May

May serves as the seasonal measure of abundance in the story of Madam Dianora and Messer Ansaldo Gradense. When Madam Dianora sets her persistent suitor an apparently impossible task, she asks him to make a garden in January look as though it were May; the contrast turns the month into a vivid test of love, ingenuity, and the peril of promises.

May as a Seasonal Measure

Madam Dianora lives in Udine, in Friuli, and is married to Gilberto. Messer Ansaldo Gradense, a renowned baron, loves her and repeatedly sends messages seeking her affection. To discourage his pursuit, she names a condition she expects he cannot meet: in the coming January, a garden near the city must be full of green grass, flowers, and trees in full leaf, just as it would be in May. The month is not a date for the promised garden; it is the image of spring that makes the winter demand seem beyond ordinary possibility.

A Winter Garden Made to Resemble May

Messer Ansaldo nevertheless seeks help, sending inquiries to find someone who can accomplish the task. He agrees to pay a man who offers to do it by nigromantic art. On the night before the calends of January, while the cold is extreme and everything is covered with snow and ice, the man works in a meadow beside the city. By morning, it appears to those who see it as a beautiful garden, with grass, trees, and fruits of every kind. Ansaldo gathers its finest fruits and fairest flowers and secretly sends them to Madam Dianora as proof that he has met her condition.

The contrast between the frozen surroundings and the flourishing meadow gives May its force in the episode. Its springlike fullness is not merely promised: the garden presents it in the depths of winter. Madam Dianora visits with other women of the city and marvels at what she sees. The display, however, makes the promise she had offered as an escape from Ansaldo’s advances feel like an obligation, and she returns home distressed.

The Promise and Its Consequences

The garden’s appearance does not settle what Madam Dianora must do. She had set the condition to rid herself of an importunate suitor, not because she wished to yield to him; when Gilberto presses her to explain her unhappiness, she eventually tells him what happened. He first becomes angry, then distinguishes her intention from the danger of having listened to Ansaldo’s messages and entered into terms with him. May’s impossible-seeming garden thus turns a seasonal comparison into a moral and marital predicament: the proof of Ansaldo’s ingenuity brings the promise into the open, but the evidence here ends as Gilberto directs his wife to seek release from it while preserving her chastity if she can.