ABSTRACT
Medieval thinkers often paid for their ideas on poverty and wealth with persecution or with their lives. Arnold of Brescia was burnt alive, and with him a very long series of ‘heretics’: St Francis died of penance; Peter Olivi did not rest even after death, for his remains were disinterred and scattered; William of Ockham lived his whole life on the run. In 1349 Ockham, the last great persecuted pauperist, died. In the same year one of the earliest humanists, Giovanni Boccaccio, began to write the Decameron, which is like the antimedieval manifesto. The Decameron opens with the tale of the death of Ciappelletto, the cheating notary and hardened sinner. So as not to harm his friends, the Italian merchants, with his bad reputation, on his deathbed in France he deceives his confessor into believing him a very virtuous man. So Ciappelletto becomes saintly and revered. The radical contrast between the two moral worlds could not find a more effective symbol than this.
