Rinieri’s Revenge: Trapping Elena in a Tower

Rinieri’s Revenge: Trapping Elena in a Tower is a revenge episode in which an injured scholar turns Elena’s credulity into a trap. When she seeks his help to recover an unfaithful lover, he promises a conjuration; instead, he strands her naked in an isolated tower, where night-long confinement gives way to scorching heat and desperate dependence on the people she had hoped to deceive.

The Grievance and the Opportunity

Rinieri’s revenge grows from an earlier humiliation. After Elena had caused him to spend a bitterly cold night outside, he had suffered serious stiffness in his arms and legs and needed physicians’ treatment. Once he recovered, he concealed his hatred and continued to feign himself more enamoured of her than before. His restraint is strategic: rather than answer her immediately, he waits until circumstances give him a chance to make her experience a suffering of his choosing.

That opening comes when Elena’s lover turns away from her and falls in love with another woman. Elena grieves, and her compassionate maid, seeing Rinieri pass, imagines that his supposed knowledge of necromancy could restore the lover’s affection. Elena accepts the suggestion and asks the maid to approach him, offering to do whatever he wants in return for his help. To Rinieri, her request converts private resentment into an opportunity for calculated reprisal.

A Conjuration Designed as a Trap

Rinieri tells the maid that Elena need not worry: he can bring back her lover, even if the man were in the Indies. When he meets Elena alone at Santa Lucia del Prato, he claims to have learned necromancy in Paris, while warning that the art displeases God and that the proposed operation requires a woman to act alone at night. He invents a ritual that will make Elena believe she is carrying out the necessary work herself, placing her obedience, not supernatural power, at the center of his design.

The instructions are precise enough to sound credible and to secure her compliance. Rinieri says he will make a pewter image bearing the lover’s name. Elena must bathe with it seven times in a running stream, naked, at the hour of first sleep while the moon is far on the wane; then she must climb a tree or an uninhabited house, face north, and repeat words he will provide. He promises that two beautiful maidens will appear and that, before the following night is halfway through, her lover will return to beg her pardon. Elena agrees, confident that the setting will be suitable: a farm near the upper Val d’Arno, close to the river and to a little deserted tower reached by a chestnut-wood ladder. Rinieri knows the place, though he pretends it is unfamiliar, and promises to send the image and conjuration.

The Ritual Reversed

When the appointed night comes, Rinieri sends Elena the pewter image and his invented conjuration, then secretly goes with a servant to a friend’s house near the tower. As darkness falls, Elena reaches the farm with her maid. She waits until the first sleep, slips out alone, checks that no one is nearby, hides her clothes beneath a bush, and bathes seven times in the Arno River with the image. Naked, she carries it toward the tower. Rinieri and his servant are concealed among the willows and trees, close enough to watch her pass.

Seeing her in the dark, Rinieri is caught between pity and physical desire. He considers approaching her, but recalls the injury she had inflicted on him and holds to his plan. Elena climbs to the upper platform, turns north, and repeats the words he supplied. While she waits for the promised maidens, Rinieri quietly removes the ladder. The supposed rite has become a confinement: the means by which she climbed to the tower is gone, and the supernatural promise that brought her there has no fulfillment.

The night passes without an apparition or the return of her lover. As dawn appears, Elena suspects that Rinieri has repaid her with a night of his own kind, though she judges it shorter and less cold than the one she once made him endure. She tries to descend before daylight exposes her, discovers the ladder missing, and faints. Coming to, she weeps and recognizes that she trusted a man she had reason to regard as an enemy. Her fear turns quickly to the consequences beyond the tower: if she is found there naked, she believes her reputation among her brothers, kin, neighbors, and the people of Florence will be ruined, while Rinieri knows enough of her affairs to discredit any excuse.

After sunrise, she sees Rinieri below and asks him to enter the tower so she can speak to him. She acknowledges that he has avenged himself, pleading that he retrieve her clothes and let her down before he damages her honor beyond repair. She offers to make amends with many nights together for the single night she had denied him, and appeals to his standing as a gentleman: overpowering a woman, she argues, brings no honor. Her appeal makes clear how completely the balance has shifted. She had once controlled whether Rinieri could be with her; now she depends on his choice to release her.

