Putting the devil in Hell

Putting the devil in Hell is the comic euphemism at the center of Dioneo’s story of Alibech and Rustico. A monk disguises sexual exploitation as religious instruction, but the deception does not remain under his control: Alibech comes to enjoy what she was taught, later explains it to other women, and helps turn the phrase into a saying that travels beyond her own story. The conceit makes desire and clerical hypocrisy collide, while its repeated retellings shift the joke from Rustico’s private advantage to the women’s shared amusement.

A religious lesson turned into a sexual euphemism

Dioneo introduces the tale as a story about putting the devil in Hell, promising a comic lesson that will remain within the day’s subject of love. Its conceit begins with a deliberately false equivalence: Rustico tells Alibech that the devil is God’s enemy and that the service most pleasing to God is to put him back where he belongs. The language of spiritual combat becomes an invented justification for sex. The joke depends on the gap between the pious explanation and the physical act it conceals.

The setting sharpens that inversion. Alibech has gone to the desert seeking a life devoted to God, and the hermits she meets direct her onward rather than take her in. Rustico, a young hermit, receives her into his cell after deciding to test his own constancy. When desire overcomes him, he does not simply abandon his religious standing; he devises a way to present what he wants as a holy duty. The episode’s comedy rests on the ingenuity of that false teaching and on Alibech’s sincere, literal-minded acceptance of it.

Rustico’s deception and Alibech’s changing response

Rustico first establishes Alibech’s inexperience through questions, then teaches her the story of the devil and Hell. He demonstrates the supposed service, and Alibech initially feels pain. Her first response treats that discomfort as further proof that the devil is wicked and that the task must be a difficult one. Rustico reassures her that it will not always be so; the two repeat the act six times before leaving the bed, and the narrative says that this quiets his devil for a time.

The balance changes as the encounters recur. Alibech begins to find the game pleasurable and interprets that pleasure through the lesson Rustico has supplied: to her, the act is a delightful form of serving God. She repeatedly returns to him and urges him to resume the work. Her questions extend the conceit beyond a one-time trick, as she wonders why the devil keeps escaping Hell when Hell receives and retains him so readily. The euphemism has become a shared language, but its meaning is no longer simply Rustico’s to dictate.

That reversal has a physical consequence for Rustico. He lives on roots and water, and Alibech’s frequent invitations exceed his strength. The narration describes him as so depleted that he begins to shiver where another man would sweat. He then modifies his lesson, telling her that the devil should be punished only when he raises his head in pride and that, by God’s grace, they have now brought him to a sober state. This theological-sounding qualification is also a practical attempt to limit her demands. Alibech sees that Rustico has stopped asking for her help and turns the metaphor around: if his devil is quiet, her Hell is not, and he should help her as she helped him.

Separation, marriage, and the saying’s spread

Their debate ends not through persuasion but through events elsewhere. A fire in Capsa kills Alibech’s father along with the rest of his household, leaving her heir to his property. Neerbale, a young man who has spent his substance in gallantry, hears she is alive and finds her before the authorities can claim the estate as that of a man who died without an heir. He takes her back to Capsa against her will, marries her, and gains her father’s inheritance through the marriage. Before Neerbale has slept with her, women ask Alibech what she did in the desert. She answers that she served God by putting the devil in Hell and says Neerbale has done wrong in taking her from that service.

Asked how the service works, Alibech explains it in words and gestures. The women laugh, reassure her that the same service can be performed there, and say that Neerbale will serve God well with her. The joke thus moves from a private exchange between monk and novice into a women’s gathering, where Alibech’s explanation can be understood and enjoyed collectively. As the account passes from person to person through the city and then across the sea, the phrase becomes a familiar saying. Dioneo ends by presenting the service as pleasing to both parties and capable of producing good, preserving the tale’s deliberately comic religious vocabulary even after the deception has been exposed to the reader.

Comic frame and thematic force

The tale’s religious language is not incidental decoration: it is the mechanism by which Rustico makes his desire seem to Alibech like devotion. That mechanism also exposes the distance between the monk’s holy identity and his conduct. The joke targets the misuse of spiritual authority, but it does not make Alibech’s experience a simple story of a trick that ends when its author is caught. She adapts the lesson, seeks the act repeatedly, and voices her own desire through the very metaphor Rustico invented. At the same time, her original religious purpose and her lack of knowledge make clear that her consent is shaped by his deception.

The story’s telling gives the phrase another life. Alibech’s account becomes communal amusement rather than private instruction, and the women’s laughter helps convert Rustico’s euphemism into a saying that can circulate independently of him. Immediately afterward, as authority passes to Filostrato, the company’s banter returns to the same devil-and-Hell conceit: Filostrato jokes about wolves and ewes, and Neifile answers by invoking Masetto of Lamporecchio and the nuns. The expression therefore links the tale to the storytelling company’s continuing play with sexual appetite, clerical roles, and comic reversals. Its lasting force lies in that double movement: religious language first conceals desire, then carries a joke the deceiver can no longer control.