Masetto Pretends to Be Mute to Enter the Nunnery

Masetto of Lamporecchio’s assumed muteness is the practical disguise that gets him into a women’s convent and the secret that enables a chain of encounters the convent’s rules are meant to prevent. A strong young laborer, he uses silence to pass as harmless, wins employment through useful work, and conceals his understanding while the nuns mistake him for incapable of reporting what happens. When the abbess’s demands make the deception physically unsustainable, Masetto speaks, and the convent turns his supposed recovery into a story of miraculous healing. His calculated silence thus becomes both his means of entry and the leverage with which he secures a workable place in the household.

Identity and Premise

Masetto is a young laborer from Lamporecchio. His opportunity arises when Nuto, a former gardener at the convent, returns home dissatisfied with his pay and describes the work there. Nuto had tended a fine garden and performed other small tasks, but complained that the nuns repeatedly criticized and interrupted him. His account tells Masetto both that the convent needs a gardener and that it is populated by young women. Masetto is drawn to the prospect of entering their company, but recognizes that his age and appearance might make the convent refuse him.

He therefore decides to pretend to be unable to speak. The device is not a response to an actual impairment: Masetto later explains that his muteness was assumed, not natural. The story makes the performed condition a strategic concealment, allowing him to be physically present while others presume that he cannot understand or disclose their words. That gap between what the convent believes and what Masetto knows drives the episode’s reversals.

Securing a Place in the Convent

Masetto travels to the convent with an axe and presents himself as a poor beggar. Using gestures, he asks the bailiff for food and offers to split wood in return. The bailiff gives him something to eat and sets him to work on logs Nuto had been unable to split; Masetto quickly finishes them. He then helps cut firewood and carries it home on an ass. These demonstrations of strength and usefulness persuade the bailiff to keep him for several days.

When the abbess asks who he is, the bailiff describes Masetto as a poor deaf-and-mute man taken in out of charity. He suggests that Masetto could tend the garden, a service the convent needs, and that the nuns would have little reason to fear a man supposedly unable to make advances or report what he saw. The abbess agrees that he should be kept, provided he is fed and given shoes and an old hood. Masetto overhears the conversation while pretending to sweep. The convent thus hires him not despite the disguise but partly because its leaders consider that disguise a guarantee of safety.

The bailiff tests Masetto’s ability to work the garden and shows him his duties. Masetto complies, and day after day he cultivates the grounds. The nuns tease and mock him, assuming that he cannot understand them; the abbess, too, appears to think him incapable of sexual initiative. Their confidence in his supposed silence allows Masetto to observe the household without revealing that he understands its conversations.

The Disguise Unravels

Two young nuns first turn the convent’s seclusion into an opportunity for secret intimacy with Masetto. They discuss the restrictions of their lives and the fact that men rarely enter the convent, then decide that the mute gardener is a particularly safe choice because he cannot tell anyone. Masetto has heard their conversation and waits for them to approach. He goes along with their plan while continuing to act as a simple, uncomprehending man.

Their encounters do not remain secret. Another nun sees the pair and tells two others; rather than report what they have witnessed, those nuns join them. Three more are added in time. The progression turns Masetto’s original calculation into a growing arrangement involving the convent’s nuns, while the repeated assumption that he is unable to speak protects the secret. The episode’s irony is structural: the same mistaken belief that secured his employment also makes the nuns confident that their conduct cannot become public.

The abbess eventually discovers Masetto asleep beneath an almond tree after he has been working by day and repeatedly kept company by night. Seeing him alone, she also seeks intimacy with him and keeps him in her chamber for several days. The other nuns complain that the gardener is no longer tending the garden. Masetto’s disguise has now brought him within reach of every nun, including the abbess, but it has also made him responsible for satisfying demands he cannot indefinitely meet.

Speech, Settlement, and Outcome

Unable to continue serving nine women while maintaining his silence, Masetto speaks to the abbess at night. He tells her that he cannot endure the burden and asks either to be released or for the situation to be remedied. His first words astonish her because she had believed him mute. Masetto explains that an illness had taken his speech and that it has returned only that night. The abbess accepts this account and asks what he meant by the burden he described. He then tells her what has happened with the nuns.

The disclosure forces a choice: let Masetto go and risk the convent’s disgrace, or find a way to keep the arrangement from becoming public. The abbess consults with the nuns, and they acknowledge their own secret conduct to one another. With Masetto’s consent, they agree to present his speech as having been restored through their prayers and the merit of the convent’s patron saint. The supposed recovery preserves the appearance of religious intervention while concealing the circumstances that prompted Masetto to speak.

After the bailiff dies, the nuns appoint Masetto as his replacement and distribute his duties so that he can endure the work. The position changes his standing within the household: he is no longer merely a hired gardener whose cover is wearing thin, but the convent’s bailiff, with a more sustainable role. The secret remains carefully managed until the abbess dies. By then Masetto is growing old and wishes to return home wealthy; when the affair becomes known, he is able to accomplish that aim readily.

Narrative Role and Significance

The action turns on a sequence of mistaken judgments rather than on Masetto’s strength alone. Nuto’s complaint supplies the opening; Masetto’s assessment of how he might be received produces the disguise; useful labor secures his place; and the convent’s belief that silence means both innocence and secrecy enables the encounters. The decisive reversal comes when Masetto speaks: the trait treated as permanent is revealed as a choice, and his disclosure changes the arrangement rather than simply ending it.

The story also places religious appearance beside private conduct. The convent’s explanation of Masetto’s returned speech gives the household a public account that differs from the private events known to its members. The tale does not present that explanation as a transparent miracle; it shows the nuns and abbess agreeing to it so the convent will not be defamed. Masetto’s assumed muteness, then, is not only a disguise for gaining access. It sets in motion the final concealment, in which an invented incapacity gives way to an invented recovery, and the convent’s reputation is protected through a story that its leaders knowingly arrange.