Tierce

Tierce, a canonical hour in the Decameron, serves as more than a label for time: it anchors communal routine and helps coordinate moments of suspense and concealment. The narration gives one explicit conversion—half-tierce is half-past seven in the morning—while other scenes use the hour to locate meetings and delays within the day.

Meaning and Measure

The text identifies Tierce as a canonical hour and glosses half-tierce as half-past seven in the morning. That specific measure locates a scene in the early part of the day without making the hour an abstract calendrical detail: it helps readers follow the company’s movement from morning activities toward the later storytelling.

A Place in the Company’s Routine

On Sunday, the company rises as daylight reaches the mountain summits, walks through the dew-wet grass, and visits a nearby church. At about half-tierce, its members hear divine service; they then return to eat, sing, and dance before resting. After the sun has passed the meridian, they gather beside the fountain for the day’s stories. Tierce thus belongs to a sequence that joins religious observance, leisure, and the regular practice of storytelling.

Timing Encounters and Delays

In another scene, the scholar notes that Tierce has passed by a good hour before agreeing to fetch the lady’s clothes and help her down from the tower. His apparent promise briefly raises her hopes, but he leaves her waiting while he goes to a friend’s house, dines, and sleeps. The hour sharpens the contrast between her urgent expectation and his deliberate delay.

Toward Tierce, Zeppa di Mino and Spinelloccio Tanena are together when Spinelloccio claims that he must leave early to dine with a friend and discuss an affair. His stated schedule supplies a plausible reason for departing; instead, he goes to Zeppa’s house to meet Zeppa’s wife. The hour helps make the meeting and the deception legible as parts of an ordinary day, even as Zeppa turns that arrangement into a trap.

Narrative Function

Across these scenes, Tierce offers a shared measure against which actions can be expected, postponed, or disguised. In the company’s routine it marks a transition from morning observance to the day’s later pursuits; in private encounters it gives departures and appointments a credible temporal frame. Its significance lies in this practical precision: the clock of ordinary life can organize sociability, but it can also conceal what people are doing.