The Decameron: a ‘spectacular’ medieval tale that pushed sexual boundaries

No one seemed to have much doubt about the strength of women’s sexual appeal. Take, for example, the story told by one of the men on the third day: Masetto, a handsome young peasant, applies for a job as a gardener at a convent, hoping to get the chance to sleep with the nuns. To get the job, Masetto pretends to be deaf and mute, thinking that if people think he can’t chat up the young women, no one will object to his presence.

Instead, he finds that because he cannot speak, all the nuns, even the Mother Superior, are courting him, until he is worn down. Forced into hiding, he reveals what is going on to the Mother Superior, complaining that he does not have the strength to keep up with her appetite. The story has a happy ending, as the Mother Superior gives Masetto a promotion and puts him on a rotation to keep up with the demands of the convent in his old age. If you’re looking for a moral lesson, Boccaccio is rarely the best choice.

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Of course, the nuns aren’t the only ones who can’t contain their desires. Before the third day was over, one of the women in the group responded with another story, this time about an abbess who was “very saintly in every respect, except when it came to women.” Full warning! The lascivious abbess is infatuated with a local beauty, but unfortunately her jealous husband Ferondo keeps a close eye on her every move.

So the abbot, with the help of the monks, drugs Ferondo and carries him to a cell in the monastery. When he wakes up, the monks tell him that he has died and been sent to purgatory as punishment for jealousy. The monks keep him there for nearly a year, beating and scolding him. Meanwhile, his wife pretends to be in mourning and secretly meets regularly with the abbot. Finally, the monks tell him that Ferondo can return to the world of the living if he reforms. Relieved and repentant, he returns to the village, again under the influence of a sleeping drug, where he spends the rest of his life as an ideal husband. His wife, on the other hand, never sets her eyes on another man again. With just one exception: “Whenever it was convenient, she was always happy to spend time with the abbot, who had so skillfully and diligently responded to her greatest need.”

Reading The Decameron, with its lecherous monks and badly behaved nuns, it quickly becomes clear that Boccaccio had little respect for religious authority. This caught the eye of the Church. When the Vatican first published The Decameron, Index of banned books In 1559, the Decameron was on the list. But that didn’t stop people from reading it. In fact, the public outcry against this attempt to suppress the work led to a compromise: the sexual scenes were left intact in the censored version, but the scenes featuring clergymen were rewritten and re-enacted as laypeople. Thankfully, this change didn’t stick, and modern translations retain all the irreverent splendor of Boccaccio’s original.