NARRATING THE NATIONAL IDENTITY: MYTH, POWER, AND DISSIDENCE

The initial claim of my essay is simple enough: that Andreuccio da Perugia, the naive and bumbling protagonist of one of the best known novellas of Boccaccio’s Decameron, could be identified as a casualty of fourteenth-century sex wars. I shall argue my point by examining the relation between this novella and some key stories that precede it, both in the Decameron, and in the French fabliau tradition. I would not have us be content to stop here, however, and that is why I shall also argue that the novella of Andreuccio da Perugia, while it encourages the reader to delight momentarily in her superiority to Andreuccio, also, by means of its nuanced conclusion, calls into question too hasty proclamations of victory.

Let us begin by thinking about how stories about women get generated in the early portion of the Decameron. On Day 1, women appear when they become the objects of male sexual attention. A young monk notices a young girl in the fields and takes her to his cell (2.4). Word of a Marchioness’s beauty brings the King of France to her land (1.5). A woman of Gascony is raped and then seeks justice (1.9). And master Alberto falls in love with Madonna Malgherida when he sees her at a feast (1.10). In a cluster of stories at the beginning of the Second Day (Decameron 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4), something quite startling happens: women see men.

For what purpose? These sightings by women are not simply a reversal of the mechanism we saw on the First Day. On Day 2, a woman’s look does not initiate the major story line. Rather, her look allows for resolution of a plot line that has heretofore involved only men. In Decameron 2.2, told by Filostrato, Rinaldo d’Asti falls victim to highway robbers; but he can be saved because a widow sees him, and offers him shelter and sexual pleasure. Decameron 2.3, told by Pampinea, focuses at great length on the political and financial hardships of a Florentine banking family in England, and in particular, on the hardships of a certain Alessandro; he manages to avoid financial ruin because he merits the attention of an abbot who proves to be the daughter of the king of England and a marriage prospect. Then in Decameron 2.4, Lauretta tells of a merchant, Landolfo Rufolo, who accumulates wealth in a piratry scheme but very nearly loses his life in a shipwreck on the high seas; a lowly washerwoman saves him from a watery death. As a unit, these stories reaffirm that, with the help of a woman who comes to his aid at an unexpected moments (and who may even make sexual advances toward him), a male protagonist can overcome the adversities of Fortune. Even more, these stories offer reassurance that when women become bearers of the look rather than its objects, they will exercise the look only to accomodate and encourage male desire.

Once again, as on Day 1, Fiammetta challenges this view. Her novella of Andreuccio da Perugia (Decameron 2.5), is a pivotal contribution to the storytelling of Day 2.^[1] Fiordaliso, the Sicilian prostitute, merely looks like Good Fortune to the naive and bumbling Andreuccio, whose perpetual misreading of signs drives the novella ahead. Moreover, Fiammetta takes advantage of a second chance to counter Dioneo’s story about the monk and the abbot (Decameron 1.4). As I have argued in a discussion of Decameron 1.4 and 1.5, Dioneo rewrites his sources, in particular the French fabliau “L’evesque qui beneï le con” (“The Bishop who Blessed the Cunt”), in order to render the female character far less substantial or clever than the men; with her novella about a virtuous marchioness, Fiammetta tries to cast woman in a more positive light. Now on Day 2 of the Decameron, Fiammetta will continue this nascent battle between the sexes. This time, she will respond tit for tat: she too will revise a French fabliau, and this time, the revisions will be to the detriment of the male character.^[2]

Fiammetta’s source is “Boivin de Provins,” a fabliau that pits against each other two tricksters: Boivin, a pleasure-seeking wastrel (“mout bon lechierres” [1]) and the prostitute Mabile. Boivin decides to go to the fair at Provins, not to participate in merchant activity, but to be the subject of narrative activity: “Porpenssa soi que a Prouvins / A la foire voudra aler, / Et si fera de lui parler!” (“He decided he would go / To the fair at Provins / And there he would make a name for himself [lit. “he would make himself the subject of talk” [2–4]). So he disguises himself ably as a peasant, in clothes that the narrator of the fabliau believes to be of one piece. (This “seamlessness” of his garments, apparently a gratuitous detail, will turn out to be significant later, when we see Boivin in action.) Having acquired a large purse and put into it twelve deniers, Boivin heads straight to the street where prostitutes live:

Et vint en la rue aus putains,

Tout droit devant l’ostel Mabile,

Qui plus savoit barat et guile

Que fame nule qui i fust.

