Pampinea

Pampinea is the eldest of the seven women who meet in Santa Maria Novella during the plague and the first queen of the company that leaves Florence. She gives the group its decisive first direction: survival is a natural right, but escape from danger should lead not to disorder but to a shared life of recreation, mutual care, and storytelling. As a leader and storyteller, she repeatedly turns that principle into practice, balancing the company’s need for pleasure with attention to its safety, dignity, and emotional needs.

Identity and Place in the Company

The narrator introduces Pampinea as the eldest of the seven young women, all between eighteen and twenty-eight, who gather in mourning clothes at Santa Maria Novella. They are connected by friendship, neighborhood, or kinship; all are described as discreet, noble-born, fair, well-mannered, and lively. Their personal names are withheld to protect their reputations from future censure, and the narrator instead gives them names chosen to suit their qualities. Pampinea is the first named and the most senior among them.

She is not simply the first speaker in a chance gathering. She recognizes that the women’s circumstances call for a decision, and she makes the case for acting before fear and grief have reduced them to passive witnesses of disaster. Her initiative establishes a pattern that recurs throughout the company’s life: she identifies what the moment requires, proposes a workable response, and gives others room to improve or carry it forward. When Filomena raises the need for guidance and Elisa points out the difficulty of inviting men without risking scandal, Pampinea’s proposal remains the basis for the solution: the women do not abandon one another, but organize a company that can travel and live honorably.

The Proposal to Leave Florence

Pampinea describes the city not as a safe refuge but as a place where the women encounter death wherever they turn. In the church, they hear of the dead and dying; outside, public order has weakened, and men who once faced punishment roam freely and mock the suffering of others. At home, the loss or flight of household members leaves women alone with fear. Her account of this vulnerability is concrete: the familiar household has been emptied until a woman may find only her maid there, while the dead seem to haunt the rooms in frightening forms.

Against that experience, Pampinea presents self-preservation as a natural right. If people may defend their lives even at great cost, she argues, they may surely take harmless measures to protect them. Her appeal gives departure a moral as well as practical justification: leaving is not an abandonment of duty, because their relatives have already been lost or have fled, and remaining may expose the women to sorrow, danger, or death. She proposes taking their maids and necessary provisions, lodging in different places from day to day, and making what diversion the season allows until they can learn what outcome Heaven has reserved for the crisis. The plan is temporary and conditional, but it gives the women something to do besides wait among the signs of catastrophe.

Pampinea’s proposal also sets pleasure beside necessity without pretending that pleasure cancels grief. The group is to seek recreation while remaining attentive to the conditions around them. Her argument anticipates the book’s larger premise: stories and sociable pleasures can relieve distress, but they do so within a world still governed by loss and uncertainty.

The First Queen and the Company’s Order

When the women have agreed to follow her plan, Pampinea becomes the company’s first ruler. After Dioneo urges them to set aside their cares and make merry, she accepts the importance of joy but insists that it needs an order if it is to last. She proposes that one member at a time should bear both the honor and the responsibility of leadership for a day. The office is to pass between women and men so that no one is excluded from authority and jealousy is less likely to arise. Each day’s ruler will appoint the next leader as the hour of Vespers approaches and decide where and how the company will live during the coming day.

The women elect Pampinea unanimously. Filomena crowns her with a wreath made from sprays of laurel, a visible sign of her office for as long as the company remains together. Pampinea then turns the idea of governance into household arrangements. She assigns the servants responsibilities for the household, provisioning and accounts, service in the bedrooms, cooking, and the care and cleanliness of the women’s rooms. Her orders also include a rule about the news brought back from outside: the company is to hear no news but joyful news. The command does not undo the epidemic; it regulates what the company admits into the space it has made for itself.

As queen, Pampinea therefore combines authority with administration. She does not merely urge the others to be cheerful. She sets out a method for distributing leadership, establishes duties that make collective life possible, and directs the company toward gardens, meadows, and other pleasant places. Her first reign gives the group a structure capable of surviving beyond the initial escape.

Storytelling as Judgment and Consolation

Pampinea’s choices as a storyteller show the same attentiveness to circumstance. After a tale of tragic love has moved the women to tears, Filostrato asks her for a story of sorrowful fortune like his own. Pampinea understands that the women’s compassion matters more in that moment than the king’s desire to hear his mood reflected. She chooses a story that remains within the day’s subject but can also provide diversion. Her decision does not reject the assigned theme; it interprets the purpose of storytelling as more than the repetition of pain.

