ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that a historian’s eye that the story of Griselda’s ideal wifely qualities and her husband’s wisdom is in reality not there in the Decameron. In Petrarch’s version Griselda was a humble peasant and Gualtieri the esteemed Marquis of Saluzzo, a prince loved by all for his wise rule. Turning to Florentine history and traditions once more it seemed almost as if his way of treating Griselda and her father echoed what citizens of Florence most disliked in the high-handed ways of local nobles/lords that they had rejected in the 1290s when they passed their revered Ordinances of Justice. For in the end Griselda survived a cruel lord, and with her willingness to suffer and peasant patience for a moment at least became the true teacher, teaching a tyrant who rejected love to love and to become a true prince—in this she was perhaps more Christ-like than Job-like.