Iluec s’assist desus un fust

Qui estoit delez sa meson;

Delez lui mist son aguillon,

Un poi torna son dos vers l’uis. (20–26)

And he came to the street of whores

Right in front of the house that belonged to Mabel,

Who knew more about trickery and guile

Than any woman who ever was.

There he sat down on a log

Which lay in front of her house.

He laid his stick beside him

And turned his back a little toward the door.

The opening scene very ably describes the competing sexual powers of Boivin and Mabile in terms of physical objects: he has his staff and purse (aguillon and borse grant), she her house and the log next to it on which he sits (meson and fust). Boivin’s phallic power, represented mainly by his staff, has been amply displayed as Boivin arrives “tout droit” (“directly,” but also “straight” and “upright”) in front of Mabile’s house. He chooses to place a check on that phallic power. He puts his staff down in order to sit on the log by Mabile’s house, and he makes himself more vulnerable by turning his back a little.

Boivin now recounts out loud the “truth” of his financial dealings, partly to suggest his gullibility, partly to testify to his recently acquired wealth. Upon hearing this, two pimps summon Mabile. Continuing his monologue, Boivin laments the absence of a niece named, coincidentally enough, Mabile: “S’or eüsse ma douce niece, / Qui fu fille de ma suer Tiece, / Dame fust or de mon avoir /... “Ahi! douce niece Mabile...!” (If I had my dear niece now, / Who’s the daughter of my sister, Tess, / She would now be the mistress of all my money /... “O dear! Sweet niece, my Mabel...!” [105–7, 112–13]). This quickly leads to a reunion of niece Mabile and her “uncle.” She asks him his name, and he says,

Je ai non Fouchier de la Brouce.

“Mes vous samblez ma niece douce

Plus que nule fame qui fust!”

Cele se pasme sor le fust. (127–30)

My name is Fouchier de la Brouce;

“But you look like my dear niece

More than any woman who ever was.”

She fainted upon the log.

Boivin, who identifies himself as “Fouchier de la Brouce” (126), has exposed his nature. As Howard Bloch notes, this name “suggests his fictitious status, his status as fiction, betraying as it does the character of the swindler (compare with “fauchier”), of the fornicator (compare with “foutier”), and of the trickster (compare with “fou-chier”) (98).” Mabile fails to catch these allusions and thus does not foresee her future subduction by Boivin. She foreshadows her vanquishment by falling into a fainting spasm on the log. The equivocal rhyme on fust (meaning both was and log), which had also been used when Boivin first appeared on Mabile’s doorstep (24–25), reappears as the power dynamics between them are shifting (129–30).^[3]

Promising him the hospitality of Saint Julian, the pimps invite Boivin into Mabile’s house. Boivin has every reason to expect to be well treated, since as Arturo Graf noted, the offer of the hospitality of Saint Julian involved not only good lodging, but also pleasurable companionship. Mabile entertains him with a grand meal, then offers him a young girl, Isane, whom she claims is a virgin. Throughout this display of cordiality, the battle for power continues. Mabile uses winks and gestures (which she naively believes Boivin does not see) to affirm her superiority over her guest; in particular, she gestures to Isane that the girl should cut the man’s purse. Meanwhile, Boivin keeps up his verbal trickery with laments of his dead family members. He is clearly ahead in this struggle, since his rhetorical deception (like the vestments he wears) is made up out of whole cloth.^[4]

Now, as Boivin and Isane are left alone, the claim of sexual superiority will be decided. Boivin, in a gesture of self-castration that will give him the edge, cuts the strings to his purse. Then he demonstrates that his phallic power is nonetheless intact:

Puis si commence a arecier,

et cele la borse a cerchier.

Que qu’ele cerche, et cil l’estraint,

De la pointe du vit la point.

El con li met jusqu’a la coille,

Dont li bat le cul, et rooille

Tant, ce m’est vis, qu’il ot foutu.(275–81)

Then he began to get hard,

And she, to search for the purse.

While she was searching and he was embracing her,

With the point of his penis he pricked her.

He put it into her cunt all the way up to his balls,

With which he beat her ass and banged

So much that, in my opinion, he screwed her.

