Devoting himself to celebrating the pleasures and the pomp of life, he took especial delight in heaping ridicule on ecclesiastics, representing them as the quintessence of all impurity and hypocrisy.

The first story in his famous Decameron is of a scoundrel who comes to be reputed as a saint, invoked as such and performing miracles {48} after death.

The second story is of a Jew who was converted to Christianity by the wickedness of Rome, for he reasoned that no cult, not divinely supported, could survive such desperate depravity as he saw there.

The third tale, of the three rings, points the moral that no one can be certain what religion is the true one.

The fourth narrative, like many others, turns upon the sensuality of the monks.