Saturday

Saturday in the Decameron is at once a day shaped by religious and household custom and a recurring measure of how people order their lives. The storytelling company observes it as a pause, while one wife turns its devotional restrictions into a pointed contrast between an unsatisfying marriage and the life she prefers.

Custom and observance

When Neifile sets out the company’s plans, she describes Saturday as a day on which ladies customarily wash their heads, removing the dust and uncleanness gathered through the week. She adds that many women fast and rest from work in reverence for the Virgin Mother and in honor of the approaching Sunday. These customs are presented as reasons to suspend storytelling, not as a rule followed identically by everyone: Neifile specifically says that many women observe the fast and rest.

Saturday’s place in the week is paired with Friday, which Neifile treats as deserving reverence because Christ suffered on that day. The contrast gives the pause a devotional rhythm: Friday is set aside for prayer, and Saturday for bodily cleansing, fasting, and rest before Sunday. The company’s routine thus makes time for observance as well as for entertainment.

The storytelling company’s pause

Neifile proposes that the company tell no stories on either Friday or Saturday. By then, the group will have spent four days at its current lodging; she also wants them to move elsewhere before newcomers can intrude. They are to assemble again on Sunday, after sleeping, with a new storytelling plan. The pause is therefore both a response to the week’s religious customs and a practical transition in the company’s life together.

For the next day of stories, Neifile proposes a theme: people who, through diligence, obtain something much desired or recover something lost. Dioneo retains his privilege to choose his own subject. Saturday consequently stands at a hinge in the frame narrative: it interrupts the daily sequence of tales, allows the company to relocate, and precedes a fresh round organized around a theme.

Saturday as a measure of married life

In Dioneo’s story of Ricciardo di Chinzica and his wife, Saturday becomes part of the young woman’s indictment of her marriage. After Paganino carries her off, Ricciardo comes to retrieve her. She acknowledges that he is her husband but argues that he failed to understand the needs of a young and lively wife, while devoting himself more readily to the observances of the religious calendar than to her.

She contrasts the regular interruptions of her former household—including Saturdays, Fridays, vigils, Ember Days, and Lent—with her present life with Paganino, where, she says, no such holy days interrupt their intimacy. Her speech makes the calendar a concrete measure of marital incompatibility: the same observances that may signify reverence to one person have, in her account, become evidence that her husband neglected her. The humor depends on treating the sacred timetable as a domestic one, a series of days that determined when the couple could be together.

Ricciardo is unable to persuade her to return to Pisa. Dioneo reports that he goes home distressed and falls into such despondency that he repeats a saying about the absence of holidays; not long afterward, he dies. Paganino then lawfully marries the woman, and the pair live happily without observing saints’ days, vigils, or Lent. Saturday’s meaning in the tale is thus not simply a matter of doctrine: it helps expose the difference between a marriage imposed by kinship and a relationship the woman willingly chooses.

Rest, confinement, and female experience

The book’s broader reflections on women’s circumstances sharpen this contrast without making Saturday itself a universal condition. In the opening defense of storytelling for women in love, women are described as often confined to their chambers and constrained by the wishes and commands of fathers, mothers, brothers, and husbands. Unlike men, who may divert themselves by going out to hunt, ride, trade, or pursue other activities, women have fewer means of escaping melancholy. Against that background, a customary day of washing and rest belongs to a weekly pattern that shapes domestic life, even as the stories show women finding very different ways to use or contest its constraints.

Fiammetta’s introduction to another tale similarly condemns jealous husbands for keeping their wives shut at home throughout the week and making holidays more sorrowful than ordinary days. She invokes the distinction between work and rest as part of a shared social and religious order, then criticizes husbands who deny their wives the leisure available to other people. Read alongside Neifile’s schedule and the wife’s refusal to return to Ricciardo, Saturday belongs to a larger narrative interest in who controls women’s time: household custom can promise rest, but marriage and surveillance can determine whether that rest is actually enjoyed.