Giosefo Learns How to Discipline His Wife at Goosebridge

Giosefo Learns How to Discipline His Wife at Goosebridge is a paired tale of advice misunderstood and applied, in which an episode at a bridge gives Giosefo what he takes to be a method for controlling his wife. The story sets his marital grievance beside Melisso’s complaint that his lavish hospitality has failed to win affection. Their encounters with Solomon and, later, a muleteer produce sharply different lessons: Giosefo turns an observed beating into domestic violence, while Melisso is told that affection must be genuine rather than staged for display.

Two grievances and two brief answers

Giosefo and Melisso meet while travelling to consult Solomon. Giosefo describes his wife as exceptionally contrary and says that neither prayers nor blandishments nor other attempts have corrected her. Melisso presents a different frustration: he is young and rich, spends his wealth keeping open house and entertaining his fellow townsmen, yet cannot find anyone who wishes him well. The two join company because each hopes the king can explain how to change an unsatisfactory relationship.

At Jerusalem, a baron of Solomon’s introduces them to the king. Melisso briefly states his problem and receives a single-word answer: love. He is then dismissed, and Giosefo is admitted. To his complaint about his wife, Solomon gives the instruction that he should go to Goosebridge. Neither answer comes with an explanation, and the brevity leaves the travellers uncertain whether they have been helped or mocked. The tale makes that uncertainty consequential: they carry the king’s words away without understanding them, and only an ordinary roadside scene supplies a possible interpretation.

The mule at Goosebridge

On their return journey, the travellers reach a river crossed by a fine bridge. A caravan of pack animals is passing, so they must wait. As nearly all the mules have crossed, one takes fright and refuses to go forward. Its driver first beats it moderately, then, as it shies from side to side and turns back, strikes it heavily on the head, flanks, and hindquarters. The blows continue despite the travellers’ objections that gentle handling would work better and that the man might kill the animal.

The muleteer replies that the travellers know their horses, while he knows his mule, and resumes beating it. At length the mule passes across. The scene offers Giosefo a practical spectacle rather than an explicit explanation from Solomon: resistance has ended under force, and the muleteer has prevailed. When Giosefo asks a poor man seated at the bridgehead for the place’s name and hears that it is Goosebridge, he recognizes the king’s phrase. He concludes that he had not known how to beat his wife and that the muleteer has shown him what to do. The inference is Giosefo’s; the king has not explicitly instructed him to strike her.

The lesson put into practice

The companions continue to Antioch, where Giosefo hosts Melisso for a few days. His wife receives them badly. Giosefo asks her to prepare supper according to Melisso’s directions, but she does almost the opposite. When Giosefo challenges her, she answers haughtily that she chose to do things her own way and that he can eat or leave it. Her defiance confirms, in Giosefo’s eyes, the problem that had brought him to Solomon.

Giosefo tells Melisso that they will soon see the result of the counsel about Goosebridge. He asks his guest not to interfere and recalls the muleteer’s claim to know how to handle his mule. After his wife leaves the table in anger and goes to another chamber, Giosefo takes a round stick made from young oak, follows her, grabs her by the hair, throws her down, and beats her. She first cries out and threatens him; when he continues and she is bruised, she begs for mercy and promises not to oppose his wishes again. He does not stop at her plea, but keeps striking until he is tired.

The violence is described through its physical particulars: the stick lands on her ribs, hips, and shoulders, and the narrator says that no part of her back is left unbruised. Giosefo then returns to Melisso, treats the beating as an experiment whose outcome they will inspect the next day, washes his hands, and has supper with him. The sequence makes the transfer from bridge to household unmistakable: the muleteer’s treatment of an animal becomes Giosefo’s model for asserting authority over his wife.

Unequal outcomes and the tale’s design

The next morning, Giosefo’s wife rises in pain and asks what he wants prepared for dinner. He gives his directions; when the men return, the meal has been made properly. Giosefo and Melisso take this compliance as confirmation that Solomon’s counsel, initially puzzling, has proved effective. Within the tale’s own terms, the result is a swift reversal from refusal to obedience. Yet the change is produced not through persuasion or mutual understanding but through a beating, and the wife’s promise follows repeated blows and a plea not to be killed.

Melisso’s answer comes only after he returns home and recounts his visit to Solomon to a man of understanding. That listener explains that Melisso has mistaken display for affection: his honours and services are offered not from love for the people he entertains, but from pomp and ostentation. Solomon’s command to love therefore calls for a change in the basis of Melisso’s conduct, not simply more generosity. The paired resolution contrasts two forms of advice and two responses to dissatisfaction. Giosefo takes an observed act of force as permission to impose control; Melisso learns that friendship cannot be purchased by conspicuous hospitality when it lacks personal care.

Narrated by Dioneo as an embedded tale, the episode gives its moral its force through juxtaposition. Solomon’s short answers appear obscure until later action supplies a meaning, but the two applications are not ethically equivalent: Melisso is asked to correct his own motive, while Giosefo’s wife is made to bear the cost of his interpretation. The story ends with the claim that the wife has been corrected and Melisso has become capable of being loved, leaving the contrast between self-correction and coercive correction at the center of its paired plot.