she argues, is among the natural forces least amenable to contrary counsel; it may consume itself, but advice cannot simply erase it. In the story, Girolamo’s mother and guardians send him away to Paris in the hope that distance will end his attachment to Salvestra, his childhood neighbor. Neifile describes their intervention as an attempt to uproot a love that had taken hold in his heart, and presents its consequence as the loss of both love and life. Her moral emphasis makes the imposed separation, rather than romantic feeling itself, the source of the tragedy.

Comic Reversals and Social Deception

On the fifth day, after the company’s laughter at the preceding story, Neifile turns to Romagna. She tells of Agnesa, the daughter Guidotto da Cremona entrusts to Giacomino da Pavia before his death. Raised by Giacomino as his own child, Agnesa becomes beautiful, virtuous, and well-bred, and two young men, Giannole di Severino and Minghino di Mingole, fall in love with her. Their rivalry threatens to become a violent contest. The decisive reversal comes when Agnesa is recognized as the daughter of Bernabuccio, and therefore Giannole’s sister. The town-captain releases those imprisoned over the conflict; Bernabuccio and Giacomino are reconciled, and Agnesa marries Minghino with the consent of their families. The ending turns a contest over a young woman into a recovered family identity and a peaceful marriage.

For the sixth day, Neifile introduces a comedy of quick speech and luck. She observes that ready wit can produce apt answers, but fortune can also place an unplanned reply in a frightened speaker’s mouth. Her example is Chichibio, cook to Currado Gianfigliazzi. Currado sends him a fat crane to roast for supper. A woman for whom Chichibio is enamored asks for a thigh; after resisting, he gives her one rather than anger her. When Currado notices the missing leg, Chichibio insists that cranes have only one. Currado demands proof the next morning and threatens punishment if the claim proves false. Neifile’s announced point is that a reply arising under pressure can turn anger into laughter and save its speaker from the threatened penalty. The missing thigh, first evidence of Chichibio’s theft, becomes the setup for a verbal escape.

On the seventh day, she tells of Madam Sismonda and her jealous husband, Arriguccio Berlinghieri. Sismonda, whose husband is often away on business, loves Ruberto, a man who has long courted her. Arriguccio’s suspicion leads him to keep watch over her and to wait until he feels her enter their bed before falling asleep. To signal Ruberto’s arrival without alerting her husband, Sismonda hangs a thread from her bedroom window and draws it across the floor to her bed, where she fastens it to her great toe. The story’s frame describes the resulting substitution: when Arriguccio pursues the lover, another woman is put into the bed and suffers his beating and the cutting of her hair; Sismonda’s brothers then reject his account. Neifile’s telling places ingenuity inside a coercive household surveillance scheme, while the apparent evidence of the husband’s discovery gives way to a reversal that leaves his accusation discredited.

Later Tales and Neifile’s Narrative Voice

Neifile opens the eighth day’s storytelling with a tale of Gulfardo, a German serving the state at Milan, and Madam Ambruogia, the wife of his friend Guasparruolo Cagastraccio. She frames the episode as a man’s trick upon a woman, but calls it more precisely a just requital. Her stated distinction turns on consent and motive: she condemns surrendering chastity for payment, while allowing that yielding for love deserves a more forgiving judgment. Gulfardo has fallen discreetly in love with Madam Ambruogia, and his friendship with her husband makes the situation especially pointed. The story’s stated outcome is an exposure carried out in the husband’s presence: Gulfardo gives the money to the wife, then tells Guasparruolo that he has paid her, and she confirms his account. Neifile’s moral preface is therefore not a neutral rule but a lens that distinguishes deception by its circumstances and the woman’s bargain.

On the ninth day, Neifile contrasts folly with knavery. After the company laughs at Calandrino for revealing his wife’s private diversions while trying to cure an imagined ailment, she proposes a contrary example: one man’s deceit overcoming another’s wit. Her story concerns Cecco Fortarrigo and Cecco Angiolieri, two men made companions partly by their shared resentment of their fathers. Angiolieri, handsome and well-mannered, hopes to improve his prospects by entering the service of a cardinal in the Marches of Ancona. He agrees, reluctantly, to take Fortarrigo along after Fortarrigo promises to give up gambling and drink. At Buonconvento, Angiolieri sleeps after dinner; Fortarrigo goes to gamble, loses his money and clothes, then takes Angiolieri’s money from his purse and loses that as well. The tale’s announced course carries the deception further: Fortarrigo uses the accusation of robbery to have Angiolieri seized by country folk, then escapes in Angiolieri’s clothes and on his horse, leaving his companion in his shirt. Neifile sets this episode against Calandrino’s self-exposure: one man’s folly gives away private information, while another man’s calculated knavery converts a companion’s trust into a means of escape.

On the tenth and last day, governed by Pamfilo, Neifile is again the first storyteller. She introduces magnificence as a virtue that gives light and luster to the others, then tells of Messer Ruggieri de' Figiovanni, a wealthy and high-spirited Tuscan who seeks service with Alfonso, King of Spain. The story’s title presents the central reversal: Ruggieri thinks himself poorly rewarded, but the king uses a definite test to show that the failure is not his fault but the work of perverse fortune, and afterward rewards him magnificently. Neifile thus closes her sequence of tales with a distinction between personal merit and the outcomes fortune permits, followed by a ruler’s deliberate act of generosity.

Her role also includes answering the company’s teasing rather than only supplying its stories. When Filostrato jokes about wolves and ewes and invokes Masetto of Lamporecchio, Neifile replies that in trying to teach women, he might instead learn sense, as Masetto learned among the nuns. The jest turns Filostrato’s metaphor back on him and momentarily checks his banter. Across her stories, she likewise uses interpretation to direct attention toward reversals: corrupt clergy inadvertently strengthen belief, imposed separation destroys lovers, a missing crane’s leg becomes a comic test, and apparent mastery through jealousy or deceit can collapse into exposure or escape. Neifile’s narrative identity rests on this combination of moral framing and comic or tragic contradiction: she gives each episode a clear interpretive angle while letting its consequences complicate the lesson.