Wit and verbal ingenuity

Wit and verbal ingenuity in the Decameron are not ornamental cleverness but practical arts of judgment: a speech can evade a dangerous question, expose a fraud, or turn an attempted humiliation back upon its author. The stories repeatedly make a few words carry consequences that force alone might not achieve. Their wit depends on more than speed. It requires reading another person’s purpose, finding language fitted to the moment, and recognizing when a joke must be gentle and when a sharp reply is deserved.

Wit as Judgment and Evasion

The exchange between Saladin and Melchizedek shows wit at its most consequential. Needing a substantial loan, Saladin summons the wealthy lender but first asks which of the Jewish, Saracen, and Christian Laws is true. Melchizedek recognizes that the question is a trap: choosing one could give Saladin grounds for a quarrel. Rather than answer directly, he tells of a father who promised the same precious inheritance to each of three sons. He secretly had two indistinguishable copies of The three rings made, then gave one to each son; after his death, every son could claim the inheritance, but no one could establish which ring was genuine. Melchizedek applies the unresolved inheritance to the three religions, leaving the question open instead of ranking one faith above another.

The story is an act of reasoning as well as a parable. It does not defeat Saladin by declaring his question illegitimate; it reveals why a direct answer would be perilous and supplies an analogy that makes the impasse intelligible. Saladin understands that Melchizedek has escaped the snare. He then confesses his need, and Melchizedek lends him the money freely. Saladin repays him in full, gives him substantial gifts, and keeps him as an honored friend. The verbal victory changes the relationship: a threatened transaction becomes one grounded in frankness and mutual regard.

A related kind of reasoning appears in Neifile’s account of Abraham. Jehannot de Chevigné urges his Jewish friend to visit Rome, expecting that the visit will encourage him to become Christian. Abraham instead returns appalled by the clergy’s conduct: he has seen greed, gluttony, and the buying and selling of sacred things. His conclusion reverses Jehannot’s expectation. Since the Christian religion continues to flourish despite the efforts of its leaders to undermine it, Abraham reasons that it must have a divine foundation; he asks to be baptized and is named Giovanni. This is not a quick retort, but it belongs to the collection’s interest in unexpected inference: the evidence Jehannot fears will dissuade his friend becomes, through Abraham’s reasoning, grounds for conversion.

The Answer That Changes the Balance

In the story of the Marchioness of Monferrato, a carefully arranged meal makes an answer possible before the question is spoken. The Marchioness orders her cooks to prepare the royal dinner from hens alone, although the region is rich in other game and the King of France has given advance notice of his visit. As the dishes arrive one after another, the king asks whether the country produces hens and no cocks. She answers that women may differ in clothing and rank, but are of the same kind everywhere. The meal has turned an unwanted courtship into a public lesson: the king understands that her rank does not make her available to him, and that his desire will not be welcomed. He ends his visit and departs for Genoa, seeking through a prompt departure to repair the impropriety of his visit.

The answer works because it joins preparation to timing. The hens make the point visible; the question gives the Marchioness an opening to state it without a direct confrontation. Her words neither invite further negotiation nor depend on force. The King of France grasps their meaning at once and restrains his passion for the sake of his honor. Here verbal ingenuity is a means of preserving a woman’s boundary within an encounter shaped by the visitor’s rank and desire.

Other stories make the reversal more openly corrective. Guglielmo Borsiere visits Ermino de' Grimaldi, a Genoese gentleman known for avarice, at his fine new house. Ermino asks what could be painted in the saloon that has never been seen before. Guglielmo answers that he doubts he can name such a thing, except perhaps a sneeze, but can name something Ermino has never seen: Liberality. The answer converts the host’s boastful question into an accusation. Ermino is ashamed and promises to have Liberality painted; the story then reports a change in his conduct, as he becomes notably generous and hospitable to both strangers and citizens. Wit here does not merely win the moment. The rebuke is followed by a lasting alteration in the person rebuked.

