Fra Rinaldo

Fra Rinaldo is a friar whose religious status gives him access to a married woman and a ready-made explanation for being alone with her. In a tale told by Elisa, his affair with Madam Agnesa, his elaborate defense of it, and his improvised cure for her child turn clerical hypocrisy into both the engine of the plot and its central joke.

Identity and Introduction

Fra Rinaldo first appears as a young man of a respectable Siena family, passionately enamored of a beautiful neighbor married to a wealthy man. Hoping to gain a more respectable pretext for speaking with her, he befriends her husband and offers to become godfather to the child she is expecting. The offer is accepted. His new status as the child’s gossip gives him a reason to visit Madam Agnesa, but his first direct declaration of love does not secure the response he wants: she is not displeased to hear him, yet the tale does not make her consent immediate.

Not long afterward, Fra Rinaldo becomes a friar. The change of clothing and office does not end his desire. For a time he sets aside his attachment to Madam Agnesa, along with other former vanities; later, however, he resumes both the affair and the habits that distinguish his worldly life from the austerity expected of a religious man.

Religious Office and Worldly Appetites

The narrator presents Fra Rinaldo’s return to his former appetites as part of a broader attack on friars who preserve the appearance of religious authority while pursuing comfort and display. He enjoys fine clothes, elegant manners, songs, sonnets, and ballads. His visits to Madam Agnesa become frequent, and he presses his suit more boldly than before. The habit remains on his body, but it no longer marks a withdrawal from worldly pleasures.

The satire widens beyond Fra Rinaldo to describe friars who appear prosperous and ruddy, dress in fine dyed cloth, and fill their cells with electuaries, ointments, confections, perfumes, distilled waters, oils, and expensive wines such as Malmsey and Cyprus. The contrast is pointed: their stores resemble those of apothecaries or perfumers rather than ascetics, while fasting, coarse food, vigils, prayer, and discipline would be expected to produce a very different life. Fra Rinaldo embodies this contradiction in miniature. His religious office lends his conduct credibility and opportunity even as his appetites contradict the discipline the office implies.

The Affair and Its Convenient Logic

When Fra Rinaldo presses Madam Agnesa, she invokes the obstacle created by their godparenthood: he is her child’s gossip, and she has heard that such intimacy would be sinful. Fra Rinaldo answers not by abandoning his suit but by turning the relationship itself into a specious argument. Since her husband, who is more closely related to the child, sleeps with her, Fra Rinaldo claims that he, being less closely related, may do likewise. Madam Agnesa either accepts or pretends to accept this reasoning, and the two begin meeting repeatedly.

Their godparenthood, intended to provide a respectable pretext for contact, becomes cover for the affair. The husband sees a familiar religious connection where he might otherwise have suspected a lover. Fra Rinaldo’s manipulation is therefore both verbal and social: he bends a religious relationship into permission, then benefits from the respectability that relationship appears to confer.

The Fabricated Cure

On one visit, Fra Rinaldo finds Madam Agnesa alone except for a young maid. He sends his own companion with the maid to the pigeon loft, ostensibly to teach her the Paternoster, then enters the bedchamber with Madam Agnesa, who is holding her child. They lock the door and take their pleasure on a daybed. When the husband arrives unexpectedly and knocks, Madam Agnesa warns Fra Rinaldo that discovery seems certain. He is partly undressed, making an innocent explanation difficult.

Madam Agnesa devises a story that turns the danger into a religious service. Fra Rinaldo dresses, takes the child in his arms, and joins her in claiming that the child suffered a sudden faint and that worms threatened its life. According to their account, he had begun to conjure the worms while his companion recited prayers elsewhere in the house; only the child’s mother could be present in the room. The explanation makes the locked door, their seclusion, and Fra Rinaldo’s presence seem necessary rather than incriminating.

Fra Rinaldo reinforces the deception by presenting the child to the husband as restored by divine grace and recommending a wax image of the child be placed before the image of St. Ambrose in thanks. The child runs to his father and caresses him, and the husband, believing the cure, embraces him and thanks Fra Rinaldo. The friar’s companion then arrives and claims to have completed the prayers. Fra Rinaldo says he had performed only part of them before the husband came, but that their combined efforts had sufficed. The husband responds with hospitality, bringing wine and confections for his gossip.

Narrative Role

Fra Rinaldo’s success depends on the very authority he abuses. His habit, godparenthood, prayers, and invocation of a saint allow an invented miracle to conceal an affair. The comic reversal is not simply that a husband fails to catch a lover: the supposed spiritual cure gives the deception a public, devotional shape, and the cuckold rewards the man who has deceived him. Through Fra Rinaldo, the tale makes clerical hypocrisy practical as well as satirical: religious language does not merely disguise private appetite but supplies the tools by which that appetite escapes exposure.