Masetto of Lamporecchio

Masetto of Lamporecchio turns a disguise into a livelihood and a means of advancement. In a story that mocks the belief that religious vows extinguish ordinary appetites, he enters a convent as a supposedly deaf-mute laborer, wins the confidence of its household, and becomes the sexual partner of its nuns and abbess. When the arrangement threatens to exhaust him, he speaks; rather than expose the convent, the women help convert his apparent recovery into a public miracle. He leaves old, wealthy, and a father, having made strategic use of both his silence and his voice.

Identity and Entry into the Convent

Masetto is a young, robust laborer from Lamporecchio, described as notably good-looking for a countryman. His opportunity comes through Nuto, a former gardener at a famous convent whose name the narrator withholds. Nuto recalls tending its garden, gathering firewood, drawing water, and performing other small services for poor wages. He also complains that the young nuns constantly interfered with his work, while the bailiff had asked him to find a replacement.

Masetto listens carefully. Nuto’s account of a household of young women makes him eager to enter the convent, but he recognizes that his youth and appearance might prevent the bailiff from accepting him. He therefore decides to pretend to be mute, setting out with an axe and presenting himself as a beggar who can repay food with labor. The performance is a practical answer to the very qualities that might otherwise bar his entry: the convent will see his strength and work, but believe his silence makes him harmless.

Labor, Secrecy, and Desire

At the convent, Masetto first earns food by quickly chopping logs that Nuto had left unsplit. The bailiff takes him to gather firewood and has him bring it back on a donkey. After seeing what he can do, the bailiff keeps him for further work. When the abbess asks who he is, the bailiff describes him as a poor deaf-mute taken in out of charity and proposes employing him in the garden. He even presents Masetto’s supposed disability as reassurance that the young women will have no reason to fear him.

The abbess orders that he be given shoes, an old hood, food, and kind treatment, and Masetto overhears the exchange while pretending to sweep. He understands that the explanation protecting his place is also the condition that gives him access. Hired to tend the garden, he continues to work in silence while the nuns tease him, treating his supposed inability to speak as license for their jokes.

His opportunity comes when he overhears two nuns privately discussing their desire to try him. Masetto makes no attempt to correct their belief that he cannot answer; when one approaches and leads him to a hut, he complies. She gives way to her companion, and the two later return with other sisters. One nun sees them from a lattice and brings two more into the secret; in time, the remaining nuns also become participants. The story’s initial household consists of eight nuns and an abbess, and Masetto’s later complaint that he must serve nine makes the full scope of the arrangement explicit.

The Abbess and the Limits of the Ruse

The abbess has not yet learned what is happening when she finds Masetto asleep beneath an almond tree in the garden. The heat has left him resting in the shade, and the forepart of his clothing has lifted. Seeing him alone, she succumbs to the same appetite that has drawn in the nuns and keeps him in her chamber for several days. She had previously treated the convent’s young women as people needing protection from him; now she joins the secret herself.

Her demands add to a burden already made difficult by the contrast between Masetto’s daytime gardening and his repeated nighttime encounters. Eventually, while he is alone with her, he gives up the pretense of muteness. He explains that one man cannot satisfy nine women and that he can no longer endure the demands being made of him. His speech is the crisis of his original plan: concealment secured his position, but maintaining the role has become physically unsustainable.

A Manufactured Miracle and a Profitable Ending

The abbess is astonished because she believed him dumb. Masetto claims that an illness had deprived him of speech and that his voice has returned only that night. She accepts this explanation. After he tells her what has been happening, she recognizes that the supposed mute has been serving all the nuns as well as herself. She nevertheless chooses to consult them about how to keep him rather than let him go and risk public disgrace.

The women acknowledge to one another what each has done and agree with Masetto on a solution. They let people believe his speech was restored through their prayers and the merits of the convent’s patron saint. When the bailiff dies, they appoint Masetto in his place and divide his duties so that he can bear them. The account stresses that the secret remains carefully managed: the truth does not become known until after the abbess’s death.

By then, Masetto is growing old and wants to return home rich. The story says that he has fathered many children, though the convent’s arrangement spared him the trouble and expense of raising them. He returns to the place from which he had departed carrying an axe, having converted a false disability into work, access, an enduring arrangement, and wealth. His ending completes the story’s reversal: the convent’s supposed protection from desire becomes the setting in which desire is accommodated, concealed, and ultimately recast as a miracle.