Satire, Hypocrisy, and the Reversal of Power

A layman’s reply to an inquisitor turns religious language against a religious official. The inquisitor has prosecuted a wealthy, simple man over a careless remark about wine and, after receiving money, imposes a penance that includes hearing Mass at Santa Croce. The man remembers a Gospel verse promising a hundredfold return and brings it up when the inquisitor asks whether anything in the service troubled him. He explains that he pities the friars: he has seen great cauldrons of broth removed from their table as surplus and given to the poor. If each cauldron is returned a hundredfold in the next life, the friars, he concludes, will have so much broth that they will drown in it. The joke makes the inquisitor’s own religious framework the instrument of criticism, exposing the gulf between charitable language and the friars’ abundance.

The story’s effect depends on concrete disproportion. The inquisitor’s doctrine promises a hundredfold reward; the cauldrons make that promise grotesquely literal. The speaker answers the official’s question in the language of religious instruction, but redirects attention from the prosecuted man’s supposed fault to the friars’ appetite. This is a comic rebuke, yet it also reverses the exchange’s authority: the person subjected to penance becomes the one who interprets the moral implications of what he has seen.

The tale of Nonna de' Pulci likewise turns a public jest back on its initiators. On Saint John’s Day in Florence, Bishop Antonio d'Orso points out Nonna to Dego della Ratta, a marshal renowned as an amorist, and asks whether she thinks she could make a conquest of him. The remark puts her honor at risk before the people gathered to watch the festivities. Nonna replies that perhaps Dego would not conquer her, but that she would in any case require good money. The answer recalls the notorious bargain in which Dego paid Nonna’s husband with gilded silver coins to sleep with the bishop’s niece, against the woman’s will. Both men understand themselves to have been struck by the retort: the bishop through the injury to his kinswoman, and Dego as the author of the deception. They ride away ashamed and silent. The joke is not detached from circumstance; its force comes from making an earlier abuse newly legible in public.

Timing, Audience, and the Ethics of the Jest

The stories explicitly treat wit as a matter of decorum as well as invention. In the account of Madam Oretta, a gentleman promises to carry her on horseback with a story, but tells it so disorderly that she asks to be set down. The episode is introduced as an example of how much depends on a witty saying delivered at the right time. Later, Lauretta develops the principle through the image of a bite: a clever remark should bite like a sheep, not like a dog, because a dog’s bite is an affront rather than a jest. Yet a sharp answer may be justified when it replies to an earlier insult. The distinction depends on who speaks, to whom, when, and where—not simply on whether the words are clever.

That standard clarifies the difference between Nonna’s answer and an unprovoked insult. Her reply follows a public remark that threatens her standing, and the story presents the return blow as permissible. By contrast, the Marchioness’s ingenuity is measured and designed to stop an advance without turning the encounter into a contest of insults. Wit is therefore both a weapon and a discipline: its success lies in fitting the force of the answer to the occasion.

Brief Speech and Narrative Design

The collection also makes the audience’s act of interpretation part of the pleasure. In the episode of Guido Cavalcanti, Messer Betto Brunelleschi and his companions find Guido among the tombs near San Giovanni and tease him about what he will have accomplished if he discovers that God does not exist. Guido replies that they may say what they wish in their own house, then vaults over a tomb and escapes. His companions at first fail to understand. Betto explains that the tombs are the houses of the dead: Guido has implied that unlearned men such as themselves are, beside learned men, as good as dead, and that they are therefore in their own house. The interpretation transforms an apparently evasive answer into a carefully aimed rebuke. Betto’s capacity to explain it distinguishes him from the companions who merely hear the words.

The tale of the Marchioness is likewise introduced as an example of a woman’s discretion in resisting a man of higher condition, while the stories of Nonna and the inquisitor frame verbal play as a response to unequal or compromised encounters. Across these episodes, speech often produces a change in status or conduct: Melchizedek escapes danger and gains a friend; the Marchioness ends an unwelcome visit; Guglielmo’s rebuke redirects Ermino’s habits; the layman’s reasoning exposes clerical excess; and Nonna leaves two powerful men without a reply. The Decameron’s wit is thus social and consequential. A well-made answer matters because it exposes what an encounter has tried to conceal and changes what its participants can do next.