R. A. Lafferty

Antonino Vescovo

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Introduction

Reading Antonino Vescovo

Antonino Vescovo follows a Florentine boy through childhood, artistic friendships, monastic study, and travel. Antoninus seeks a holy life. His mother disputes the lessons he takes from saints’ lives, Casimirro teaches him to observe, and Maddelena troubles his understanding of beauty, conduct, and salvation.

Conversations give way to poems, catalogues, legends, and essays. Chapter 7 presents nine writings attributed to Antoninus. In Chapters 9 and 10, the young monks gather during a storm. Maddelena joins them, argues with them, and leaves. Abraham continues speaking after the others have gone.

The chapter summaries follow the scenes in order. Character profiles, accounts of embedded works, and discussions of recurring subjects accompany the glossary and historical notes.

Chapter Summaries

1. Of Chimeras and Childhood

The narrator begins with a prophecy about Florence, then lets the stars and the devil dispute the purpose of Antoninus’s future learning. The stars promise an interpreter of a beautiful creation; the devil predicts a scholar whose symbols and books will conceal God from him. Childhood dreams take Antoninus into earlier human lives. A later dream carries him beyond sensible images into the joy of Heaven. The narrator adds that some readers will think he invented this dream.

Antoninus’s devotion is intense and frequently comic. His mother’s dancing song irritates him; his fasting and sleepless study alarm her. Obedience to her interrupts the penances he enjoys. At seven he finds a theological pattern in multiplication and lectures a sailor about charms. At eight he examines the habits that make people laugh at him and learns to judge particular people before condemning them. At fourteen he decides to enter the Dominicans. His mother finally lets him walk to Fiesole, where a father sends him home with the Decretals to learn. The book humbles a boy who had scarcely suspected the extent of his ignorance.

1. Florence and the rival predictions

Totila’s reported prophecy promises Florence an illustrious future. The narrator doubts whether Totila uttered it but declares it fulfilled. The stars foresee a boy who will understand the wonders of creation through images and allegories. The devil expects those same habits to make him mistake his learning for God.

2. Dreams before remembered history

The narrator describes childhood dreaming as a return through racial history. Antoninus’s dreams include frightening transformations, friendly animals, a blue holy room, and an ancient Rome full of remembered objects and sensations. The narrator attributes his later historical knowledge to these dreams as well as diligent study and natural aptitude.

3. Mother, music, and penance

The narrator places Antoninus’s birth in 1389. His mother was sixteen when he was born. She adapts one dancing tune to prayer, baking, conversation, and calling chickens. Antoninus dries bread for his austere breakfast and lets birds eat part before he takes the rest.

4. Study and the marketplace

His mother removes his candle and asks him to eat and sleep properly. He obeys, discovering that surrendering his chosen penances is itself a penance. His delight in the multiplication table leads into market encounters. He censures a sailor’s Venus charm, then accepts his claim to possess the dice cast for Christ’s garments and thinks they belong in a church.

5. Heaven and correction

The dream’s final joy exceeds color, sound, space, and time. Antoninus cannot recall it on waking, although it remains an ideal and promise. He later examines why people laugh at him. He has spoken archaically, condemned people he knows nothing about, and scarcely considered that he might be wrong. He stops attacking merchants without knowing their conduct, gives up dresses, keeps animals, and becomes easier company.

6. The first journey to Fiesole

The discussion of vocation includes his mother’s practical objection to Saint Abraham of Edessa abandoning his bride. At Fiesole the father tests Antoninus’s confidence by asking about ecclesiastical law. Antoninus knows nothing of it. He receives a densely written book whose memorization he mistakenly supposes others can accomplish in hours. His mother welcomes the delay and he begins studying at home.

2. Of Artists and Actors

While learning the Decretals, Antoninus takes up drawing, ballad writing, and notebook keeping under Casimirro’s influence. Casimirro studies Florence, its people, their hands, and the resemblance between human and animal eyes. He confidently expounds palmistry. Antoninus tests him by bringing children to be read, but the narrator explains how their predictability makes his demonstrations easier.