After pulling up his britches, Boivin sees that his purse has been cut, and cries to his “niece” that the young woman is responsible. Mabile opens the door, threatens to beat him with a stick; he leaves. Mabile, certain that the purse is soon to be hers, demands it of Isane, who of course does not have it. So Mabile beats the girl and tears her clothes. Such is the fate of those who tell the truth; integrity of body and apparel is the privilege of those who, like Boivin, deal in unassailable falsehoods. Finally, as other people approach, the scene turns into a general brawl: Boivin’s pretense of violence toward himself has been unleashed as uncontrollable violence among his opponents, who are less able to control the distinctions between truth and deceit.

The end of the fabliau coincides with the end of the story as Boivin tells it:

Boivin s’en vint droit au provost,

se li a conté mot a mot

de chief en chief la verité.

E li provos l’a escouté,

qui molt ama la lecherie.

Sovent li fist conter sa vie

a ses parens, a ses amis,

qui molt s’en sont joué et ris.

Boivin remest trois jors entiers,

Se le dona de ses deniers

Li provos dis sous a Boivins,

Qui cest fablel fist a Provins. (369–80)

Boivin went straight to the magistrate

And told him the truth, word

For word from beginning to end

And the magistrate, who greatly loved

A bawdy story, listened to him.

He kept making him tell the whole experience

To his relatives and to his friends,

Who enjoyed it very much and laughed about it.

Boivin stayed there three whole days;

And the magistrate gave ten sous

Of his own money to Boivin,

Who made this fabliau in Provins.

The listener is encouraged to take pleasure in Boivin’s superior deceptiveness and sexual power. Do we actually know what the “truth, word / For word from beginning to end” is? Could Boivin be making up a story out of whole cloth again, just as when he told Mabile the “truth” about his finances and family? Who knows? We needn’t care, because in hearing Boivin recount his adventure, we get pleasure from his fictions without having to pay inordinately.^[5]

Fiammetta mutates the crafty and clever Boivin de Provins into the laughably naive Andreuccio da Perugia. Convinced that his ostentatious display of his money is proof that he is a serious horsetrader, Andreuccio is easily taken advantage of by someone who knows that his ostentatious display is proof of his gullibility. He is all too willing to assume that an invitation to an unknown woman’s house is proof of his magnetism; it never occurs to him that she might be interested in something else in his pocket. He imprudently chooses to remain silent about his departure for a district of Naples inauspiciously called “Malpertugio” (“Evil Hole”), and when he arrives there, he has no inkling that these are not the environs of the well-to-do.

The question of the reader’s pleasure is more complicated than we might expect, however. It is true that the reader is encouraged to take pleasure first in the superior deceptiveness of Fiordaliso, the Sicilian prostitute who, with a good deal of planning and a little luck, tricks the gullible Andreuccio out of his five hundred florins. Fiordaliso, the first female voyeur of the Decameron, sees without being seen.^[6] And the reader can identify with her, for like all readers, she finds out information without (presumably) having to reveal any. But when Fiordaliso disappears from the narrative, the reader is left with Andreuccio. Now what, if not to participate in Andreuccio’s education as a critical reader? Andreuccio falls once (into the latrine, after he fails to judge the signs that would tip him off about Fiordaliso), and yet again (as he is left in a well by the graverobbers), and even yet again (when he is abandoned in the tomb of the Archbishop of Naples, after he chooses to remain with the graverobbers). Finally, one would think, he will learn to be more prudent. As he hides the archbishop’s ring from the graverobbers and as he tricks another graverobber into thinking he is one of the living dead, Andreuccio discovers what Boivin and Fiordaliso have known all along: that things are not always what they seem.

At the end of the story, Andreuccio is in possession of a ring worth more than five hundred florins; he has recovered his losses. Some readers maintain that Andreuccio has learned his lesson, that he has become, in the words of Giovanni Getto, “un abilissimo interprete e maestro” “a most proficient interpreter and master” (94; trans. mine).^[7] But it is not clear that Andreuccio is much less naive at the end than he was in the beginning.

