An Irreverent Confession in a Florentine Rustic Comedy

A comedy in rustic language printed in Florence around 1520, La Biagia da Decomano, centres on the marriage of two peasants before the village priest. The work is built chiefly on a combination of two popular contemporary genres: poems in praise of country girls such as La Nencia da Barberino and Luigi Pulci’s La Beca da Dicomano, and the mogliazzi or mariazi that depict a peasant wedding. However, the marriage negotiations and ceremony enacted in La Biagia include another element, a monologue by the priest that parodies the sacrament of confession. This is akin to other sacred parodies, such as Bacchic masses and confessions by the figure of Carnival, and yet is distinctive in character. Here both the focus and the language of the play move from the countryside into Florence and what Guido Ruggiero has called its masculine spaces. The priest invites the couple to pray for help from a long list of taverns in and around the city, several of which were brothels or places frequented by prostitutes, and from the sustenance they offer to customers. ‘Amor divino’ becomes ‘amor di vino’; the saints to whom prayers are addressed are foodstuffs that have suffered martyrdom to satisfy the bodily appetites of mankind. In this essay, the annotated text of the ‘Confessione’, in verse and prose, is introduced by a discussion of its combination of religious parody and celebration of food and drink.