Madam Agnesa

Madam Agnesa is the married woman at the center of Elisa’s story of Fra Rinaldo, in which a cleric’s sexual pursuit and a husband’s unexpected return are met with a quick domestic deception. Agnesa is not merely the object of the friar’s desire: when their secret is threatened, she invents the explanation that allows him to escape discovery and persuades her husband to thank him for saving their child.

Identity and Household

The story places Agnesa in Siena as the wife of a rich man. She is described as very beautiful, and her pregnancy gives Fra Rinaldo a plausible route into the household: he makes the husband’s acquaintance and offers to become godfather to the child. The offer is accepted, establishing the spiritual kinship that later gives the friar a respectable reason to visit and speak with her.

Agnesa’s household includes the child and, at the crucial moment, a little maid. The narrative does not give the husband’s name or any further account of Agnesa’s family or life before the affair. It instead introduces her through the relationships that shape the plot: wife, mother, godmother to Fra Rinaldo, and lover whom he persistently solicits.

The Godfather’s Pursuit

After becoming the child’s godfather, Fra Rinaldo has a more credible excuse for talking with Agnesa. He tells her his desire plainly; she is not displeased to hear it, though his first declaration brings him no success. The story later recounts that he entered the religious life. For a time he set aside his former love and other vanities, but eventually resumed them without leaving his friar’s habit.

The narrator depicts his return to worldly pursuits through his elegant dress and cultivated amusements: he enjoys fine fabrics, composes and sings songs, sonnets, and ballads, and takes care over his appearance. He visits Agnesa frequently and presses his suit more insistently than before. The contrast between his religious clothing and his renewed appetites makes his conduct part of the tale’s broader mockery of clerical hypocrisy.

When Agnesa asks whether monks do such things, Fra Rinaldo replies that he can easily take off his gown and appear as an ordinary man. She raises the obstacle of their godparent relationship and says she has heard that yielding would be a great sin. He answers with a sham argument about kinship: since her husband is more closely related to the child than the godfather is, and the husband sleeps with Agnesa, Fra Rinaldo claims that he may do so as well. Agnesa accepts, or pretends to accept, this reasoning. The pair meet many times, with their godparent connection serving as cover because it makes his visits less suspicious.

The Child’s Room as Cover

On one visit, Fra Rinaldo finds Agnesa alone except for her young maid. He sends his companion to the pigeon loft with the girl, ostensibly to teach her the Paternoster, and goes with Agnesa into her bedchamber. They lock the door and are together on a daybed. Their private arrangement is suddenly endangered when Agnesa’s husband comes home and knocks at the chamber door.

Agnesa immediately recognizes the danger: Fra Rinaldo has removed his gown and scapulary, and an unprepared opening of the door would expose their intimacy. She proposes that he dress, take the child in his arms, and follow her account of events. She then tells her husband that the child had suffered a sudden fainting fit and seemed on the point of death. According to her explanation, Fra Rinaldo arrived at just the right moment, diagnosed worms approaching the child’s heart, and undertook to conjure them away. The supposed ritual required prayers, she says, and only the child’s mother could be present; the maid had gone to find the husband while Fra Rinaldo and Agnesa shut themselves in to perform the office.

The story’s reversal depends on the husband’s fear for his child. He is so distressed by the account that suspicion of his wife never enters his mind. Agnesa’s invented emergency transforms the closed chamber from evidence of an affair into the necessary setting for a rescue, while Fra Rinaldo’s clerical status lends the fabricated cure an appearance of authority.

The Performance and Its Outcome

Having overheard Agnesa’s explanation and dressed himself, Fra Rinaldo completes the deception in front of the husband. He calls him into the room, gives him the child, and says the boy is restored to health by God’s grace. He urges the husband to commission a wax image of the child and place it before the statue of St. Ambrose in gratitude. The child runs to his father and caresses him; the husband, believing he has nearly lost his son, weeps as he embraces him and thanks Fra Rinaldo for the cure.

Agnesa’s success is therefore more than a last-minute excuse. She supplies a detailed story, assigns each person a role, and gives Fra Rinaldo time to dress and take up the child so that his actions confirm her account. The husband accepts the explanation and remains unaware that the supposed danger and cure were invented to conceal the lovers. The tale does not disclose what happens to Agnesa afterward; its ending rests on the successful deception and the husband’s gratitude.

Narrative Significance

Agnesa’s story belongs to a work that presents its tales as solace for women, whose lives, in its introductory account, are often restricted to chambers and constrained by the wishes of fathers, mothers, brothers, and husbands. That broader description should not be mistaken for a complete social portrait of Agnesa, but it makes the story’s domestic setting significant: the household’s ordinary relationships both limit and enable her. The godfather tie gives Fra Rinaldo access, while the child and the husband’s concern for him provide Agnesa with the means to redirect suspicion.

Her cleverness operates within a comic tale of adultery and clerical misconduct, not as an escape from the household or a lasting change to her circumstances. Yet in the decisive scene she controls the account of what has happened. Fra Rinaldo helps enact it, but Agnesa recognizes the danger first, devises the cover, and persuades her husband to accept it. The story closes not with discovery or punishment, but with the false miracle successfully believed.