A Day of Deliberate Torment

Elena next appeals to Rinieri through the love he bears another lady, whom he considers wiser than herself. That plea moves him where her offers had not: after laughing, he agrees to fetch her clothes and help her down, and asks where she left them. Believing his promise, she tells him they are beneath a bush. But Rinieri sends his servant to keep watch near the tower and goes instead to his friend’s house, where he dines at leisure and then sleeps. Elena, who has passed the night without rest, remains trapped above, alternately hoping and despairing that he will return.

By midday the tower’s exposed platform turns the delay into bodily punishment. The July sun beats on Elena’s uncovered head and naked body until her skin burns, cracks, and bleeds; the scorching surface gives her no place to rest her feet. Swarms of flies and gadflies settle on her injured flesh, while hunger and, above all, thirst deepen her torment. The Arno is visible, but its water is beyond her reach. The neighboring fields are empty because the husbandmen have left the heat to thresh their sheaves beside their homes, and the nearby thickets, shade, and houses only sharpen her awareness of what she cannot reach. The woman whose whiteness had stood out in the night is now described as red and bloodied, her exposed body transformed by the ordeal.

Rinieri returns only after rising from his sleep, remembering Elena, and sending his still-fasting servant away to eat. Hearing him, she drags herself to the opening and begs him either to kill her or, at least, to bring her water. He recognizes her weakness and sees how badly the sun has burned her, and her humble pleading awakens some compassion in him. Yet he refuses both requests, declaring that she will receive as much water from him as he had received warmth from her when she left him in the cold. He contrasts the dung’s heat that had been used to treat his injured limbs with the rose-water that, he says, will soothe her burns, and taunts her with the prospect of her skin renewing like a snake’s. Elena answers that the beauty gained through such suffering should belong to those who wish her ill, then condemns the cruelty of denying water even to someone facing death. She finally resigns herself to endure what comes, appealing to God to judge Rinieri’s conduct.

As Vespers approaches, Rinieri decides that his revenge has gone far enough. He has his servant gather Elena’s clothes and wrap them in his cloak, then goes to her house, where her maid is waiting in distress, unable to find her mistress. Rinieri tells the maid that he has punished Elena for her part in his suffering and threatens to punish her too for her complicity; he then has his servant hand over the clothes and tell her she may go to Elena. The maid recognizes them and fears that her mistress has been killed, but sets off for the tower in tears.

Rescue, Concealment, and Aftermath

The first help comes by chance. A husbandman searching for two missing swine hears Elena lamenting from the tower and recognizes her voice. At her plea, he sets the ladder-poles in place and binds on the cross-staves with withy bands. Her maid arrives with Elena’s clothes, but, hurrying down after reaching the platform, slips from the ladder and breaks her thigh. The rescue thus brings its own injury: the person Elena expected to help her is hurt in the attempt to get them both out.

Because Elena cannot walk, the husbandman carries her from the tower and gives her cold water and kind words. His wife and two brothers return with a plank to carry the injured maid; the husbandman’s wife gives Elena a wine-sop, undresses her, and puts her to bed. That night the two women are taken to Florence. Once home, Elena invents an account wholly at odds with what happened, persuading her brothers, sisters, and others that she and her maid had suffered diabolical enchantment. Physicians treat Elena’s severe fever and the maid’s broken thigh. Elena’s burns are so grave that her skin repeatedly sticks to the sheets, but both women recover.

The aftermath reverses the episode’s opening pattern of mockery. Elena forgets the lover she had hoped to win back and thereafter behaves discreetly, refraining both from making fun of others and from loving. Rinieri, meanwhile, learns that the maid has broken her thigh and considers himself fully avenged; he says nothing more about the affair. The tale closes by turning his revenge into a warning to its female audience against making sport of people, especially scholars. Its irony is severe: Elena’s scheme to recover a faithless lover through supposed magic leaves her dependent on chance rescue, forced to conceal the truth, and chastened not by a supernatural power but by the scholar she had once wronged.