Vespers

Vespers, or evensong, is the evening prayer period that helps organize the daily schedule in the story of Fra Puccio. Its place in that schedule is consequential: after daytime observances, Fra Puccio is instructed to attend church for prayers, then resume his motionless night vigil, while the monk uses the same hours to meet Fra Puccio’s wife.

Meaning and Place in the Day

The text uses evensong as a recognizable point in the sequence of devotional activities. Fra Puccio is told to attend church at that hour and say prayers, before returning, as Compline approaches, to the posture prescribed for his penance. Vespers therefore belongs to the evening’s transition from communal worship to the solitary vigil that is supposed to last until matins.

Vespers in Fra Puccio’s Routine

The evening observance is one part of a demanding program. The monk prescribes a forty-day fast and abstinence, a nightly vigil with Fra Puccio standing and his arms extended, three hundred Paternosters and as many Ave Marys during the night, and a further visit to church in the forenoon for three masses and fifty prayers of each kind. Fra Puccio is also to return to church at Vespers for additional prayers. The sequence makes the evening service a recurring obligation within an elaborate, supposedly penitential timetable.

The Schedule’s Double Use

The routine appears to direct Fra Puccio toward religious discipline, but it also creates the opportunity for the monk’s deception. Fra Puccio’s vigil takes place beside the chamber where his wife sleeps, separated from it only by a slight wall. While Fra Puccio follows the prescribed exercises, the monk comes to sup with the wife and spends the night with her, leaving around matins. Vespers is not itself the source of the trick; its position in the daily schedule helps frame the evening that the monk has appropriated for his own purposes.

Narrative Significance

By placing Vespers between church prayer and the overnight vigil, the story gives the deception a precise rhythm: worship, return to the vigil, the wife’s clandestine meeting, and the monk’s departure at matins. The religious timetable lends the scheme an appearance of spiritual order, even as its prescribed discipline is manipulated to conceal adultery. Vespers thus functions both as a marker of the day’s devotional sequence and as part of the contrast between the penance Fra Puccio believes he is performing and the events occurring just beyond his reach.