Italian Renaissance Tales by Anthony Mortimer

Author:Anthony Mortimer [Mortimer, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780198794967
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-08-07T00:00:00+00:00

Giovanni Brevio

Madonna Lisabetta

Rime e prose volgari (Vernacular Poetry and Prose)

Left a widow, Madonna Lisabetta falls in love with her son who is himself deeply in love with her maid. Thinking that he is with the maid, he lies with his mother who becomes pregnant and gives birth to a daughter. The son then becomes this girl’s brother, father, and husband.

Fair and loving ladies, there are certainly many unfortunate lovers, but no less great, I believe, is the number of strange events and wonderful effects that result from ever-deceptive love. And since the whole world today is full of such happenings, I do not think it unfitting to relate one of them which happened not so long ago. I am happy to do this, not only to raise your spirits, but also to offer some justification for you before those harsh and hypocritical men who look upon your actions with a stern face and condemn them far more severely than they deserve, as if you were not made of flesh and blood and created, moreover, with a nature more delicate and fragile than theirs. But if such men looked on themselves and their own actions with an impartial eye, they would surely be more gentle and compassionate judges and not hurry—or rather rush—to blame and shame your every action and motion, however insignificant. It is as if they alone were rightly privileged to say and do whatever they like, while you must behave like statues. I do not deny that immortal praise is due to those women, and men too, who quench the fiery and lustful carnal appetites with the pure water of morality and live decent, chaste, or at least prudent lives. But if we really consider the force of concupiscent love, the multitude of its impulses, and the fragility of human nature, then we shall conclude that those women who stumble when burning desire drives them into its snares are more deserving of compassion than of harsh condemnation. It is my pleasure, therefore, to tell you the story of how a worthy gentlewoman, possessed by excessive love, succeeded in satisfying her desire.

In our city,* where love causes more strange adventures than anywhere else in the world, there lived not so long ago a beautiful and noble lady called Lisabetta. The death of her husband had left her a widow, with only one son of about fifteen years of age, a youth as handsome and charming as any in Venice. With this son the mother fell passionately in love, with a carnal and lascivious desire so fierce that she could have no joy except when watching or thinking of him. And the noble lady found this love all the more difficult to bear in that her great sense of decency forbade her to reveal it. Thus, from day to day, as her son grew yet more handsome and gracious in his ways, so the flames of love rose ever higher in the heart of his mother. Knowing her desire to

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