# Mistress Belcolore — The Decameron character guide

> Mistress Belcolore in The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio.

**Role:** major

**Also known as:** Belcolore

**First appearance:** 0089-the-second-story

## Snapshot

A sharp-witted country wife who turns a lecherous priest's schemes back on him and keeps her dignity and her lover's cloak.

## Who they are

Belcolore is a peasant woman whose beauty and self-possession make her the target of a local priest's persistent and clumsy advances. Rather than submit or make a scene, she plays along just far enough to extract payment and then arranges matters so that the priest is publicly humiliated and she keeps what she has gained. Her cool-headed manipulation of male desire and clerical hypocrisy gives the brigata one of its sharpest pictures of how wit, not virtue alone, protects a woman's interests in a world where both church and neighbor feel entitled to her body.

## In the story

### [The Second Story](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/chapters/the-second-story)

A jolly, buxom country wench and wife of Bentivegna del Mazzo, skilled at playing the tabret and singing. She is courted by the parish priest and cleverly bargains for a cloak as a pledge, but is later outwitted when the priest retrieves it.

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/mistress_belcolore
- Book: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se
- All characters: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters