Ismenia and Alanio's Love Affair

Ismenia and Alanio’s love affair begins in concealment and develops through a chain of mistaken identities, rival attachments, and deliberate attempts to redirect desire. Ismenia loves her cousin Alanio more than herself, but her feelings become entangled with Selvagia’s love for the person Ismenia pretends to be. Later, Ismenia tries to draw Alanio back by feigning affection for Montano; the feint becomes genuine, while Alanio’s jealousy pulls him toward Ismenia again. Their story turns private desire into a shifting four-person pattern in which no attachment remains securely where it began.

The Disguise and Its Consequences

Selvagia recounts the beginning of the affair while explaining her own troubles in love. At a festival held at the Temple of Minerva in the Kingdom of the Lusitanos, she keeps vigil with other shepherdesses before the ceremonies. A veiled newcomer sits beside her, watches her closely, and takes her hand. Believing the stranger to be a woman, Selvagia responds to Ismenia’s tender advances with sincere affection. Ismenia speaks as though she shares that love, while withholding her name and face.

When Selvagia presses her for an explanation, Ismenia removes her veil and claims to be a man. She tells Selvagia that the shepherdesses accompanying her are her female relatives, who dressed her in women’s clothing for amusement. The disguise, she says, has misled Selvagia, though the exchange of affection has become real for her. The revelation does not end Selvagia’s attachment: she is already captivated by the beautiful face and by the apparent tenderness of their encounter. Ismenia keeps the deception alive through the night, then gives the name Alanio and says that she comes from Galia, near Selvagia’s village.

The name belongs not to Ismenia but to her cousin, whom she loves deeply. The two resemble each other so closely in face and eyes that, as Selvagia explains, people might mistake one for the other if they were not of different sexes. Ismenia’s sudden choice of his name exposes the attachment at the heart of her deception: when required to invent a shepherd’s name, she gives the one already lodged in her heart. Her disguise thus creates a double effect. It lets her perform a romantic encounter with Selvagia, while also bringing Selvagia into contact with the likeness and name of the man Ismenia loves.

Selvagia, the Real Alanio, and a Divided Attachment

After the vigil, Ismenia tells the real Alanio what happened, laughing with him about Selvagia’s belief that the disguised shepherdess was a man. Alanio draws out the whole story. Eight days later, he visits Selvagia’s village and lets her see him by a spring. She recognizes in him the figure she thinks she met at the festival and invites him over. Their private courtship begins under the spell of the resemblance and the earlier deception. Selvagia remains devoted even after the truth emerges; the knowledge that Ismenia had misled her does not loosen her feelings for Alanio.

Alanio, too, comes to love Selvagia, though the narrator of the episode says that he does not show that affection as fully in his actions as he ought. Ismenia discovers their secret relationship and recognizes that her own prank has helped bring it about: by telling Alanio about Selvagia, she has given him the opportunity to love her. The shift wounds Ismenia, who had loved him before the deception and now sees him turn his attention to another woman. Selvagia’s affection, meanwhile, is steadfast enough that learning the origin of their acquaintance makes her love Alanio more, not less.

Ismenia’s response is not simply to withdraw. She continues to ask after Alanio and suffers when she hears that he is with Selvagia, even while finding comfort in talking about him. She also tries to avoid him, reasoning that denying herself his presence may repay something of what she owes Selvagia for having caused the relationship. The effort makes her devotion visible as a pattern of pursuit and self-denial: she wants Alanio to stop loving, yet cannot cease to care where he is or to speak of him.

Jealousy, Montano, and the Reversal of Desire

Ismenia eventually chooses a more active remedy. She pretends to love Montano, a shepherd who has long courted her and whom Alanio dislikes. Her aim is to provoke Alanio by making him believe that he has lost someone he took for granted. Montano, however, receives her apparent favor as genuine, and his services and attentions help turn the pretense into real affection. Ismenia comes to love him firmly, no longer wishing to see Alanio as she once did.

Alanio is distressed by Ismenia’s apparent attachment to his rival. His jealousy first makes him renew his attention to Ismenia and become less publicly present with Selvagia. But he still loves Selvagia deeply, and his efforts to reach Ismenia cannot move her away from Montano. His renewed pursuit therefore does not restore the earlier relationship; it instead makes the competing attachments more painful. Ismenia now loves Montano, Alanio loves Selvagia while becoming jealous over Ismenia, and Selvagia remains devoted to Alanio.

The pattern shifts again when Montano sees Selvagia bringing her sheep to the fold and begins to love her. The narrator presents the result as an unusually tangled sequence of desire: Alanio seeks Ismenia, Ismenia seeks Montano, Montano seeks Selvagia, and Selvagia still seeks Alanio. Their movements through the countryside make the emotional disorder concrete: each follows the person who does not return that love, while the desired person follows someone else. Ismenia’s original scheme has not merely failed to recover Alanio; it has helped produce a new attachment that redirects Montano toward Selvagia.

Endings and the Shape of the Affair

Selvagia’s father eventually removes her from her village without telling her why and takes her to live with her aunt. She later learns that Montano has married Ismenia and that Alanio intends to marry another of Ismenia’s sisters. These outcomes close the immediate story of the four shepherds without restoring the original pairings: Ismenia’s love for Alanio gives way to her marriage to Montano, while Alanio’s courtship of Selvagia does not end in marriage to her.

The affair’s central irony is that Ismenia’s deception sets in motion the attachment she most fears. By impersonating the man she loves, she brings Selvagia and Alanio together; when that bond displaces her, she uses another man’s affection to provoke Alanio, only to become attached to that man herself. The narrative does not treat love as a stable possession that can be secured by a disguise, a confession, or a calculated change of favor. Instead, each attempt to manage another person’s desire alters the relations among all four shepherds, until the relationships settle into marriages and intended marriage that differ sharply from the desires with which their story began.