To read this novella as if it were about the successful education of a critical reader requires that we ignore what happens after this momentary resolution. Andreuccio wanders aimlessly through the streets of Naples, just as he had done earlier, after he had fallen into the latrine outside his “sister’s” house. It is almost dawn, and therefore light enough to begin to see, but he is wearing the archbishop’s ring—surely a large one—on his finger nonetheless. How different is this from when he had displayed his money for all to see when he arrived in Naples? As it happens, Andreuccio then comes upon the inn where he had been staying. He tells the innkeeper the whole story—just as he had earlier, when he had foolishly told his woes to the graverobbers, who then proceeded to take advantage of a poor unsuspecting sop. It is only because the innkeeper is not inclined to take advantage of his guest that Andreuccio escapes the cycle of victimization. Andreuccio comes to a happy end, but it isn’t by his own doing that he makes it out of Naples alive. Given how little he seems to have learned, one has to wonder whether Andreuccio will manage to keep his ring when he returns to Perugia.^[8]

The novella of Andreuccio da Perugia demonstrates masterfully not how a protagonist can triumph over misfortune, but rather how complicated it is to calculate losses and gains. Anyone familiar with balance sheets and financial statements is certain to know that the mere presence of assets is not a reliable indicator of financial strength, nor is debt a crippling factor. Gains and losses that appear on paper are not always such; they may be passive, not realized. So it is too in a world in which one attempts to calculate degrees of mastery and submission, triumph and failure, liberation and oppression. Whereas previous stories on Day 2 show an astute protagonist threatened by misfortune but then restored to his initial state (Martellino in Decameron 2.1 and Rinaldo d’Asti in Decameron 2.2), or they show how he can be elevated to a new status that permits him to withdraw from the risky world of mercantile exchange (Alessandro in Decameron 2.3 and Landolfo Rufolo in Decameron 2.4), Fiammetta’s story about Andreuccio da Perugia, which stages two different stories of gain, is dedicated to showing how we might fool ourselves into thinking of our protagonist as a winner. To do this, Fiammetta forges a delicate balance in the power relations between the crafty Sicilian prostitute and Andreuccio. Fiordaliso tells the superior story about herself and leaves with a handsome sum. The foolish Andreuccio, who is also most willing to tell of himself, regains his wealth. No wonder then that a reader as insightful as Millicent Marcus vacillates between Andreuccio and the Sicilian prostitute when she tries to name the active hero of this novella, the person who authors his (or her) destiny.^[9]

Fiammetta resists the drift of the early novellas on Day 2, where good things happen when people speak in orderly fashion.^[10] Martellino owes his life to an orderly narration; his friends Marchese and Stecchi tell their innkeeper of Martellino’s plight (“come il fatto era gli raccontarono” [Decameron 2.1.30]), and subsequently the innkeeper has them tell a certain Sandro Agolanti (“ogni cosa per ordine dettagli” [Decameron 2.1.30]), who arranges for Martellino’s release. When Rinaldo d’Asti finds himself at the woman’s castle after he has been robbed, Rinaldo tells her all in orderly fashion (“per ordine ogni cosa narrò” [Decameron 2.2.32]) and in response she treats him extraordinarily well. In Decameron 2.3, the daughter of the King of England manages, by means of an eloquent speech to the Pope, to attain her desires. In Fiammetta’s story, orderly narration is effective—but not quite in the way we might have imagined. Fiammetta reminds us, first of all, that orderly narration is not a reliable indication of truth, virtue, or success. Andreuccio, hearing the young Sicilian woman’s orderly narration (“questa favola così ordinatamente, così compostamente detta da costei” [2.5.25]) makes the mistake of thinking that her story is true because it is well told. She is successful; but he pays the consequences. Fiammetta also reminds us that orderly narration does not ensure triumph over adversity. Andreuccio offers the graverobbers a systematic account of what he had found after he got out of the well where they had abandoned him (“ordinatamente disse come era avvenuto e quello che trovato aveva fuori del pozzo” [2.5.50; 95]). The graverobbers still remain intent on taking advantage of Andreuccio, lovely narration or not.

