Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) was the son of a prosperous Florentine merchant. After a brief apprenticeship in his father's bank, and after giving up his studies of canon law, he devoted all his time to literature. As a young man he spent some years in Naples, which, under the rule of Robert of Anjou, was one of the major intellectual and cultural centres of Italy. He returned to Florence in 1341 and half a decade later witnessed the effects of the Black Death on the social structure of the city, which he was to describe in the introduction to his best-known work. The setting for the Decameron is a country villa in the hills outside Florence, where a group of ten young men and women have taken refuge from the plague which has begun to infect their city. To entertain themselves, it is arranged that each of them will tell a story every day for a period of ten days. The basic theme of the ghost story which follows (that it is an offence which is punishable in the afterlife to refrain from love during one's brief mortal existence) corresponds to the philosophy of courtly love. In the same way that the anonymous author of the Lay du Trot used an earlier medieval motif of a sorrowful procession of ghosts to uphold the tenets of this philosophy, so Boccaccio adapted the story of a woman hunted inexorably in the afterlife to accord with the specific circumstances of a lovelorn suitor and a scornful mistress. The social context and physical setting of the story-telling process in the Decameron would have underlined the message: like all the other tales, this story is related to a group of youthful listeners who, as refugees from a city infected with the plague, would have been fully aware of the fragility of mortal existence and the necessity of seizing the chance of transitory pleasure.

The Huntsman of Ravenna

Fifth Day, Story VIII

In Ravenna, that ancient city of Romagna, there dwelt among the nobility a young man called Nastagio degli Onesti, who inherited great wealth after the death of his father and his uncle. Being without a wife, Nastagio fell in love, as young men do, with the daughter of Messer Paolo Traversaro.