Fra Rinaldo—Madam Agnesa

Fra Rinaldo—Madam Agnesa is a relationship built on overlapping forms of concealment: godparenthood provides the friar with access to a married woman, his religious office supplies a respectable cover, and, when discovery seems imminent, the pair invents a miracle to deceive her husband. Their affair is not merely a private breach of marriage or clerical discipline; its escape depends on turning the signs of religious trust into tools of deception.

The relationship begins under cover of godparenthood

Fra Rinaldo is introduced as a young man from a respected family in Siena, enamored of his beautiful married neighbor. Because she is pregnant, he sees an opportunity to become her child’s godfather. He befriends her wealthy husband and offers to stand as sponsor; once that offer is accepted, his role gives him a plausible reason to speak with Madam Agnesa. She has already inferred his desire from his looks, and although his first direct disclosure does not lead immediately to an affair, she is not displeased to hear it. Godparenthood thus begins as a deliberate social pretext: Fra Rinaldo uses a family and religious bond to create the access he wants.

Not long afterward, Fra Rinaldo becomes a friar. For a time, he sets aside his former love along with other worldly vanities, but he eventually resumes them without leaving the religious life. The story emphasizes the contrast between his habit and his conduct: he cultivates fine clothes and an elegant manner even as he returns to his pursuit of Madam Agnesa. His continued position as a friar does not end the relationship; it gives their meetings an appearance of familiarity that attracts less suspicion.

Desire, pressure, and a false argument

Fra Rinaldo visits Madam Agnesa frequently and presses her more insistently than before. When he importunes her, she raises the obstacle of his being a monk. He answers that he can easily take off his habit and appear as a man like other men. Her next objection is their godparenthood: she says that the relationship makes yielding to him a serious sin. Fra Rinaldo counters with a deliberately specious comparison. Her husband, he argues, is more closely related to the child than he is, yet her husband lies with her; therefore, the less closely related godfather may do so as well.

The argument is not a serious account of kinship or religious duty. It twists the very bond that first gave Fra Rinaldo access into a rationalization for violating its expected boundaries. Madam Agnesa either believes his reasoning or pretends to do so, and yields. The two meet repeatedly, with the cover of their godparent relationship making their familiarity seem less suspicious. Their intimacy therefore rests on a double use of the same connection: first as a pretext for access, then as camouflage for the affair.

The husband returns

The deception is tested when Fra Rinaldo visits and finds Madam Agnesa alone except for a pretty young servant. He sends his companion with the girl to the pigeon loft 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. At that moment, her husband comes home and knocks at the chamber door.

Madam Agnesa recognizes the danger at once: Fra Rinaldo is out of his religious clothes, and his presence with her could expose their familiarity. She tells him to dress, take the child in his arms, and follow her account. She then opens the door with a composed manner and tells her husband that Fra Rinaldo’s arrival was providential: the child had suddenly seemed close to death, and the friar had identified worms in the boy’s body that threatened his heart. According to her story, he had taken the child away to perform a conjuration, while the servant and Fra Rinaldo’s companion said prayers elsewhere; only the child’s mother could be present for the rite.

A fabricated miracle becomes public reassurance

Madam Agnesa’s explanation gives Fra Rinaldo a role that accounts for both his presence and his having been alone with her in the locked room. Her husband, preoccupied with the supposed danger to his child, accepts the story without suspecting the affair. Fra Rinaldo emerges dressed and holding the boy, and tells the father that the child has been restored, though he had feared the boy would not live until vespers. He even instructs the husband to commission a wax image of the child and set it before the statue of St. Ambrose in gratitude for the recovery.

The child runs to his father, who embraces and kisses him, weeping as though he had received him back from the grave. That ordinary gesture supplies the visible reassurance the invented miracle needs: the father sees his child well and takes the friar’s account for the cause. The companion then returns, claiming to have completed four prayers. Fra Rinaldo says that he had managed only two before the husband arrived, but credits their combined efforts with the child’s recovery. The pair’s improvised explanation has now extended beyond the lovers’ private word: it gives the companion a supporting part and makes the supposed cure seem like a shared religious act.

Clerical satire and the limits of the episode

The episode belongs to a broader pattern of stories in which religious language and clerical authority can be turned toward appetite or fraud. Here, Fra Rinaldo’s status as a friar does not restrain his pursuit; it supplies both his social cover and the vocabulary of the lovers’ escape. The Paternoster, the conjuration, the proposed wax offering, and the appeal to St. Ambrose are made to serve a false account of events. The narrative’s comedy comes from the speed and confidence with which a near-discovery is converted into a performance of piety, and from the husband’s sincere gratitude for a cure that never took place.

The relationship’s decisive consequence in the episode is therefore not an exposure or punishment but the success of their deception: the husband accepts the child’s apparent recovery, thanks Fra Rinaldo, and remains unaware of the affair. The available account closes on this successful cover story rather than reporting a later end to the relationship. Its resolution is deliberately ironic: the bond of godparenthood that made the affair possible becomes the means by which the friar and Madam Agnesa conceal it.