Antoninus’s notebook considers fictional dialogue, changing proverbs, the effects of artistic materials, the difficulty of representing sensation, popular generalizations, imagined music in rain, and the danger of writing to suit established expectations. The narrator subsequently criticizes its borrowed opinions and sweeping claims. A comic ranking of arts by expense explains why the two boys write more than they paint. Their only model, thirteen-year-old Maddelena, poses as saints, ordinary girls, and pagan figures. Antoninus protests the more provocative poses and finally returns to his book when Casimirro draws her with red garters. He remains their friend but withdraws from what he finds tempting.

1. Learning to observe

A ballad about the Holy Family and a stubborn donkey precedes the account of Casimirro’s influence. Drawing makes both boys attend to things they would otherwise miss. Casimirro reads the left hand as an inheritance and the right as an account that changes with its owner’s life. He claims he can reconstruct a whole person from the hands, though the narrator says he cannot. His demonstrations succeed partly because Antoninus brings predictable subjects.

2. Notebook arguments

The notebook objects to prose habits becoming habits of thought. It explains how proverbs survive through changing interpretations and how pencil and paint can suggest emotions absent from the scene represented. A listener hears elaborate imaginary music in the rain. Antoninus’s final argument asks writers to lead readers beyond the habits and opinions they already hold.

3. The narrator corrects the critic

The narrator finds Antoninus borrowing what he has recently read, filling space without advancing an argument, and making assertions beyond his experience. Antoninus nevertheless resolves to improve public judgment about art.

4. Materials, models, and temptation

Sculpture, music, painting, literature, and cultivated eating are ranked by the costs of their necessary materials. Maddelena poses without payment when free from work. The catalogue places saints beside street figures, ladies, and pagan beings. She wants to become a saint and loves performing. Antoninus’s attraction to her sends him back to the Decretals, while their friendship continues.

3. Of Acolytes and Agnostics

Antoninus returns to Fiesole having memorized the Decretals. The narrator gives twelve months for the task, then recounts a legend adding one day, during which God holds him at the final page. In the monastery he studies, prays, and works in the fields. His interests include biblical languages, pagan philosophy, music, legends, riddles, and ecclesiastical law. A quotation attributed to the Catholic Encyclopedia introduces a catalogue of Dominican scholars and artists.

Antoninus grows impatient with intellectual laziness. He befriends the painter Giovanni and joins Abraham, Nicolo, Bertolommeo, and Maurizio in nocturnal conversation. They discuss the scale of the universe, Incarnation, divine threats, honest doubt, guilt, dream sin, and the loss of faith. Nicolo recites his Ode to a Wooden Madonna; Abraham tells of the Virgin overtaking the damned to offer help. Nicolo then asks whether Christ may have authorized communities outside the familiar apostolic succession.

1. Formation and the appetite for knowledge

The projected life of disciplined learning is compared to the scheme in Love’s Labor’s Lost. Antoninus studies languages alongside accounts of survivors of the Flood, repeated lives, fairies, and lost ancient music. He thinks riddles may preserve fragments of ancient thought whose original meaning has been lost. The narrator also attributes a capacity for study to racial inheritance.

2. Dominican learning and its difficulties

The encyclopedia quotation leads into a list of Dominican scholars and artists, followed by Antoninus’s Regola a ben vivere. Antoninus challenges professions of humble ignorance when they excuse failure in an intellectual vocation. He argues that people must maintain the mind as they care for the body. His companions will not agree that stupidity should be treated like moral depravity.

3. The circle

Giovanni listens and sketches; Abraham has joined for the opportunity to study; Nicolo prays and mocks; Bertolommeo remembers abundantly without selecting well; Maurizio looks like an owl. Nicolo opens the problem of innumerable worlds and repeated Incarnations. Abraham answers that effortless creation need not avoid waste. The subsequent dispute expands to space, other gods, and the insufficiency of familiar analogies.

4. Doubt, guilt, and faith

Abraham describes the fear of a God who punishes suspension of belief. The ensuing exchange weighs principled doubt against pride. Antoninus argues that both creation and a beginningless world confront reason with something it cannot readily conceive. The conversation turns to the unreliability of guilt as a measure of sin and the injustice of a legend damning a boy for a dream. The claim that lost innocence leads to lost faith is also questioned.

