How we cite our quotes: (Day.Story.Page)
Quote #7
O Love, how manifold and mighty are your powers! How wise your counsels, how keen your insights! What philosopher, what artist could ever have conjured up all the arguments, all the subterfuges, all the explanations that you offer spontaneously to those who nail their colours to your mast? Every other doctrine is assuredly behindhand in comparison with yours, as may clearly be seen from the cases already brought to our notice. (VII.4.501, Lauretta's story of Tofano and Ghita, the intro)
Love is being praised here as the master of all deception. Of course, Lauretta's offering a backhanded compliment to this mischievous deity. In this case, Love gives Ghita the ability to avoid detection of her cheating ways and inspires her with a special level of meanness to abuse her husband in the process. Boccaccio often implies that women need as much help as they can get, since they aren't naturally endowed with a ready wit. Therefore, this kind of intervention really is divine and nothing to condemn. How to we know that Love is behind all this? According to Lauretta, the woman wasn't smart enough to pull this off herself.
Quote #8
[…Bruno turned to Buffalmacco, as they had rearranged, and said:
'Where's Calandrino got to?'
Buffalmacco, who could see him very plainly, turned to gaze in every direction, and then replied:
'I've no idea. He was here a moment ago, just a little way ahead of us.'
Hearing them talk in this fashion, Calandrino concluded that he must have picked up the stone without knowing it and because of its special powers, they were unable to see him even though he was standing just a few yards away. (VIII.3.565-566, Elissa's tale of the gullible Caladrino)
At first glance, this is a light-hearted tale about a harmless prank: two friends convince the town fool that magic stones can make him invisible. They keep up the joke by pretending not to see him while they walk along with him back home. But at the end of the story there's a 180. Calandrino's wife is perfectly able to see him. He figures it's because she's destroyed the stone's magic spell and he beats the %$&!@ out of her. For some reason, Calandrino's friends find this hilarious. Collateral damage, we guess.
Quote #9
'So whilst I am not an eagle, yet, knowing that you are not a dove, but a poisonous snake, I intend to harry you with all the hatred and all the strength of a man who is fighting his oldest enemy. To call it revenge, however, is a misuse of words, for it is rather a punishment, inasmuch as revenge must exceed the offence and this will fall short of it. For when I consider how nearly you came to causing my death, it would not suffice for me to take your life by way of revenge, nor a hundred others like it, since I should only be killing a foul and wicked strumpet." (VIII.7.600, Pampinea's story of The Student and the Widow).
Pampinea, mature and rational person that she is, doesn't want everyone to get carried away by all the funny stories about tricks people play on one another. She assures the group that deception often leads to disaster, and what goes around comes around. Her story of The Student and the Widow is one of the most disturbing in The Decameron; the Widow gets some pretty brutal payback by the deceived Student. According to Pampinea, it's his intelligence and the widow's lack of it that allows him to turn the tables on her. This story also contains another form of deception—the complicated magic spells that the Student thinks up and makes the Widow perform.