Put the Devil in Hell

Put the Devil in Hell is the comic euphemism Dioneo gives to sexual intercourse in his tale of Alibech and Rustico. Its joke depends on making a bodily act sound like religious labor: a monk presents desire as a service to God, and his inexperienced pupil gradually adopts the lesson so completely that she begins to summon him to perform it. The phrase becomes both the tale’s governing metaphor and its portable punch line, traveling from a desert cell into a city’s everyday speech.

The phrase and its desert setting

Dioneo introduces the expression as a story that the ladies may not have heard, and connects it to the day’s discussion of Love’s power. He insists that Love is not confined to luxurious chambers or comfortable houses: it can make itself felt among thick forests, rugged mountains, and desert caves. The setting gives the joke its first contrast. Alibech has left ordinary society to seek religious service in the Desert of Thebais; the language with which Rustico interprets that service turns her retreat into the scene of a sexual education.

Alibech is a young daughter of a wealthy man in Capsa, in Barbary. Having heard Christians praise their faith, she asks how a person might serve God with the least hindrance. She is told that those who most strictly renounce worldly things serve Him best, and hears of Christians who have gone into the desert. Still very young and simple, she leaves secretly and alone, without telling anyone her purpose. Her journey therefore begins with sincere but unformed religious curiosity, not with an established understanding of the life she is seeking.

After several encounters with men who direct her onward, Alibech reaches Rustico, a young hermit. Unlike the others, he receives her into his cell, makes a bed of palm fronds, and tells her to rest. He had intended to test his own constancy, but, seeing her beauty, abandons that intention. Because he discovers that she has never known a man and is as inexperienced as she appears, he devises a way to obtain what he wants under the appearance of religious instruction.

How the euphemism works

Rustico first describes the Devil as an enemy of God, then tells Alibech that the most acceptable service she can render is to put the Devil back into hell, where God has condemned him. The metaphor gives sexual intercourse a counterfeit theological purpose: Rustico casts his own desire as a spiritual affliction and Alibech’s body as the place where it can be remedied. She accepts the explanation in good faith and agrees to help. The humor is built not on a disagreement about the phrase’s meaning, but on the gap between the sacred account Rustico offers and the bodily act it disguises.

At first the instruction is painful for Alibech, who understands that the supposed service causes discomfort. Rustico reassures her that this will not always be so. Before they leave the bed, they repeat the act six times, and his account frames the repetition as a way of humbling the Devil’s pride. The euphemism can thus be repeated as though it described a continuing spiritual task, while its actual meaning becomes harder for the reader to miss.

In time, Alibech begins to find the activity pleasurable. She repeats the religious explanation she has been given, treating the service of God as a source of unusual delight, and returns to Rustico to ask that they perform it again. Her change is significant: she is no longer simply the novice who accepts his lesson, but the one who calls for its continuation. She even wonders why the Devil keeps escaping hell, since hell is ready to receive and retain him. The conceit has become her own, and her elaboration makes Rustico’s euphemism increasingly vulnerable to comic reversal.

Rustico’s resources, however, do not match Alibech’s new enthusiasm. He lives on roots and water and can satisfy her only occasionally; the tale compares his meagre capacity to casting a bean into a lion’s mouth. When she continues inviting him, he alters the teaching: the Devil should be put in hell only when pride makes him raise his head, and, by God’s grace, they have now brought him to a peaceful state. The language that first excused his desire has become a means of postponing her demands.

Alibech detects the imbalance in the metaphor. If Rustico’s Devil has been chastened and no longer troubles him, she reasons, her own hell still gives her no peace; since she helped him, he should now help her. The joke’s direction has shifted. Rustico invented the religious fiction to gain access to Alibech, but she now uses its terms to claim reciprocity and to expose his attempt to declare the task finished on his own terms.

Return, marriage, and the saying

The desert episode ends not through a resolution between Alibech and Rustico but through an accident far away. A fire in Capsa kills Alibech’s father, his other children, and the rest of his household. She is left heir to his substantial property. Neerbale, a young man who has squandered his own substance, hears that she is alive, finds her, and brings her back to Capsa before the authorities can take her father’s estate as property left without an heir. He marries her and, through the marriage, succeeds to the inheritance. The change of place and fortune removes Alibech from Rustico’s cell and gives the expression a new audience.

Before Neerbale has slept with her, women ask Alibech what she did in the desert to serve God. She answers by explaining that she served Him by putting the Devil in hell, and complains that Neerbale has taken her away from that service. When the women ask how it is done, she explains with words and gestures. Their laughter turns the private euphemism into a public joke; they reassure her that the same service can be performed at home, and that Neerbale can serve the Lord with her there. The joke’s meaning is no longer controlled by Rustico’s instruction. The women recognize it immediately and translate its supposed devotional practice into ordinary marital sex.

The story then traces the expression’s circulation: the women tell it to one another, it becomes a common saying in the city, and the byword crosses the sea and remains current in the narrator’s own country. Dioneo closes by addressing young women directly, urging them to learn the service because it pleases God, pleases both parties, and may bring good consequences. That mock-serious recommendation preserves the language of religious exhortation while openly grounding the joke in mutual pleasure.

Comic afterlife and narrative function

The phrase’s afterlife extends beyond Dioneo’s tale. When the storytelling company changes its ruler, Filostrato jokes that the wolves might teach the ewes to put the Devil in hell, turning the expression into a teasing comment on relations between men and women. Neifile answers by recalling Masetto of Lamporecchio and the nuns, continuing the company’s playful exchange through another story of desire crossing a religious boundary. The phrase has become recognizable enough to carry an allusion without retelling Alibech’s experience.

Its comic mechanism is also a pointed inversion of exemplary religious language. Rustico’s instruction imitates the form of spiritual teaching, but his conduct contradicts the piety it claims to serve. Alibech, in turn, takes the lesson literally enough to repeat it and intelligently enough to use it against him. The story does not end by restoring the desert’s solemn religious frame; it sends the phrase into social circulation as sexual wordplay. Its enduring force comes from that double use: the language of salvation remains audible, but the tale makes the bodily meaning—and the power to name it—impossible to ignore.