5. Nicolo’s poem and Abraham’s legend

Nicolo’s Ode to a Wooden Madonna remembers devotion, discovery, disillusion, and the continuing wish that God were present. Its candle goes out in darkness and sleet. Abraham responds with the Virgin’s attempt to help people already condemned to Hell. Nicolo then asks whether Christ authorized communities outside the familiar apostolic succession. The answer condemns particular sects for pride and hostility; Nicolo insists that other communities may have existed.

4. Of Taverns and Topers

After several years at Fiesole, Antoninus visits Florence while still a novice without final vows. Casimirro and Maddelena meet him with an ox cart and lead him through taverns, where he can see what he would relinquish by entering the order. Three young singers list kinds of popular song. A tavern couple quarrels elaborately over seduction, a poet answers questions in comic verse, and a stranger offers a Syriac defence of Delilah. Antoninus takes an eager interest in their songs and stories.

Another encounter with the singers, further tavern comedy, and the poet’s unsuccessful French courtship lead to Maddelena’s dance within four candles. She invites Antoninus to become her consort and imagines their future attraction for writers of saints’ lives. He refuses, defending his vocation as adventurous and demanding. Their exchange turns into stories about a saint deceiving the devil and a milkmaid deceiving a king. Antoninus later dreams erotically of Maddelena and wakes into a moonlit world that appears theatrical and enchanted. The narrator says he has sinned in his sleep, although the novices earlier rejected a legend in which a boy was damned for a dream.

1. The street singers

The three girls take turns listing songs, with familiar situations, miniature plots, emotional formulas, and improbable phrases. Antoninus wants to preserve the songs and follows them to hear more. They interrupt their catalogue to ask for money. Maddelena knows them and says they earn well.

2. Talk, drink, and rival stories

The woman tells of a Sleeping Beauty who prefers her dream to the prince, answering her companion’s appeal for love. Drinking prompts a reflection on the separation of ego and id and on the conventions of bodily identity. The poet recites six quatrains. The stranger judges a performance by its manner, then claims to own Delilah’s account of Samson in Syriac. Antoninus applies the story to Maddelena’s beauty, suggesting that its apparent power depends on presentation.

3. More songs and the French girl

Antoninus blesses tavern people and street singers in a sleepy prayer. The singers describe both their pleasure and their weariness, sometimes offering descriptions of songs instead of performances. A graybeard requests music of vanished years. The tavern proprietor avoids his own food. The poet, who knows no French, composes two French verses for a girl who tears them up.

4. Dance and vocation

Maddelena dances in her chemise, first wearing soft slippers, then going barefoot, then putting on wooden shoes. She imagines a life with Antoninus that would include sin, public performance, and eventual sanctity. He answers that his chosen life is right for him and that religious service may involve severe danger. Their ensuing legends tell how a saint escapes temptation by tricking the devil and how a milkmaid turns a king’s demands to her advantage.

5. The dream and the moonlit city

The dream repeats Maddelena’s dance. Regret, guilt, amusement, desire, and sleepiness mingle when Antoninus wakes. Rossetti and Jenny, Shelley’s Indian Serenade, Macbeth, Saba and Salomon, Sappho, and Strindberg’s Dream Play enter the moonlit catalogue. The narrator offers dubious explanations of these nocturnal wonders, ending with the way ears look pointed by moonlight.

5. Of Sceptics and Scholers

Antoninus returns to Fiesole the next day. Giovanni questions him about modern dress and vehicles in sacred pictures. Antoninus objects to fashions that soon look ridiculous, recommends shadow where historical detail is uncertain, and finally allows limited invention. He then admits that he cannot paint. Abraham delivers a long series of arguments while others work in the fields. He invokes providence to excuse his dislike of labor, though the narrator says he does not believe the excuse.

Abraham discusses women, left-handedness, human surroundings, animals, language, territorial claims, personality, practical maxims, war, and seven kinds of joke. He challenges some ethnic stereotypes while repeating others in his account of language. Later conversation includes Nicolo’s bankrupt family, Antoninus’s millennial story, cards as calendar and allegory, ritual as fetish, the difficulty of explanation, stigmata, ecstasy, Marian imagery, and the Stations of the Cross as drama. Antoninus then reads a former balladeer’s manuscripts. He pauses over six poems and writes a scholarly footnote with deliberately unreadable, nonexistent names.

