The Decameron Eighth Day Summary & Analysis

Summary: All Eighth-Day Stories

On the eighth day, which is a Sunday, the ten companions hear services at a nearby chapel. That afternoon they assemble as usual beside the delectable fountain to hear stories. Lauretta, the queen for the day, has decreed that the stories should be about tricks people play on each other.

Neifile tells of a soldier of fortune who borrows money from a wealthy merchant to afford the fee the merchant’s wife is charging for her sexual favors. When the merchant comes to collect the debt, the soldier replies that he left the money with the merchant’s wife. All ten of the tales make similar comments on human folly. Several stories involve money transactions. Some tales involve cruel tricks and humiliation of others. Pampinea tells of a scholar who pursues a woman who doesn’t want him. She leaves him outside in winter, where he nearly freezes, and he retaliates by imprisoning her on a high tower, where the sun nearly burns her to death.

Summary of Selected Story: Eighth Day, Eighth Story

Fiammetta criticizes the scholar in Pampinea’s story for his harsh treatment of the woman who rejects him. She offers her own story as an example of a better reaction to being rejected. Fiammetta’s story involves two young men, Spinelloccio and Zeppa, who are as deeply attached as brothers. Both men come from good, plebeian families. They live next door to each other and are both married to beautiful wives. The couples become friends.

Spinelloccio and Zeppa’s wife become lovers. They keep their secret for a long time, but one day, Zeppa comes home and sees them going into the bedroom together. Instead of saying anything, Zeppa vows to find some means of revenge that will also spare his honor. At last, he comes up with a plan. Zeppa confronts his wife with what he knows and enlists her help. At her husband’s instructions, Zeppa’s wife invites Spinelloccio to her room and then quickly hides him in a chest when her husband arrives without warning. Meanwhile, Zeppa informs Spinelloccio’s wife of her husband’s infidelity and enlists her help as well. Zeppa takes Spinelloccio’s wife up to the bedroom and makes love to her on top of the chest where Spinelloccio is imprisoned. Then Zeppa summons his wife and opens the chest to reveal Spinelloccio. Zeppa and Spinelloccio vow to remain friends. After that, two husbands have two wives, and two wives have two husbands.

Summary: Conclusion of the Eighth Day

After the tenth story of the day, Lauretta passes the crown to Emilia, advising Emilia to act in keeping with her beauty. This advice makes Emilia ill at ease, but she quickly recovers and issues her storytelling plan, which is to let the companions tell whatever stories they like. The others applaud the plan. After the usual singing and dancing, Emilia asks Panfilo to sing. Panfilo sings about the joy that love has brought to him and compares finding love to finding salvation. Everyone attends carefully to his words, trying to guess what they imply.

Analysis: Eighth Day

Lauretta’s decision to include all sorts of tricks expands the scope of the stories and creates more variety in the plots and characters. As on the sixth day (also devoted to tricks), the requirements increase the likelihood that the stories will be funny. The need to describe and explain the tricks keeps the stories short and focused only on essential details. Expanding the types of tricks moves the action from the largely domestic setting of the sixth day into wider settings, such as the worlds of commerce and scholarship.

The stories told by Neifile, Pampinea, and Fiammetta illustrate the wider variety of tales and characters made possible by the expanded topic. Neifile’s story is an amusing tale in which a greedy woman tries to trade her body and her husband ends up footing the bill. Pampinea’s tale is a horror story about a woman being pursued by a man she has rejected. Fiammetta’s tale is an absurd fantasy that questions the premise of marriage itself and suggests a radical alternative.

The stories of the eighth day expand on the general themes of The Decameron. For example, Pampinea’s tale dwells on misfortune by providing lurid details of close brushes with death. Fiammetta’s story highlights the power of love and celebrates the virtue of physical pleasure. Almost all the stories expose the folly of human vices such as greed and lust. In Neifile’s story, greed drives the merchant’s wife to sell her body for money, and greed also drives the soldier’s trickery of the woman.

Pampinea’s story of the scholar’s revenge is an example of how Boccaccio uses the stories to convey information about the storytellers and to connect images and concepts. On the first day of the retreat to the country, Pampinea forbids the companions to talk about sad things and decrees that they will concentrate on pleasure. On the second day, Pampinea performs a song about the pleasurable sensation of burning with desire. Now, on the eighth day, Pampinea’s mood has turned dark. The scholar in her story delivers a cruel punishment to the woman who rejects him, and Pampinea describes the woman’s near-death experience by burning. Something has changed Pampinea from a person determined to be happy and burning with love to someone burning with anger. The next speaker, Fiammetta, reprimands Pampinea for this cruelty before telling a story with a more humane resolution.

The conclusion of the eighth day is another example of how Boccaccio hints at aspects of his characters. At the end of the first day, Emilia sings a song about her own beauty, a sign of her vanity. Now, as Lauretta crowns Emilia the next queen, she makes a cutting remark that reveals how unpopular Emilia is with the others. Emilia declares that she will throw out the rules and let people tell the next day’s stories on any topic they like, a gesture that shows her defiance. In the final song of the day, Panfilo sings of the joys of love and shifts the attention away from Emilia toward speculation about his love life.

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