Cluny Abbey

Cluny Abbey enters the narrative through the reputation of its abbot: a prelate said to be among the wealthiest in the Church and famed for keeping an open house. In Bergamino’s embedded story, that reputation draws the impoverished scholar Primasso toward the abbot and gives Bergamino a pointed example with which to rebuke Messer Cane della Scala for his sudden parsimony. The tale’s setting is carefully qualified: Primasso hears that the abbot is staying at a place roughly six miles from Paris, not that the visit takes place at the abbey itself.

Reputation and Hospitality

The Abbot of Cluny is described as exceptionally wealthy, surpassed in revenues only by the Pope. More important to Primasso’s decision, however, is the report that the abbot keeps open house and denies neither food nor drink to anyone who comes while he is dining. The account makes hospitality a public measure of the abbot’s magnificence: his wealth is made visible in a meal freely offered to whoever arrives at the right time.

Primasso’s Visit

Primasso, a learned grammarian and accomplished maker of verse, is in poor circumstances when he hears these reports in Paris. Although he is famous by name and reputation, his learning brings him little material reward. He delights in seeing people of worth and nobility, so the abbot’s reported generosity gives him both a reason and an opportunity to make the journey. Told that the abbot is staying about six miles away, Primasso plans to set out early enough to arrive at dinner.

Narrative Significance

The story of Primasso and the Abbot of Cluny becomes Bergamino’s courteous rebuke to Messer Cane, whose newly displayed stinginess contrasts with the abbot’s celebrated open-handedness. Cluny thus functions in the tale less as a described building than as the name attached to a standard of princely hospitality. Its reputation gives the embedded anecdote its force: the abbot’s welcome is remembered as a form of liberality against which a powerful patron’s refusal to give can be measured.