Masetto’s Secret Affairs at the Convent is a comic tale of disguise, desire, and institutional cover-up, in which a young laborer turns his supposed inability to speak into the means of entering a convent and concealing his affairs there. The deception that first gives him access also enables the secret to persist: when the arrangement becomes physically unsustainable, the nuns recast his restored speech as a miracle, and Masetto eventually leaves rich and a father. Filostrato tells the story as an example of how a contrivance meant to silence its user can become the instrument of his advancement.

The gardener’s vacancy and Masetto’s plan

The story begins at a convent renowned for sanctity, which the narrator deliberately leaves unnamed. It has only eight nuns and an abbess, all young, and maintains a fine garden. Its former gardener, Nuto, returns to Lamporecchio dissatisfied with his small wage and frustrated by the nuns’ constant corrections. Besides tending the garden, his work had included gathering firewood and drawing water. He recounts how one nun would direct him to put something in one place, another would order something else, and a third might take the spade from him to show that he was doing the work incorrectly. Nuto’s account presents the vacancy as both a practical job and a chance to live among women whose conduct he finds trying.

Masetto, a robust and good-looking young laborer, hears Nuto’s description and immediately wants the position. He hides his purpose from Nuto, outwardly agreeing that it is hard for a man to live with women. The performance is already taking shape: he must appear to share Nuto’s complaint while privately imagining what the convent might offer him. He knows he can perform the work, but fears that his youth and looks will make the convent refuse him. His solution is to pretend to be deaf and dumb, reasoning that strangers far away will not know him and that a mute worker will seem harmless.

He sets out carrying an axe around his neck and presents himself at the convent as a beggar. The bailiff gives him food, then tests his strength by setting him to split logs Nuto had been unable to manage. Masetto finishes quickly. The bailiff takes him to cut firewood and has him bring the load home on an ass; Masetto performs those tasks well too. His practical usefulness secures a trial period before the abbess has even decided whether to keep him.

Work, concealment, and the first affairs

When the abbess sees Masetto, the bailiff describes him as a poor deaf-mute whom charity has brought into the convent. He praises the young man’s strength and suggests that, if he can tend the garden, he would be useful—and unlikely to pursue the nuns. The abbess agrees that he should be kept, provided with shoes and an old hood, well treated, and given plenty to eat. Masetto hears this while pretending to sweep the courtyard and privately recognizes the irony: the very appearance that reassures the abbess will serve his actual purpose.

Once hired, he works in the garden from day to day. The nuns tease him and speak obscenely in his presence because they assume he cannot understand them; the abbess appears to suppose that he is not only speechless but sexually incapable. Their confidence in his silence becomes the condition of the first encounter. One day, after a hard morning’s labor, Masetto lies down as if asleep. Two young nuns approach and discuss their confinement and their curiosity about sexual pleasure. One proposes trying the mute because he cannot tell anyone what happens. When the other worries about pregnancy, her companion dismisses the danger as something they can address if it arises. Masetto hears the plan and waits for them to act.

The bolder nun leads him by the hand to a hut used for shelter from the rain. Masetto responds to her without resistance; afterward, she gives way to her companion, who also takes her turn. Their expectation that he will keep their secret proves well founded, and the women return to him on later occasions. A sister eventually sees the two in the act from her cell window and tells two others. The first thought of reporting them gives way to an agreement to join them. The remaining nuns likewise become participants, until the abbess alone has not yet learned what is happening.

The abbess joins the secret

The abbess discovers Masetto herself while walking alone in the garden during hot weather. He is asleep beneath an almond tree, worn down by his daytime work and his repeated nighttime visits; his clothes have shifted so that his body is exposed. Seeing him alone, the abbess succumbs to the same appetite she had seen no reason to fear in the supposedly harmless gardener. She wakes him and takes him to her chamber, keeping him there for several days. The other nuns complain that the gardener is neglecting the garden, unaware at first that the abbess has claimed him for herself. She eventually sends him back to his lodging but continues to summon him, and her demands add to the burden already created by the other eight women.

Masetto’s mute disguise has brought him what he sought, but its terms now threaten to exhaust him. He tells the abbess that one man cannot satisfy nine women and that the strain has left him unable to continue. His complaint exposes the arrangement’s arithmetic as well as its cost: the household consists of eight nuns and an abbess, and the gardener has become the shared secret of all of them. His speech astonishes the abbess, who had believed him mute. Masetto explains that he had lost his speech through illness and has only now recovered it. He also recounts what has happened among the nuns, making clear that the abbess is not the only one who has been using him.

A miracle as cover, and Masetto’s return

The abbess understands that her sisters have been no wiser than she was. Rather than let Masetto leave and expose the convent, she consults with the nuns. They admit to one another what each has secretly done and, with Masetto’s consent, devise a public explanation: people nearby are to believe that prayer and the merits of the convent’s patron saint have restored his speech after a long silence. The story thus converts a false disability into a purported miracle, protecting the institution by making its shared misconduct appear to be evidence of its sanctity.

The convent’s bailiff has recently died, so the nuns appoint Masetto to the position. They arrange his duties so that he can endure them, and he continues to father many children there. The concealment lasts until the abbess’s death and until Masetto has grown old. By then he wants to return home wealthy, and the truth becomes known; he is able to accomplish his wish without difficulty. He returns to the place from which he had set out with an axe around his neck, now rich and a father, though spared the trouble and expense of raising the children.

The ending makes Masetto’s successful deception more than a trick of entry. His assumed muteness lets the convent’s inhabitants speak and act without fear of disclosure; his eventual speech forces the household to choose between exposure and a new fiction. The nuns preserve their reputation by presenting that speech as a holy gift, while Masetto converts his service and secrecy into wealth and a secure position. The tale’s final irony is that the convent’s supposed miracle and its reputation for sanctity are sustained not by the truth of its conduct, but by a story agreed upon by the people most implicated in concealing it.