Fiammetta will also take her distance from other narrators’ ideas about critical reading. Filostrato and Pampinea have broached some epistemological and practical questions about reading, as: What sort of knowledge can we derive from the reading of signs, and how reliable is it? Soon thereafter, they abandon these questions about intellectual knowledge, preferring to turn instead to descriptions of pleasurable sexual encounters. In Decameron 2.2, told by Filostrato, Rinaldo d’Asti carefully considers the speech and comportment of his traveling companions and, since signs are not always what one takes them to be, he gets robbed by the very men he thought he could trust. Filostrato continues not by exploring interpretive matters in greater detail, but by granting Rinaldo d’Asti comfort and pleasure in the arms of a widow. Likewise, in Decameron 2.3, the matter of critical reading arises briefly as the Abbot carefully considers his travelling companion Alessandro carefully, weighing his speech and behavior, and determining him to be worthy of love (2.3.20–22); Alessandro remains completely unaware of the necessity of critical reading, and has to wait for the Abbot/princess to enlighten him. What could have turned into a sustained exploration of critical reading is put aside in favor of a description of the sexual encounter between the Abbot/princess and Alessandro. Contesting this nascent trend, Fiammetta frustrates those who are looking for a story about sex rather than reading. When Andreuccio discovers (ahimé!) that the beautiful woman who has invited him into her abode is his sister, Fiammetta is in a position to force us to reflect long and hard on the education of a critical reader. She is the first narrator of the Decameron to do so. When to speak, when to remain silent, when to be honest, when to be deceptive? The answers to these questions can materialize only in a practice that is constantly sensitive to difference, to small but significant shifts in meaning and in context.

Moreover, Fiammetta renders it difficult for the narrators of the Decameron to think about women as merely supporting the fortunes of men who move in the world of trade and finance. As a result, women and their fortunes become a more stable focus of the narration. As I expect to demonstrate in a future essay, the narrators, in the wake of Fiammetta’s story, have a more complicated framework for thinking about men, women, and fortune, and they begin to explore how gender structures the experience of loss and misfortune. Overwhelmingly, the stories of Madonna Beritola (Decameron 2.6), Alatiel (2.7), Madonna Zinevra (2.9), and the wife of Ricciardo Chinzica (2.10) ask how women respond to the blows of fortune, in a way that Pampinea’s story of a princess/Abbot and Fiammetta’s story of a Sicilian prostitute could not yet do. Women characters are no longer figured simply as helpers in a plot line dedicated to males and their concerns. Male characters are no longer indisputably winners. Narrative and social roles, having been expanded, will become a subject for ongoing investigation and debate.^[11]

So if we step back for a moment, we see that the strategy of Fiammetta’s novella about Andreuccio da Perugia is two-pronged. The story is another barb thrust at Dioneo and the male ego, another vindication of woman’s intellect and her resistance to male desire. Here its message about sexual difference seems cut-and-dry. But in its foregrounding of questions of critical reading, the novella refuses such unequivocal answers.

As we recognize this complicated narrative strategy, we can explain better why it is that many readers might prefer to read Fiammetta’s novella as the story of an uncomplicated and straightforward triumph, rather than a story about the problematic murkiness of reading and narration. The narrators of the Decameron conveniently illustrate this for us in the latter part of Day II.^[12] Even as they imagine a world made more complex by gender and sexual difference, they try to reestablish, with broad strokes, the order and stability that seemed to reign before Fiammetta introduced troublesome differences. They downplay the point about critical reading that Fiammetta had made. Critical reading seems not relevant to the resolution of their protagonists’ dilemmas. This is not to say that the reader of the Decameron is freed from the responsibility of judging and weighing evidence, but rather that the novellas offer listeners and readers no model for what a critical reading might look like. This is especially striking in novellas like Decameron 2.8 and 2.9, stories about a man falsely accused of rape and a woman falsely accused of infidelity, precisely because one feels that a critical reading of the evidence might have saved the protagonists from misfortune.

And pace Fiammetta, the narrators of the second half of Day 2 reaffirm the value of orderly narration. Madonna Beritola is saved by a story told by a nursemaid who, called forth by Currado, “ordinatamente ogni cosa gli disse e le cagioni gli mostrò per che quella maniera che fatto aveva tenuta avesse” (“told him everything in detail, explaining, as well, her motives for behaving as she had” [2.6.73; 107). In Decameron 2.7, Antigono helps Alatiel construct a story that will save her honor (“ordinatamente ciò che da far fosse le dimostrò” “he explained in detail what she had to do” [2.7.102; 123]), and she recounts this story fully when she is before the king and queen (“secondo l’ammaestramento datole da Antigono rispose e contò tutto” [2.7.104]). Finally, Sicurano, having organized and requested a meeting (“questo ordinato avea e domandato” [2.9. 63]) begins to tell her story of betrayal and loss to the sultan in generic terms, then substantiates it by exposing her breasts and revealing herself as the protagonist of that story.

