After reading this week's primary sources, I found it intriguing of the change from fervent statement of love of God in many chapters in The Beguine Movement to sarcastic perspective towards piety to God in The Third Day, The Tenth Novell of The Decameron. The different attitude to the God, the Christianity reflects the influence of Renaissance that was trying to object the superstition and promote the humanism in the time period when people's love of God was getting more zealous and blind.

When Boccaccio wrote The Decameron, there was Black Plague attacking Florence. Boccaccio witnessed the frightening disease that caused a huge amounts of corpses send out of the city every day. That's why we can see that the entire The Decameron is praising that love of human beings is the noble source of intelligence, and the important value of freedom of love. Although during that time period, the church was executing the confinement and mortification, it still cannot prevent the impulses of love from the humankind. The selected content in The Decameron depicts a ridiculous story about how a monk taught an innocent girl how to "Put the Devil in the Hell". Reading through the paragraphs, we can feel the sarcastic description of how the monk explained his sexual impulse as a righteous and pious activity to God. " Temptations did not long delay an assault on his constancy ", even the monk himself could not stop "putting away all saintly thoughts, prayers and mortifications", why people were forbidden to love, why people were dehumanized. The innocent girl Alibech, in the faith and devotion to the service of God, was deceived of the truth of what she is doing with Rustico, the one who was thought by the first two hermits that he might possibly overcome the temptation and the Devil would not ensnare him. Alibech didn't realize the truth until the end of story, where people in the town laughed at her because "that is done as well here".

Boccaccio was mocking the superstition by the so-called noble people from the church. In the story, the people in the town represented a group of underprivileged in society. They had no faith, no devotion to the service of God. However, they all did what Alibech said as the most acceptable of all services of God. The root cause of this phenomenon was everyone was a human being, everyone had humanism, everyone had the right to love, the right of pursuit of happiness, no matter whether they are in the lowest level of society or up high in the church, because happiness, expressed by Alibech herself, is "To put the Devil in the Hell". So there was no superstition, even the monk had a Devil.

Of course, in the story, we can also see the blind love of God from the awkward explanation from Rustico. He tried to reason his deed to the girl as pious to gain the comfort to the mind. That was essentially because of people's zealous and blind love of God that caused those believers to demonstrate every action of their as pious to be the service to God. The Life of Christina Mirabilis even more evidently showed this fervent love to God and dehumanization of people. "As soon as I died, angels of God, the ministers of light, took my soul and led me into a dark and terrible spot which filled with the souls of them". Even people were going to die, they wanted to explain this as the special service to God. No one was focusing himself in the pursuit of own lifetime happiness, but their blood, their body, their deed of everything should all be related to the pious service to God, we can see how serious the people's mind were controlled, centralized by the faith of Chritianity.