With novellas 3 and 5 ends the so called cycle of Calandrino. A victim of two hoaxes in the preceding day (VIII, 3 e 6), the naïve painter is now made to believe by Bruno and Buffalmacco to be pregnant (3), so as to be able to extort money from him. In the second episode (6), Calandrino is assisted by his “friends” in his extramarital passions, with the sole purpose of having him caught red handed by his wife, the brutal Monna Tessa. The woman attacks Calandrino with the same violence as when she had been her husband’s victim when accused of the loss of the heliotrope’s magic properties (VIII, 3). The tables are turned and Tessa achieves vengeance, this in contravention to the idea of wifely submission prescribed in other novellas of this decury (7, 9). This contradiction contributes to making of the novellas of the cycle of Calandrino a compact series, intimately interdependent, in contrast with the principle themes of the day in which they are inserted.
Compar Pietro’s gullibility and his wife’s stimulate donno Gianni’s malice (10). Once again the blaspheme ridicule shed upon sacred liturgies, used for the purpose of achieving sexual ends, shows up the behaviour of the clergy and its links with lust. The rule is valid for men as for women. Proof is the story of the abbess Usimbalda (2), who chases with her lover’s trousers on her head a young lascivious nun. The same plot, which in this novella seems to be declined in the feminine, had already been the subject matter of the first day of the episode set in a Benedictine monastery in Lunigiana, where a monk escapes punishment by accusing his abbot of the same carnal sin (4).
Decameron
