Madam Filippa

Madam Filippa is a noblewoman of Prato whose trial turns an accusation of adultery into a public challenge to an unequal law. Rather than deny her affair or flee the city, she admits it, questions the statute’s authority over women, and answers her husband’s charge with such composure and wit that the assembled crowd supports her. The story ends not only with her escape from execution, but with the statute narrowed at the provost’s suggestion.

Identity and Circumstances

Madam Filippa is described as noble, beautiful, and unusually amorous. She loves Lazzerino de' Guazzagliotri, a handsome young nobleman of the city, and the two are together in her chamber when her husband, Rinaldo de' Pugliesi, discovers them one night. The account presents their attachment as mutual: Lazzerino is a man she loves as herself, not an anonymous partner or a paid lover. That distinction becomes decisive when she later addresses a law that treats adultery and sex for money under the same penalty.

The story places her private relationship inside a sharply coercive legal setting. A statute in Prato provides that a woman caught by her husband in adultery with a lover is to be burned, without distinction from a woman who sells her favors. Rinaldo is enraged and nearly attacks the couple himself, but restrains himself because he fears the consequences for himself. He then turns to the law, whose prescribed punishment allows him to pursue her death through the court rather than by his own hand.

Choosing to Face the Charge

Friends and relatives advise Madam Filippa to deny the accusation. She refuses. She would rather appear before the provost, tell the truth, and face death with an undaunted spirit than flee and live as an outlaw, ashamed of the lover in whose arms she had spent the previous night. Her decision makes the hearing more than a contest over evidence: she will not preserve her life by disavowing either her actions or her attachment.

She appears before the provost in the company of many men and women, while those around her urge her to deny the charge. The magistrate sees her beauty, bearing, and apparent courage, and feels compassion for her; yet the statute leaves him little room to avoid the question. He explains that Rinaldo accuses her of adultery and seeks the penalty the law provides, and that he cannot condemn her unless she confesses. Madam Filippa answers without evasion: Rinaldo is her husband, he found her with Lazzerino, and she does not intend to deny it.

The Argument in Court

Her defense shifts the inquiry from whether she committed adultery to whether the law is just. Madam Filippa argues that laws should apply equally and be made with the consent of those bound by them. This statute, she says, binds only women, although women might satisfy men’s desires more readily than men could satisfy theirs. No woman consented when the law was made, she adds, and women were not even summoned to take part. She does not pretend the charge is false; instead, she challenges the authority of a rule imposed on one sex without its participation.

She then asks the provost to establish whether she has ever refused Rinaldo the sexual access he wanted. Before the magistrate can question him, Rinaldo confirms that she has granted him every pleasure whenever he asked. Madam Filippa turns his answer into the central irony of her case: if her husband has always had what he needed and wanted from her, what was she supposed to do with what remained? Her question, “Should I cast it to the dogs?”, recasts the affair as an excess her husband’s own testimony has helped define. She says it was better to gratify a gentleman who loved her than to let that excess go to waste.

Outcome and Narrative Significance

The people gathered for the hearing laugh at her argument and cry out that she is right. At the provost’s urging, they amend the statute before leaving court: it is henceforth to apply only to women who make default to their husbands for money. The change does not make the story’s society sexually equal; it records a narrower law, not the abolition of the gendered rule. But Madam Filippa’s frankness has forced the crowd to distinguish a lover from a customer, and her husband’s accusation has supplied the testimony that helps her expose the statute’s terms.

Rinaldo leaves the court in shame after gaining nothing from his attempt to have her condemned. Madam Filippa returns home joyful and free, as though raised from the flames. In the story Filostrato introduces, the reversal depends on her refusal to let the hearing remain a simple test of guilt: her confession gives the court no factual denial to seize upon, while her argument makes the law itself answer for its unequal reach. Her wit saves her life, alters the rule’s stated application, and makes public speech the means by which a private accusation is turned against the accuser.