1. The painter’s problem

Giovanni argues that invented ancient clothes may mislead worshippers into associating sanctity with costume. Antoninus fears the rapid obsolescence of fashionable sacred art. He eventually permits slight innovations and warns that literal accuracy can itself shock. Giovanni objects that researching every detail takes time from learning to paint; Antoninus ends by mocking his own readiness to instruct an artist.

2. Abraham among the hay cutters

Abraham offers a mixture of mock anthropology and moral argument. He proposes limits of 150 years for recovering territory and 400 for national independence, attacks the confusion of domestic competence with intellectual capacity, disputes the demand to do everything well, and condemns soldiers who take pride in needlessly seeking death. The hay cutters pay him little attention and sometimes object.

3. Jokes, stories, cards, and religious experience

Abraham divides jokes into seven kinds and disputes the familiar assumption that Jews speak badly and love money. Nicolo tells of a bankrupt family’s extravagant feast before the creditors return; Antoninus adds a story about believers awaiting the millennium. Abraham later argues that stigmata should receive an entry in a medical dictionary. He says he has seen four cases and knows of nearly two hundred, but separates his conviction that the wounds exist from his proposed explanation of their cause.

4. The manuscripts

Antoninus reads verse by a former member of the order who had been a travelling singer. The house record describes his recurrent sins, comic remarks, Latin learning, cat, and regular prayers. Six poems precede an account of three collections: Libr Canterm, Hilarion, and Duendajo. Antoninus writes a deliberately unreadable footnote containing nonexistent names, then must turn to the remaining manuscripts.

6. Of Travelers and Traders

Antoninus is ordered to leave his books and travel without money or a coat for one year. He turns away from Florence into the countryside, offering to give or receive according to whether each stranger is more fortunate than he. His first gift is the silver crucifix from his rosary. A man known as the miser then gives him a heavy purse, which Antoninus uses to buy food and distribute money at an inn.

A sixteen-year-old girl takes him to her family's house. She and her intended husband, the muleteer Moise, have been trying to extort money from the miser. Her father, a tinker, argues that ballads derive from hammer strokes, then sings his children a gentler lullaby. The next morning the girl reports that Moise nearly beat the miser to death and stole goods. Antoninus condemns the attack; she defends it as a just claim upon a miser's wealth.

After giving his dagger to a supposedly hungry seaman, Antoninus meets a young trader whose family is De Medici. Over breakfast they discuss his proposed rule of Florence and a censorship of artistic quality enforced by beating, imprisonment, and execution. Antoninus rejects the killings and the castration of singers but entertains some lesser penalties and support for artists. The trader admits that his schemes change daily and supplies him with a coat, a donkey, and money.

Two days later Antoninus meets an old scholar beside the sea. Their conversation moves from migrations and the sea to the scholar's books, an unwritten poetry collection, criticism, ciphers, and ancient wines. The scholar claims to have learned the secret of living forever from a Greek footnote. Antoninus insists upon the promised joy of the other life. Their subsequent arguments concern art, belief, greatness, types of men, drink, imitation, national character, and architecture. The narrator says that they talk for nine hours.

The narrator interrupts the journey to defend arranging a saint’s adventures where the story needs them. Some months after the visit to the scholar, a young squire disputes Antoninus’s demand for repentance and his claim that nobody can stand outside the struggle between God and the devil. They turn finally to the difficulty of supporting artists. Antoninus returns after a year and a half and gives his superior his remaining half-penny. A conspicuous cudgel has helped him avoid injury.

But we can tell nothing about men till we meet them, and then there seems to be something pretty good in all of them.

Antoninus

7. Of Innuendos to the Number of Nine

Nine essays, presented as a translation of a work by Antoninus, interrupt the story. Their speaker argues in the first person, recounts encounters, and repeatedly questions the reasoning behind familiar judgments.

The first two essays question the relation between truth, useful belief, and received judgment. The third argues that virtue in painting becomes intelligible through the danger of its loss. The fourth reverses a retreat lecturer’s advice about reasoning with temptation. It rejects purported rational proofs used to quiet religious doubt, condemning the deception even when it seems to preserve faith.

