In the Decameron's frame tale, Pampinea leads a group of young adults out of Florence into the Tuscan countryside to avoid the 1348 bubonic plague. There, also under Pampinea's leadership, the company establishes a mini monarchy with rotating kings and queens to ensure their orderly entertainment and allow each member to experience both "il peso e l'onore" ("the weight and the honor") 1 to rule for a day. Ten stories later, Filomena, the newly appointed queen for Day 2, raises the bar on the

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... ellare by introducing a rule that restricts the theme for each day of storytelling. 2 Nevertheless, Emilia, the queen of Day 9, overrules the law established by Filomena. Emilia's reasoning is analogical: after much labor, oxen are released from the yoke and allowed to wander freely wherever they please. 3 To Emilia the thematic rule is a burden, hence, she imposes a day of recovery from it. To Emilia, temporarily lifting the thematic yoke imposed by Filomena is a useful and timely relief. 4 Put differently, temporarily breaking a "certa legge" ("certain law") 5 is a necessary transgression of government before being placed back under the thematic yoke one last time on Day 10. However, with the temporary freedom of topic choice, Day 9 gradually turns into a day of violent storytelling, most notoriously the beating of a disobedient wife in Queen Emilia's novella. Emilia's allegedly regenerative, yet controversial, government raises eyebrows along some questions: What does it mean to "wander freely" while beating a female character into submission? Why the animal analogy and how does it resurface in the stories of Day 9? Itself plagued with ill-transmitted discourses that govern the female narrators' demeanor together with their storytelling, the Decameron is (and always has been) a scandalous text. In a pandemic year ourselves, the Decameron invites us to revisit women's status as the victims of socio-political (rather than bacterial or viral) pandemics. 6 I argue that the Decameron records a dangerous contagion of normative misogynist discourses that define and govern womanhood. I read Emilia's ruling day against Filomena's, evincing the contradictions that arise between these queens and their respective novellas. Furthermore, I show that the inconsistencies that both queens display are symptoms of female shame as defined by Dante. Hence, as the article's title hints, there are two major points of contact herein: First, I read the centonovelle as a fiction that * I want to express my deepest gratitude to