Matins

Matins functions in the tales as more than a named hour of prayer: it is a practical boundary in the night, a point at which vigil gives way to sleep, secret meetings must end, or events can be presented as signs of divine intervention. The narratives do not assign it an exact clock time, but repeatedly place it near the transition into morning. That recurring position gives Matins a double force: it belongs to the regular religious order of the day, yet it also measures private schemes that exploit or counterfeit that order.

A liturgical boundary in the night

Matins appears as the endpoint of prolonged nighttime activity. In Fra Puccio’s prescribed penance, the service is the signal that his vigil is over: after standing through the night, he may go to bed when the bell rings. The term also organizes other nocturnal action. A gentleman who has been misled by a friar’s rebuke waits until Matinsong on the following night before climbing into his mistress’s chamber. In both cases, the service marks a transition, but the actions it governs differ sharply: one man is released from a devotional vigil, while the other uses the night’s religious timetable to resume a secret affair.

Matins therefore does not simply mean that night has ended. It supplies a recognizable limit within the night, around which characters can plan. In the affair, the gentleman waits for the appointed nocturnal moment and finds the window open; his mistress welcomes him, and the two laugh at the friar whose supposed warning has in fact helped him reach her. The service’s name lends an orderly schedule to an encounter that undermines the friar’s moral authority.

The vigil imposed on Fra Puccio

Dom Felice presents Fra Puccio with a purportedly short path to blessedness. Its program lasts forty days and combines fasting and abstinence with an elaborate daily routine. At night, Fra Puccio must go to a place where he can see the sky, stand against a broad plank with his arms extended in the form of a cross, and remain there until Matins. He is to recite three hundred Paternosters and three hundred Ave Marias; when the bell sounds, he may lie down, then attend church in the morning and return again for evening prayers and the next vigil.

The scheme depends on separating Fra Puccio’s understanding of the schedule from the actual use of the household’s hours. His chosen place is beside his wife’s chamber, divided from it only by a thin wall. While Fra Puccio recites his prayers, Dom Felice visits the wife, dines with her, and stays with her through the night. When the floor shakes, Fra Puccio pauses in his prayers and asks what she is doing. She turns the moment into a joke, while he attributes the movement to the discomfort of fasting and tells her to rest. Matins thus measures not only the imposed vigil but the interval in which the monk and the wife can carry on their affair beside the unsuspecting husband.

After that disturbance, the lovers arrange a bed elsewhere in the house. Dom Felice leaves at the same hour each night, and the wife returns to her own bed before Fra Puccio comes in from his vigil. The schedule persists for the full course of penance; afterward, she continues to meet the monk discreetly. The ending reverses Fra Puccio’s spiritual expectation: he believes his discipline is earning Paradise for himself, but the narrator’s comic conclusion assigns the supposed benefit to Dom Felice and the wife, who have used the vigil to secure their own pleasure.

Matins and the staged return of Ferondo

In the episode of Ferondo, Matins belongs not to a private household timetable but to the monastery’s public routine. After Ferondo has lain in the tomb for ten months, he sees daylight through a crevice and begins pushing at the lid, believing himself alive again. The monks have just finished Matins when they hear his voice and see him trying to emerge. Their fear gives the abbot an opportunity to stage the discovery as a manifestation of divine power: he calls for the cross and holy water and leads them to the tomb.

Ferondo comes out pale from his long confinement and credits the abbot’s prayers, along with those of Saint Benedict and his wife, with delivering him from the pains of Purgatory. The abbot then presents the event as a miracle, and the monks sing the Miserere. Matins supplies the immediate setting for this apparent return from the dead: the service has ended, the monks are gathered, and Ferondo’s voice turns their ordinary morning routine into a spectacle that can be given a religious interpretation. Once back in his village, Ferondo elaborates that interpretation with invented accounts of the souls in Purgatory, while his wife conceals the true circumstances behind his disappearance and return.

Narrative significance

Across these episodes, Matins joins religious observance to the management of time. Fra Puccio’s vigil gives Dom Felice cover for an affair; the gentleman’s wait until Matinsong becomes part of a successful clandestine visit; and the monks’ completion of the service frames Ferondo’s emergence as a miracle. The hour is not itself the cause of any deception. Rather, its dependable place in the night gives characters a schedule to exploit and observers a setting in which to misread events.

The contrast is especially pointed because Matins is associated with prayer, communal worship, and the beginning of the day, while the scenes around it expose private desire, gullibility, and manufactured holiness. The tales make the same boundary serve different purposes: an endpoint for penance, a cue for lovers, and a threshold for public wonder. Its recurrence turns a familiar liturgical hour into a narrative instrument, capable of making deception look orderly and fraud appear sacred.