Nonna de' Pulci

Nonna de' Pulci appears briefly in an anecdote that makes a public insult recoil on its authors. When a bishop points her out to the marshal Dego della Ratta and asks whether she could win him, Nonna answers with a joke about payment. The reply leaves both men ashamed and silent, turning their display of power into the occasion for her verbal victory.

Identity and Setting

The story describes Nonna as young, fresh and fair, well-spoken, and high-spirited. She had married not long before and lived in Porta San Piero. These details place her amid the women gathered along the route on Saint John’s Day in Florence, when the bishop and Dego rode together to watch the race for the mantle.

The Public Exchange

The encounter carries the weight of an earlier scandal. Dego had arranged with the miserly husband of one of the bishop’s kinswomen to pay five hundred florins for a night with her. He had the equivalent sum in silver poplins gilded to pass for gold; the woman was taken against her will, and her husband received the false payment. The affair became widely known, although the bishop affected ignorance of it.

As the two men rode together, the bishop pointed Nonna out to Dego and asked whether she could make a conquest of him. Nonna understood that the question threatened to sully her reputation in front of the many people present. Rather than try to clear away the insult, she returned it: perhaps Dego would not conquer her, she said in effect, but she would require good money. Her answer invokes the marshal’s earlier fraud without repeating its circumstances, making his treatment of women and his counterfeit payment the measure of the joke directed at her.

Consequences and Narrative Role

The retort strikes both riders. Dego is implicated as the man who carried out the deception, while the bishop is stung through the injury to his kinswoman. They ride away ashamed and silent, neither meeting the other’s eyes nor speaking to Nonna again that day. The public exchange therefore ends not with the men’s teasing question but with their retreat.

The anecdote presents Nonna’s wit as a counterblow, not as an attempt to accept the marshal’s proposition. Its framing stresses that a person must consider how, with whom, when, and where to exchange jests. Nonna’s brief intervention gives that warning its sharpest demonstration: a joke aimed at a woman’s honor can be answered by exposing the conduct of the men who presumed to test it.