Ferondo’s Feigned Death and Return to Life turns a drug-induced disappearance into a public miracle. After spending ten months shut in a tomb, Ferondo wakes, is welcomed back as one restored from purgatory, and supplies the villagers with invented reports of the afterlife. The deception succeeds on several levels at once: it transforms the abbot’s private scheme into evidence of holiness, gives Ferondo a new explanation for his absence, and provides cover for the birth of a child whom he believes to be his own.

The Scheme and Its Stakes

Ferondo’s return follows the abbot’s use of a sleeping powder and the concealment of Ferondo in a tomb. The powder is administered in wine, and the abbot, assisted by a monk, puts his own clothes on Ferondo before secretly restoring him to the sepulchre. The plan depends on Ferondo’s apparent death being taken for real and on his later awakening being interpreted not as the result of human manipulation, but as a supernatural deliverance.

The deception also rests on Ferondo’s credulity and jealousy. By the time he returns, the abbot’s repeated beatings have, in effect, cured him of the jealousy that had helped make him vulnerable to the scheme. The staged death therefore does more than remove him from the village: its intended consequence is a changed husband, one less likely to suspect his wife. The abbot has promised the lady that Ferondo will no longer be jealous, and the return scene will make that promise appear to have been fulfilled through a passage in the afterlife.

Awakening in the Tomb

At daybreak, after ten months without seeing the sky, Ferondo notices light coming through a crack in the tomb. He concludes that he has come alive again and cries out for the tomb to be opened. He pushes at its loose lid with his head, nearly moving it aside before the monks, who have just finished matins, hear his voice and hurry to the grave.

The monks recognize Ferondo and see him trying to emerge. Their alarm gives the scene its first appearance of the uncanny: they run to the abbot, who presents himself as if rising from prayer and directs them to bring the cross and holy water. Rather than reveal that Ferondo has been drugged and hidden, the abbot frames the event as something God has chosen to show them. Ferondo comes out pale after his long confinement, but his first response is not suspicion. He falls at the abbot’s feet and attributes his release to the prayers of the abbot, Saint Benedict, and his wife.

The abbot then instructs him to return to his wife, who, he says, has remained in tears since his death, and to live henceforth as a servant of God. Ferondo accepts this account as the explanation of his experience. His eagerness to find and kiss his wife, expressed in his answer to the abbot, carries the marital intimacy back into the story even as the abbot’s public performance conceals his own private connection with her.

A Village Convinced by the Miracle

The abbot makes a show of wonder before the monks and has them sing the Miserere. Ferondo returns to his village, where people flee at the sight of him, as if he were still a frightening figure from beyond the grave. He calls them back and insists that he has been raised from the dead. His wife, too, pretends to be afraid of him; the performance helps preserve the appearance that his death and return have been extraordinary rather than arranged.

Once the villagers are reassured that Ferondo is alive, they question him about what he has seen. He responds as though the experience has made him wise, inventing elaborate tales about the souls of their dead relatives and the affairs of purgatory. In public, he attributes what was revealed to him to the angel he calls Rangel Bragiel. These fabricated reports give the supposed resurrection an afterlife of its own: Ferondo does not merely return as a witness to a miracle, but becomes a source of supposed knowledge about the dead.

The story makes the community’s credulity consequential. Nearly everyone believes Ferondo has risen, and his account adds greatly to the abbot’s reputation for sanctity. The monks’ ritual response, the villagers’ fear, and Ferondo’s confident tales reinforce one another until the abbot’s staged event is accepted as proof of religious authority. The same deception that lets the abbot manipulate Ferondo also enlarges his public standing.

The Household After the Return

Ferondo regains possession of his goods and resumes life with his wife, believing that she has conceived his child. In due time she gives birth to a boy named Benedict Ferondi. The timing is pointed: Ferondo has been absent in the tomb for ten months, while the birth is described as occurring at the time that fools believe a pregnancy lasts nine months. The episode thereby lets the staged death serve as cover for the pregnancy, while Ferondo’s belief in his own paternity protects the household’s outward order.

The wife lives honestly with Ferondo according to her usual manner, except that, when she conveniently can, she continues to meet with the abbot. The return has not ended their relationship; it has made it easier to conceal. Ferondo’s jealousy has been quieted by the beatings he endured, and the abbot’s public reputation has risen through the very event that enabled his private access. What appears to the village as a restoration of life and virtue thus preserves the arrangement that the miracle was designed to hide.

Narrative Role and Meaning

Told by Dioneo as an embedded tale, the episode builds its reversal from the contrast between bodily fact and received explanation. Ferondo wakes in a tomb, sees daylight, and mistakes a managed return for divine intervention; the monks see a chance to stage a miracle; the villagers take his invented purgatory stories as revelation. Each audience accepts the account that fits what it wants or expects to believe, while the abbot’s control of the scene determines what can be seen publicly.

The ending refuses a simple correction of the deception. Ferondo’s return does not expose the abbot but magnifies his sanctity; it does not restore the marriage to mutual knowledge but quiets the husband’s suspicion. The supposed resurrection is therefore both the resolution of the immediate crisis and the continuation of the fraud. A man who believes he has come back from the dead returns to ordinary household life, while the secret that shaped his absence remains intact.