Ferondo Is Returned to the Living World to Conceal His Wife’s Pregnancy

Ferondo Is Returned to the Living World to Conceal His Wife’s Pregnancy turns a fabricated death and purgatory into a cover for adultery: the abbot revives Ferondo’s public presence not from compassion, but so Ferondo’s wife can claim the child she is carrying as her husband’s. The staged return makes private deception look like divine intervention, and the credulous Ferondo himself helps spread the story.

The pregnancy forces a return

For ten months, Ferondo has been kept in confinement, fed, beaten, and made to believe he is in purgatory, while the abbot repeatedly visits Ferondo’s wife. When she discovers she is pregnant, she tells the abbot. They decide that Ferondo must be brought back to life without delay so that she can say the child is his. The pregnancy, rather than any change in Ferondo’s condition, sets the timing of his release.

A staged message and a hidden transfer

That night, the abbot has Ferondo addressed in a counterfeit voice. The message announces that God permits his return to the world and promises him a son through his wife, to be named Benedict, supposedly through the prayers of the abbot and Ferondo’s wife and for the love of Saint Benedict. Ferondo rejoices, accepting the message as heavenly news and blessing God, the abbot, and his wife.

The abbot then has enough of the sleeping powder put into the wine sent to Ferondo to keep him asleep for about four hours. With a monk’s help, he dresses Ferondo in his own clothes and secretly places him in the tomb where Ferondo had been buried. The maneuver supplies the appearance of a return from death: Ferondo is not restored by a miracle, but moved while unconscious into the setting where the monks can discover him.

The miracle becomes public

At daybreak Ferondo wakes and sees light, which he has not seen for nearly ten months. He takes this as proof that he is alive again, cries out to be let out, and pushes at the tomb’s lid with his head. The monks, who have just finished Matins, recognize his voice and flee in alarm when they see him emerging. The abbot feigns rising from prayer, takes a cross and holy water, and leads them back to witness what he presents as a display of God’s power.

Ferondo comes out pale from his long confinement and falls at the abbot’s feet. He believes that the abbot’s prayers, together with those of Saint Benedict and his wife, have freed him from the pains of purgatory and restored him to life. The abbot directs him to comfort his wife, who has supposedly remained in tears, and to serve God. Ferondo, eager to find and kiss her, accepts the account without suspicion.

A false resurrection secures the cover story

When Ferondo returns to his village, people flee from him at first, but he calls them back and insists that he has been raised from the dead. His wife also pretends to be afraid of him. Once the villagers recover from their alarm, they question him about the afterlife; Ferondo invents elaborate stories about the souls of their relatives and recounts a revelation attributed to the angel Gabriel. His fabricated account turns the abbot’s deception into a public marvel, with Ferondo himself supplying its supposed evidence.

Ferondo regains possession of his property and believes that his wife has conceived by him. In time, she gives birth to a boy named Benedict Ferondi. The staged return has therefore accomplished its practical purpose: the child born of the abbot’s affair is accepted as Ferondo’s, while the husband’s credulity sustains the religious fiction that made the concealment possible.