With the exception of Fiammetta, the narrators of Day 2 bypass questions of critical reading, and reject the idea that orderly narration could ever be detrimental to the protagonists of their novellas. What does this mean? It means that just as readers get introduced to a more intricate social reality—one that takes account of gender and sexual difference, one that acknowledges the contrary uses to which language can be put—they may not have the tools they need to adequately comprehend the workings of this system. That, in a nutshell, was Andreuccio’s dilemma, when he moved from the limited social world of Perugia to the city of Naples. One could say that Fiammetta has presented her companions with a richer view of rhetoric and social reality; but she can not oblige them to assume this view. And indeed, it seems that they do not mind visiting a place where more complex readings are required, but ultimately they prefer to return home to well-worn standards.

Works Cited

Almansi, Guido. “Lettura della novella di Bernabò e Zinevra (II 9).” Studi sul Boccaccio 7 (1973): 125–40.

Bloch, R. Howard. The Scandal of the Fabliaux. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1986.

Boccaccio, Giovanni. Decameron. Ed. Vittore Branca. Milan: Mondadori, 1985.

___. The Decameron. Trans. Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella. New York: Penguin, 1982.

“Boivin de Provins.” Vol. 2 of Nouveau recueil complet des fabliaux (NRCF). Ed. Willem Noomen and Nico van den Boogaard. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1984. 96–105.

“Boivin de Provins.” Vol. 1 of The French Fabliau: B.N. MS. 837. Ed. and trans. Raymond Eichmann and John DuVal. New York: Garland, 1984. 62–79.

Cerreta, Florindo. “La novella di Andreuccio: Problemi di unità e d’interpretazione.” Italica 47 (1970): 255–64.

Cestaro, Gary P. “Rinaldo d’Asti: Drama of the Signifié.” Carte italiane 7 (1985–86): 14–27.

Getto, Giovanni. “La composizione della novella di Andreuccio.” In Vita di forme e forme di vita nel “Decameron.” 4th rev. ed. Turin: Petrini, 1986.

Graf, Arturo. “San Giuliano nel Decameron e altrove.” In Miti, leggende, e superstizioni del Medioevo. Turin: Loescher, 1893. 2: 205–14.

Lucente, Gregory. “The Fortunate Fall of Andreuccio da Perugia.” Forum Italicum 10 (1976): 323–44.

Marcus, Millicent J. An Allegory of Form: Literary Self-Consciousness in the “Decameron.” Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri, 1979.

Mazzotta, Giuseppe. The World at Play in Boccaccio’s “Decameron.” Princeton: Princeton UP 1986.

Migiel, Marilyn. “Fiammetta v. Dioneo (Decameron 1.4 and 1.5).” Paper presented at the meeting of the American Boccaccio Association. MLA Convention. December 30, 1997.

Rossi, Luciano. “L’evoluzione dell’intreccio: Bouvin e Andreuccio.” Filologia e critica 1 (1976): 5–14.

^[1]Almansi has noted the Fiammetta complicates the narratives of Day II by rendering them far more complex in their investigations of moral issues (125–26). For the argument that Fiammetta complicates the storytelling on Day 1 of the Decameron, see Migiel. I would add that this pivotal position tends to fall to Fiammetta, who most often tells her stories at the center of a Day, in the fifth or sixth position.

^[2]In “L’evoluzione dell’intreccio: Bouvin e Andreuccio,” Filologia e critica 1 (1976): 5–14, Luciano Rossi has compared “Boivin de Provins” with the novella of Andreuccio da Perugia, arguing that Boccaccio certainly knew this fabliau. Analyzing the two narratives in light of Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, Rossi shows how the narratives diverge in plot development; he also finds that Boccaccio opens up many narrative possibilities as he renounces the double identity of the male character (11). My reading diverges from Rossi’s, as he fails to see that gender affects Proppian categories in ways that we cannot afford to ignore.

^[3]See “Boivin de Provins,” 21–25: “Et vint en la rue aus putains, / Tout droit devant l’ostel Mabile, / Qui plus savoit barat et guile / Que fame nule qui i fust. / Iluec s’assist desus un fust...,” and compare 127–30: “—Je ai non Fouchier de la Brouce. / Mes vous samblez ma niece douce / Plus que nule fame qui fust!”/ Cele se pasme sor le fust.”

