Ciappelletto’s Contrition and Canon Law’s Drunk Saint ( Audivimus [ Liber Extra 3.45.1], De penitentia, Decameron 1.1)

This essay proposes two new intertexts from major collections of canon law for the first tale of Boccaccio’s Decameron , Ser Ciappelletto’s fraudulent confession and subsequent veneration as a saint. In the decretal Audivimus , collected in the Liber Extra (1234), the pope forbids the veneration of a drunk man as a saint; this text sets up a distilled version of Decameron 1.1’s plot and similarly casts uncertainty on the role of the intercessor in the veneration of uncanonized saints. And with the tale’s invocation of Ciappelletto’s contrition—a possibility raised only to be discarded as profoundly improbable— Decameron 1.1 hearkens to Gratian’s De penitentia . For Boccaccio and Gratian alike, contrition (or its absence) is a site of temporal and ontological meditation, and Boccaccio uses ideas from canon law to probe the practical and epistemological stakes of last-minute deathbed repentance after a life of fraud.