Tingoccio Mini—Mistress Mita

Tingoccio Mini—Mistress Mita is a clandestine affair rooted in a relationship of spiritual kinship: Tingoccio is godfather to Mistress Mita’s child, yet becomes her lover. The connection leads to his death and returns as the subject of a posthumous conversation, where the anticipated severity of his sin gives way to comic relief.

From Godparenthood to Secret Affair

Tingoccio and Meuccio di Tura are close friends who have agreed that whichever dies first will return, if possible, with news of the next world. Their lives become entangled with Mistress Mita when Tingoccio is made godfather to her child, born to Ambruogio Anselmini. Visiting her with Meuccio, he falls in love with his godchild’s mother, a relationship that makes his desire a breach of the very spiritual bond that brought him into her household.

Meuccio also becomes attracted to Mistress Mita after hearing her praised by Tingoccio. Each man conceals his feelings, but for different reasons: Tingoccio is ashamed of loving his godchild’s mother, while Meuccio holds back because he fears that revealing his own desire would make Tingoccio jealous and obstruct his chances. Their friendship thus contains a hidden rivalry even before Tingoccio’s affair becomes known.

The Affair and Its Posthumous Reckoning

Tingoccio eventually turns his visits into a clandestine affair with Mistress Mita, using words and actions to win her favor. Meuccio discovers what has happened but conceals his knowledge: although the affair pains him, he hopes to approach Mistress Mita himself someday and does not want to give Tingoccio reason to obstruct him. The friends’ concealed rivalry therefore persists even as Tingoccio succeeds where Meuccio has not.

The story makes the affair’s physical consequence part of its earthy comedy: Tingoccio labors so vigorously in Mistress Mita’s bed that he falls ill, and after several days the illness kills him. Three days after his death, he returns to Meuccio’s chamber, fulfilling their promise to bring news from the next world. He reports that he is suffering for his sins and says that masses, prayers, and alms performed on his behalf can help him.

Meuccio then asks what punishment Tingoccio has received for sleeping with his godchild’s mother. Tingoccio recounts that, while enduring a fiery penance, he trembled at the thought of facing a still harsher sentence for this particular sin. A fellow sufferer tells him that no special account is taken there of sexual relations with a godparent. The reassurance releases Tingoccio from that fear, and the episode turns spiritual anxiety into a bawdy punchline: the forbidden bond that gave the affair its seriousness becomes, in the afterlife story, the very sin for which he need not expect additional punishment.

Meuccio’s Lesson and the Comic Turn

Tingoccio’s reassurance changes more than his own understanding of his punishment. Meuccio concludes that he had been foolish to hold back from several women who were godmothers, and resolves to abandon that restraint. The ending thus turns the affair’s spiritual-kinship taboo into a joke about worldly opportunity: what had seemed to Meuccio a reason for caution proves, in Tingoccio’s account, no special obstacle in the next world. The closing allusion to Fra Rinaldo’s elaborate reasoning sharpens the irreverence, making the afterlife report a comic counterpoint to clerical argument.

Narrative Function

The relationship’s significance lies in the way the tale makes spiritual kinship both a social fact and a comic measure of sexual transgression. Mistress Mita enters the plot through Tingoccio’s role as a child’s godfather, while the promised return from the dead gives that intimate breach a second life as testimony about punishment. Yet the report does not settle into a solemn moral exemplum: its final effect depends on the gap between Tingoccio’s dread of a special penalty and the reassurance he receives, a reversal that redirects judgment into comedy and leaves Meuccio to draw his own self-serving conclusion.