The fifth essay is a collection of observations about poetry, including sound, rhyme, artistic pride, the survival of ballads, and the damage done by intrusive commentary. The sixth derives superstition from a supposed bodily mechanism governing direction and balance. The seventh imagines an ancient hermit mistaking imitative modern art for burlesque. The eighth describes a teacher whose quotations bewilder his pupils.

The final essay asks whether a critic should displace a beloved but unworthy public figure in favour of three deserving men whom the public dislikes. One candidate is Jewish; his description invokes hostile bodily stereotypes while affirming his achievements. The essay ends by defending the incumbent and predicting that an attempt to correct the public will merely add to his honours.

The Lord desires us to live under these impossible conditions that our minds may not rot from lack of use.

The first Innuendo

8. Of Scenes and Scandals

On the first night of spring Antoninus goes to Florence to examine a new play. Before the curtain rises, a girl sitting with her mother describes older theatrical conventions and tells improbable stories about her father. Casimirro arrives dishevelled and miserable. He reluctantly begins to explain what has happened between him and Maddelena.

The play is narrated in three successive stage sequences, separated by conversations in the audience. A besieged city's girl loves a soldier who refuses to fight. He dies; the conqueror wins the city, treats its inhabitants conciliatorily, and proposes to her. In a dressing-room scene, she rejects appeals to forget her worthless lover and kills the conqueror before the wedding. The narrator calls the play a tragedy about mistaking dross for gold. A maid's epilogue then releases the audience from its sadness.

Between these scenes Casimirro recalls Maddelena's attentiveness, professional generosity, and their life amid the music of Florence. She notices when her applause is spoiling another actress's entrance, changes her conduct, sends the girl roses, and apologizes to the playwright. Casimirro also describes her refusal to withdraw kindness from don Sebastian, whose cruelty and sexual conquests he condemns.

After the play, a poem attributed to Johanno Rustico introduces the account of the previous Christmas. Casimirro had expected to share a tortola with Maddelena. He thought he saw her setting it at her window, but later discovered that the woman was a new tenant and that Maddelena had moved. At her new address he found don Sebastian in an undershirt and carpet slippers. Maddelena subsequently offered to return to Casimirro when Sebastian tired of her. Casimirro regards her proposed consolation as intolerable and ends by doubting the reality of right and wrong. Antoninus returns to the monastery grieving for both friends.

She drew the line at nobody. She would be friends with everybody in the world if she had only half a chance.

Casimirro

9. Of Thunder and Theory

Several years have altered the young men. Bertolommeo has declined final vows and become a farmer and husband. Maurizio is preparing to judge for the Inquisition. Nicolo works in the fields and withdraws increasingly into imagined worlds. A tale about a man who dispersed his soul among imaginary lives illustrates the danger of that withdrawal, though the narrator expressly says Nicolo has not gone so far. Giovanni's sanctity is affirmed while his reputation as a painter is questioned.

Abraham compares public opinion to a slowing pendulum and discusses self-burlesque, literary identity, and experiments intended to establish telepathy and second sight. Antoninus answers the discussion of plagiarism with a legend of rival miracle-working saints, then denies that the legend is true. Abraham's private library follows, arranged by authors' elaborate Latin names and containing such works as a grammar of monkeys' speech and instructions for cultivating a superior attitude.

When the rainy season begins, Antoninus climbs to Abraham’s room at the top of a reputedly haunted tower. He tells of an aged dissenter whom a governing committee in Atlantis cannot punish effectively. Abraham replies with a story about a famous whist expert ignorant of elementary details on the cards. Giovanni joins them. Antoninus remains unstartled by thunder, and the narrator recalls his later efforts to reassure a pope frightened by a comet.

Antoninus proposes that life develops twice, first as a childhood model and then as a larger adult undertaking. He extends the analogy to civilization. Nicolo reports a girl standing at the gate in the rain. While the men debate whether to admit her, Abraham argues that models may fail at extreme scales and discusses the proportions of beautiful bodies. Footsteps climb the dark stairs. The men take the approaching figure for a boy.

Laughter at self is not really an enemy within the walls; it is a friend within the heart.

Abraham

10. Of Insurgents and Engines

The visitor is Maddelena, wrapped in wet garments and showing only her eyes. She says that she came to see the haunted tower and seek Antoninus's advice. Her sackcloth, public penance, and fasting have chiefly been adopted to comfort an old priest concerned for her. She continues to understand her sexual conduct as sacrifice for people she believes God would reject. Antoninus objects that she is not the Lord and calls her position more horrible than she understands.

