Lauretta, teller of the abbot and Ferondo story

Lauretta is the storyteller who turns the third day’s attention to the deception of Ferondo, a living man mistaken for dead and then made to believe that he has returned from purgatory. She introduces the tale as a true account with the appearance of falsehood. Its central reversal is that a supposed miracle, accepted as proof of holiness, is the work of an abbot exploiting religious trust for private desire.

Identity and place in the storytelling

Lauretta speaks after the company has heard a long story, and the queen signals her to begin. Her contribution belongs to the Decameron’s shared storytelling arrangement: the company’s tales offer diversion, and the larger work presents such storytelling as solace for women who may have fewer ways than men to distract themselves from sorrow. Lauretta’s own tale gives that entertainment a sharp edge, making deception, clerical authority, and public credulity its materials.

Her opening establishes how the audience should approach what follows. She calls the account true, while acknowledging that its events seem more like falsehood than fact. She says that the preceding story, involving someone lamented and buried in place of another, has brought this subject to mind. That transition makes burial and mistaken identity a bridge between tales, while preparing listeners for an episode in which appearances will repeatedly be mistaken for reality.

The tale she chooses

Lauretta sets the story at an abbey in a secluded place. Its abbot is regarded as holy and just, and is careful to conceal his conduct so that hardly anyone knows or suspects his weakness for women. A wealthy farmer named Ferondo becomes intimate with him. Ferondo is dull-witted and simple, qualities that amuse the abbot; but he is also shrewd in guarding his beautiful wife. The abbot falls passionately in love with her and despairs of gaining access to her while her husband remains watchful.

The tale’s central stratagem makes Ferondo appear dead. After he swallows a powder, he is entombed, and the abbot has him taken from the sepulchre and confined, presenting the confinement as purgatory. In Ferondo’s absence, the abbot enjoys his wife. The plot thus turns the signs of religious authority into instruments of concealment: the abbot’s reputation helps make a staged spiritual ordeal credible, while the farmer’s credulity allows the private deception to pass as sacred intervention.

Apparent resurrection and public belief

After nearly ten months, Ferondo wakes and sees light through a crevice in the tomb. He believes he has been restored to life. When he emerges, he throws himself at the abbot’s feet, crediting the abbot’s prayers, the prayers of Saint Benedict, and his wife with delivering him from purgatory. He announces that he means to kiss his wife as soon as he finds her. The abbot, in turn, performs astonishment at the supposed miracle and has the monks sing a penitential hymn.

The villagers first flee from Ferondo, but when they accept that he is alive, they question him about the afterlife. Ferondo answers as if newly wise, inventing elaborate accounts of purgatory and reporting revelations attributed to an angel. His experience has taught him nothing about the abbot’s fraud; instead, the deception gives him a new authority among those who hear him. He returns home and resumes possession of his goods, believing that his wife’s child is his. The child is born in due course and named Benedict Ferondi, a name that carries the story’s religious language into the household produced by the abbot’s deception.

Narrative significance

Lauretta’s story depends on a widening contrast between what the characters claim to know and what the audience has been told. The abbot’s apparent holiness conceals his sexual misconduct; Ferondo’s supposed return from death conceals a drug and a period of imprisonment; and the villagers’ wonder gives invented accounts of the afterlife a public life of their own. Each new appearance of sanctity or supernatural knowledge rests on a practical fraud.

The tale’s conclusion does not expose the deception to the people who believe in it. Ferondo is welcomed back, mistaken for a man made wise by purgatory, and allowed to live under a false understanding of his child’s parentage. That ending sharpens Lauretta’s opening distinction between truth and seeming: the audience knows how the miracle was manufactured, while the characters preserve its reputation. Her contribution is therefore not simply a comic trick but a story about how authority and belief can make a lie socially convincing.