^[4]My argument is consonant with Bloch’s assertion that “Among the fabliaux that stage their own production none is more significant than ‘De Boivin de Provins’ (96).”

^[5]In an alternate text of the fabliau, printed in Eichmann and DuVal’s The French Fabliau: B.N. MS. 837, the audience is treated to another version of the story come full circle. When Boivin leaves the site of his mischief, we watch him divest himself of his aliases and become the Boivin we first met. As he leaves Mabile’s house, he is still the “peasant” that Mabile believed him to be (39, 41). Then, as he tells his story to the magistrate, his verbal and sexual prowess emerge; he is “Sir Fouchier” (43). He becomes “Sir Boivin” (50) at the very end, when he is about to depart, and the amused magistrate compensates him.

^[6]In creating the first female voyeur of Italian literature, a figure that will inspire Tasso’s Armida, Fiammetta is revising earlier episodes of voyeurism in the Decameron (1.1; 1.4), both of which involved male voyeurs. Of course, technically, one might claim that the first female voyeur of the Decameron is the Princess of England, disguised as an abbot, who studies Alessandro and his manners most carefully (2.3.20–24). I think, however, that a solid case can be made for continuing to think of this as an instance of “male” voyeurism.

^[7]Cerreta also sees Andreuccio’s education as highly successful. Lucente even mobilizes various details that could call into question the success of Andreuccio’s journey to knowledge, and then willfully reads them in an optimistic key. For Lucente, Andreuccio wandering about with his ring is ready to face both chance and men because he is armed with “the emblem of knowledge on his finger” (337); Andreuccio, though wandering through the streets, is said to have “at last caught up with the rest of us in the world of “mondana virtù,” with “those who know” (340). Lucente also reassures us that “it is without further preoccupation that we may watch as he departs Napoli” (340). But as I argue immediately below, such a reading depends heavily on denial.

^[8]Mazzotta points at a similar conclusion, based on evidence that is extratextual rather than textual: “Andreuccio wins, but we are asked to extend the trajectory and realize that his fall may happen all over again because even as he is at the top of the wheel, he is always on its shifty curve” (210). If we actually read to the end of the story, as I argue we should, we will see that one needn’t extend the trajectory of the novella to see the provisional nature of Andreuccio’s victory.

^[9]Marcus, who is discussing Alatiel as “author of her destiny,” begins by drawing an analogy between Alatiel and the Sicilian prostitute (“By rewriting her past, as did Ser Ciappelletto and Andreuccio’s Sicilian prostitute, Alatiel literally becomes the author of her destiny, bringing about the happy ending so unwarranted by her “real” adventures on the stormy Mediterranean Sea” [43]). Then, probably because the Sicilian prostitute is not the principal protagonist of Decameron 2.5, Marcus shifts her focus to Andreuccio (“Despite the equivocal morality of the Andreuccios and the Alatiels of Day II, it is they who will prevail in the world of the Decameron, and not the Beritolas and the Arrighettos who passively await fortune’s next blow and invite their own extinction” [43]).

^[10]Relevant in this regard is the work of Cestaro, who has explored the power of the word in Decameron 2.2.

^[11]This expansion of narrative and social roles strikes me as the origin of the more complex exploration of ethics and morality that Almansi has seen in the second half of Decameron 2 (125–26).

^[12]Also relevant is the difficulty experienced by an anonymous reader of the draft of my essay, a reader who objected that “Fiammetta is seen to raise the issue [of critical reading], which then is shown not to have any ramifications for the subsequent stories of Day 2. This totally undermines the force of Fiammetta’s lesson for the reader.” This reader understood my point: that part of the message of Fiammetta’s story falls on deaf ears. What the reader has failed to grasp is that we cannot read these muted moments of the Decameron as indicative of failure. Rather, it is our responsibility as readers to try to understand why certain messages rather than others have been muted. In brief, I believe that it is too easy to read Decameron 2.5 only in an “imaginary” key, where men and women engage in sex wars. It is more faithful to the text—but certainly harder—to read this novella in a “symbolic” mode, and to see in it an extended reflection about language and interpretation.