The Comoedia Lydiae (or Lidia) is a medieval Latin elegiac comedy from the late twelfth century. The "argument" at the beginning of the play refers to it as the Lidiades (line 3, a play on Heroides), which the manuscripts gloss as comedia de Lidia facta (a comedy made about Lidia) and which its English translator gives as Adventures of Lidia. Lidia was long ascribed to Matthieu de Vendôme, but in 1924 Edmond Faral, in his study of Latin "fabliaux", discounted this hypothesis. More recently, scholars have argued in favour of the authorship of the cleric Arnulf of Orléans, which now seems secure. The play was probably composed sometime shortly after 1175. Compared with the other elegiac comedies, Lidia is not as dependent on Ovid. It is dark and cynical in its view of human nature, even misogynistic. Lidia, the title character, is portrayed as a complete brute, sexually mischievous, faithless, cruel, and completely self-centred. Arnulf is explicit when he claims that Lidia is just a typical woman (line 37). In style, Lidia is highly rhetorical. Bruno Roy called it "the apotheosis of the pun". Lidia's name is often punned with ludus (game) and ludere (play), often with connotations of deception or sexual activity. Women are the virus that destroys virum (man, virility). Lidia would be unsatisfied even with ten (decem) men, a pun on her husband's name, Decius. The puns, though fashionable in the late twelfth century, make elegance in translation very difficult. Lidia is preserved in two fourteenth-century manuscripts. One of them may have been copied by the hand of Giovanni Boccaccio. Regardless, he certainly borrowed the tale for his Decameron, 7.9. His major alteration was the name of Lidia's husband, changed from Decius to Nicostrato. Geoffrey Chaucer also borrowed aspects of Lidia for "The Merchant's Tale", one of The Canterbury Tales. Story The comedy is divided into three parts: a short "argument" explaining the nature and purpose of the work, a brief prologue laying out the characters and the situation, and the story itself. In the argument Arnulf claims that he is writing to improve upon his previous comedy about "the sportive knight", Miles gloriosus. He has depicted "all female wiles worthy of note" so that you "may flee forewarned: after all, you too may have a Lidia in your life" (lines 5–6). A moralistic or didactic purpose was often given in the Middle Ages to justify the