Pampinea’s “Honorable” Leadership in the Decameron

Abstract

When Boccaccio moves from describing the external raging of the Plague to the enclosure of Santa Maria Novella, the contrast could not be starker. While outside the crowds fall sick and die, the “venerable” church lies almost empty, with the seeming exception of seven young women who, after listening to the “holy functions wearing mourning clothes,” gather in a group (Decameron 29). The women, we are told, have come together as the result of general friendship, closeness of living quarters, or family bonds. They range in age from 18 to 27, and are apparently unmarried, though at least three are in love with the men who will soon join them. Boccaccio describes them as wise, noble, good looking, and beautiful in manners and graceful virtue (29), though he declines to give their real names. He justifies the omission by saying that, due to the nature of the stories they tell, the women might be ashamed to be identified, because nowadays—the after-Plague years—the rules that govern enjoyment are much stricter than they were then for women of their age and even older, for the reason he has just shown (e.g., the Plague itself and the slackening of authoritarian control) (30). The statement stands out for two reasons. For one, Boccaccio already issues a disclaimer similar to the ones he will proffer in the Introduction to Day IV and the Author’s Conclusion: he parries the accusations of immorality that critics level at his stories by justifying their out-of-bounds content as the result of the slack controls of the times.