The story she introduces concerns Berto della Massa, a man whose known wickedness in Imola has made him so discredited that people will not believe him even when he tells the truth. After moving to Venice, he adopts the appearance of religious humility, becomes a Minor Friar under the name Fra Alberta da Imola, and presents himself as austere and devout while continuing his former vices in secret. His preaching and performed tears win him extensive trust: he becomes a depositary of wills and money, and a confessor and adviser to many. Pampinea’s opening framing makes the contradiction central. The outward signs of holiness can be turned into instruments of deception, and the apparent shepherd may still be a wolf. The evidence preserves her introduction and the beginning of Berto’s rise, making her emphasis on clerical hypocrisy clear without requiring the rest of the tale to be treated as part of her personal history.

In another story, Pampinea uses a small social encounter to think about the relation between rank and worth. She recalls how Madam Oretta’s story brought Messer Geri Spina to mind, then introduces Cisti the baker as a man in whom a lofty spirit appears under a humble occupation. She considers the possibility that precious things may be kept in mean places, where they are less suspected and more secure until they are needed. Cisti is a wealthy baker who continues to practice his trade in person and possesses exceptionally good white and red wines. When Messer Geri and the envoys of Pope Boniface pass his bakehouse in the heat, Cisti wishes to offer them wine but judges a direct invitation unsuitable to the difference in their stations. Pampinea presents his tact as the first movement of a story about perception: his way of prompting Messer Geri to invite himself reveals intelligence without requiring Cisti to abandon the position fortune has given him.

Her tales also connect through the company’s conversation. After Pampinea’s account of Cisti is praised, Lauretta takes up the subject of witty speech, distinguishing a pointed reply that bites like a sheep from one that bites like a dog. The next story is thus not isolated entertainment: Pampinea’s framing gives rise to another storyteller’s reflection on how wit should be used, and how a speaker’s choice of target and occasion matters.

Recurring Stories and Narrative Function

Pampinea returns to the company’s needs in stories that make practical intelligence, vulnerability, and consequence visible. In introducing the tale of Isabella, she disputes the claim that love makes people senseless. The story begins with a noblewoman who loves Leonetto, a well-bred young man of lesser extraction, while Messer Lambertuccio, whom she finds disagreeable, threatens to dishonor her if she refuses him. When her husband is away and Leonetto is visiting her country estate, Lambertuccio arrives alone. Pampinea’s framing makes the situation a test of judgment under pressure rather than evidence that desire abolishes reason.

When she introduces Elena and Rinieri, she explicitly turns from tricks that have gone unanswered to retribution for a cheat. Elena is a wealthy young widow who has chosen not to remarry because she loves a young man of her own choice; with the help of a trusted maid, she enjoys a private life with him. Rinieri, a nobleman and learned scholar recently returned from study in Paris, becomes enamored of her after seeing her at an entertainment. Pampinea presents the episode as a reversal in which craft is answered by craft, warning her listeners against taking pleasure in making sport of others. Her frame makes the consequences of a prank, rather than the ingenuity of the prank alone, the point of attention.

In her account of Talano di Molese and Margarita, Pampinea turns to dreams as possible warnings. Talano dreams that a fierce wolf attacks Margarita in a wood near their country house, mangling her throat and face. In the morning he urges her to stay indoors and recounts the dream. Margarita dismisses his concern as hostility disguised as care, suspects that he is trying to keep her away from a tryst with another woman, and refuses to credit his warning. Pampinea introduces the episode as a case in which a woman’s disbelief in a dream seen by her husband has consequences; the tale’s title identifies the dream’s prediction as fulfilled.

Her final recorded example here shifts from domestic danger to royal conduct. After hearing a story about King Charles, Pampinea proposes a comparable act of generosity by his adversary, King Pedro of Aragon. At a festival in Palermo after the French have been expelled from Sicily, Lisa, the daughter of the rich apothecary Bernardo Puccini, sees the king at a tournament from a window and falls passionately in love with him. Conscious of the distance between her status and his, she keeps her love secret; the king does not notice her, and her grief deepens until she becomes visibly ill and despairs of living. Pampinea recounts how Lisa asks her father to summon Minuccio d'Arezzo, a singer and musician welcomed at the king’s court, so that she may make her love and intention known before she dies. The example extends Pampinea’s interest in the costs of constrained speech, while setting a ruler’s response to another person’s vulnerability against the private suffering that has brought Lisa to this point.

Across these episodes, Pampinea is both an architect of the storytelling community and a teller alert to its moral and emotional uses. She organizes a refuge from danger, but she does not define refuge as mere safety: it requires ordered companionship, the distribution of responsibility, and stories capable of entertaining, warning, or changing how listeners judge what they hear. Her first decision—leave the scene of helplessness and make a life together—becomes the structure through which the company can keep speaking about fear, love, fraud, rank, and fortune without being confined to sorrow alone.