Love and Sex in the Time of Plague: A Decameron Renaissance by Guido Ruggiero

Author:Guido Ruggiero [Ruggiero, Guido]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, Europe, Italy, Renaissance, Literary Criticism, European, Italian
ISBN: 9780674259560
Google: tIAqEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Harvard UP
Published: 2021-06-01T22:37:13+00:00

Where Gualtieri Decides to Marry in His Own Way and Insists His Subjects Honor the Bride That He Will Pick

In the end, then, although he reluctantly gave in to his subjects’ demands, he decided to do so in his own way. And, once again, the way he arranged his marriage would have troubled contemporaries. Actually, of course, arranged marriages were the norm in fourteenth-century Florence. But typically they were negotiated by parents or relatives to secure family alliances, whereas instead Gualtieri took his marriage personally in hand to secure his selfish desires with no concern for his family or his subjects. Beyond that troubling novelty, his motives for arranging his marriage also evoked the negative presentation in Decameron stories of arranged marriages more generally—that is, they overlooked love and thus led to unhappy matches, especially for young women. The brigata and their tales over and over again advocated avoiding such unhappy situations by advocating marrying for true love, exactly what Gualtieri aggressively rejected—a beastly character indeed. From his perspective, marrying for love and loving his wife in the shared emotional world of such a match would have endangered his solipsistic self-serving life, focused on his own personal and noble pleasures. Moreover, at the same time that such a marriage would undermine those pleasures, it would also signal the end of his freedom from his responsibilities as a ruler and declare that he had acquiesced in becoming the signore / prince he was supposed to be and that his subjects demanded he become.

Making his disgruntlement clear, when Gualtieri finally did knuckle under to his subjects’ demands that he marry, he insisted, however, “But given that you insist in binding me in these chains and given that I insist on being content, in order to not hold anyone to blame but myself if worse comes to worst, I insist on choosing [my wife].”29 He then continued to warn his followers that whoever he might chose, he expected and demanded that they honor the woman as their lady or feel his anger for having forced him to marry against his will. Evidently, with this warning, he was suggesting that the wife he might pick in some way might not match up to the ideal wife that his subjects expected of their prince.30 The reality behind that warning was soon to be dramatically revealed. For Gualtieri, according to Dioneo, had for some time been observing a peasant girl who lived in a nearby village. She was beautiful, as required by such stories, even if she was a peasant. Yet, crucially, what made her most attractive to Gualtieri was the fact that “he considered that with her he could live very comfortably (assai consolata).”31 In other words, he was confident that she would not interfere with his youthful noble pleasures that he was so anxious to protect and, in turn, neither love nor its accompanying sexual pleasures entered into his decision on a wife.

Following Gualtieri’s misplaced desires, we are drawn ever deeper into the dark morass of arranged marriages as his matrimonial plans unfold.

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