The Abbot Makes Ferondo Believe He Is in Purgatory

The Abbot Makes Ferondo Believe He Is in Purgatory is a deception built from a staged death, a hidden prison, and the authority of a fabricated afterlife. By making Ferondo interpret beatings and meals as divine punishment, the abbot keeps him captive and ignorant while continuing his affair with Ferondo’s wife. The episode’s comic machinery depends on the gap between what Ferondo believes and what the reader knows: the supposed purgatory is a concealed vault, and its punishments serve a living man’s private purposes.

A Death Staged as a Passage

After Ferondo fails to recover his senses, the abbot performs concern, calls for cold water, and tries remedies as though he were attempting to revive a man overcome by a bodily illness. The monks find no sign of life in Ferondo’s pulse and conclude that he is dead. His wife and relatives are summoned; after mourning him with her women, she sees him placed in a tomb. She returns home and says that she will devote herself to the little son she already has and to the management of Ferondo’s wealth.

The appearance of death gives the abbot the opportunity to remove Ferondo without attracting notice. At night, he and a trusted monk from Bologna take Ferondo out of the tomb and carry him to a lightless vault used as a prison for monks who have failed in their duties. They strip off his clothes and dress him as a monk, then lay him on straw to await his recovery. The secret is closely contained: the Bolognese monk has been instructed in the plan, while no one else is told what has happened.

The Fabricated Purgatory

When Ferondo wakes, the Bolognese monk enters with a terrifying noise, seizes him, and beats him with a rod. Disoriented, Ferondo asks where he is; the monk answers that he is in purgatory and confirms that he is dead. The explanation turns an assault into an apparent sentence from beyond the grave. Ferondo’s questions and grief for his wife and child make clear that he accepts the monk’s account as the only explanation available to him.

The meals reinforce the fiction rather than expose it. When the monk brings food and drink, Ferondo is astonished that the dead eat. He is told that the food was sent by his former wife to the church for masses for his soul and that God has permitted it to be passed on to him. Ferondo blesses her generosity, eats eagerly, and then complains that the wine is poor, wishing she had sent wine from the cask by the wall. Even his ordinary appetite and complaints are drawn into the counterfeit afterlife: the food is real, but its supposed route from his wife through the church is part of the story that keeps him deceived.

Punishment, Jealousy, and the Hidden Affair

After Ferondo eats, the monk beats him again. He explains that the blows are ordained twice each day because Ferondo was jealous despite having, as the monk puts it, the best woman in the country for a wife. Ferondo admits that he was jealous and calls his wife kind and sweet, but says he did not know that God considered jealousy wrong. The monk presents the beatings as instruction he should have accepted while still alive, and as a lesson to remember if he is ever returned to the world.

Ferondo promises that, if he comes back, he will be the best of husbands: he will neither beat his wife nor speak harshly to her, apart from complaining about the wine and the candles he believes she failed to send. The monk explains that he too is dead and punished for having praised a jealous master; his assigned task is to feed and beat Ferondo until God decides otherwise. He also says that thousands of other people are present but invisible and inaudible to Ferondo. The tale gives the imagined purgatory its own rules and population, while keeping Ferondo sealed within an account that only his captors can verify.

For ten months, the monk maintains this routine of food, drink, and beatings. At the same time, the abbot repeatedly visits Ferondo’s wife. The abbot sometimes travels in Ferondo’s clothes, and villagers who encounter him believe that Ferondo is walking about the countryside doing penance. Their reports reach the wife, who knows what is really happening. The false sighting thus extends the deception beyond the vault: it makes the abbot’s movements look like evidence of Ferondo’s penance, while the wife alone among those hearing the stories understands their true cause.

Pregnancy and the Return to Life

The arrangement changes when Ferondo’s wife becomes pregnant and tells the abbot. They decide that Ferondo must be returned to life without delay so that she can claim the child is his. The abbot calls to Ferondo in a counterfeit voice, telling him that God has granted his return and that he will have a son by his wife. He is told to name the child Benedict, in recognition of the prayers of the abbot and his wife and of St Benedict. Ferondo responds with delight and gratitude, welcoming the supposed divine favor and blessing his wife.

The abbot then puts enough of the earlier powder into the wine to keep Ferondo asleep for about four hours. With the Bolognese monk’s help, he dresses Ferondo in his own clothes and secretly restores him to the tomb in which he had been buried. The return is therefore staged as another miracle, though it is managed through the same practical means as the imprisonment: costume, concealment, and control of what Ferondo can know. The announced son provides the cover for the pregnancy, while Ferondo’s belief in the abbot’s account completes the deception.

Narrative Significance

The episode makes religious explanation a tool of immediate power. The abbot and his accomplice do not merely hide Ferondo; they supply him with a complete account of his condition, its cause, its rules, and its eventual end. The rod, the food sent for masses, the unseen inhabitants, and the promised release all make the invented purgatory feel orderly to its prisoner. Yet the reader can see that this apparent moral order has been constructed to facilitate the abbot’s affair and to keep its husband out of the way.

The lesson Ferondo is made to learn is equally compromised. He is told that jealousy is a sin deserving twice-daily punishment, and he promises to return as a more accommodating husband. But the abbot’s supposed spiritual discipline is inseparable from deception and self-interest; Ferondo’s submission is secured not through understanding but through his captors’ control of his body and information. The final return to life does not undo the ten months of counterfeit punishment. It transfers Ferondo back into the household with a story that conceals the pregnancy and leaves him grateful to the very figures who engineered his captivity.