Against Maurizio's account of divine pity and justice, Maddelena defends compassion for villains and traitors, whom she cannot cease loving when punishment comes. She also claims a right to disagree with God and repeats a story of the devil founding Hell as a refuge. Maurizio regards her attempted good as harmful. His proposed remedy is five years in an orthodox middle-class family, where reciprocal affection might bring her back to belief. She agrees that this might be best and says she is not an irreconcilable Promethean rebel.

Abraham argues that God, or at least the customary idea of God, must make concessions to humanity. Antoninus gives limited assent, distinguishing changes in interpretation and circumstances from any present need to alter doctrine. He speculates about humanity acquiring powers for which current moral categories would be inadequate. Maurizio accepts Antoninus's answer, then threatens Nicolo with burning to provoke some response from his indifference.

Maddelena announces that she will move in with a young painter the next morning. She reports that don Sebastian has been killed and that she alone went to his grave. She leaves with a candle. The narrator calls her the room's only female visitor, apart from occasions when the devil had appeared in female form. Abraham continues with reflections on supposedly hectic ages, practical education, the heart and the head, and praise of irrationality. Maurizio and Nicolo leave before Antoninus. Abraham ends alone, disputing the proverb that one receives from life only what one puts into it.

Yet I am sure that there is no need today for any change in the letter of our doctrine, though it does seem that many of our interpretations will have to go.

Antoninus

Character Profiles

Antoninus

Antoninus is introduced as the Bishop, or Antónino, Little Anthony. The narrator places his birth in 1389. As a child he is devout, studious, confident, and easily ridiculed. He delights in the sights, sounds, and smells of worship. At seven he finds theological possibilities in arithmetic; at eight he reforms his manner of addressing others; at fourteen he decides to become a Dominican.

His studies extend beyond ecclesiastical law to languages, pagan philosophy, legends, music, and artistic criticism. He learns to obey his mother, admit ignorance, and consider particular people before judging them, although his notebook still contains borrowed judgments and sweeping assertions. His attraction to Maddelena repeatedly troubles his resolve to enter the religious life.

Within the monastery he argues for the duty of intellectual work, listens to unorthodox questions, advises Giovanni, and helps examine manuscripts. He also practises the scholarly dishonesty he observes. His footnote to the rose poem contains names made deliberately unreadable because they do not exist.

On his travels Antoninus gives freely, condemns the beating of the miser, and objects to the young Medici’s proposal to execute bad artists. He entertains some lesser penalties and provision for artists. With the scholar he drinks abundantly while praising moderation. After meeting the squire, he admits the danger of hearing arguments he cannot refute.

He remains fond of Maddelena while objecting to her conduct and beliefs. He hears Casimirro’s account of her kindness and infidelity, returns grieving for both friends, and later challenges her claim to sacrifice herself for those rejected by God. In the tower discussion he agrees with Abraham that changes in human capacities may call for changes in interpretation. He still rejects Maddelena’s account of her actions and denies any present need to change the letter of doctrine.

The nine Innuendos are presented as a translation of a work by Antoninus. Their fourth essay denies rational proof of God’s existence, the rationality of the Trinity, the possibility of the virgin birth, and the certainty of an afterlife. It condemns arguments devised merely to quiet doubt. At the novel’s end Antoninus leaves Abraham speaking alone.

Antoninus’s mother

She is sixteen when Antoninus is born. A dancing tune becomes the measure of her domestic work, speech, and prayers. Antoninus objects to levity in worship but regards her as good at heart. She protects him from damaging austerities by taking away his candle and asking him to eat and sleep properly.

She questions his decision to become a Dominican and asks what became of the bride Saint Abraham abandoned. Eventually she packs food, wine, and an extra shirt for Fiesole. When the father sends him home with the Decretals, she is pleased by the book’s size and the delay it will bring.

The father at Fiesole

The father who receives fourteen-year-old Antoninus initially mistakes him for an errand boy. After questioning his knowledge, he discovers that the boy knows nothing of ecclesiastical law and lends him the Decretals to memorize. His suggestion that Antoninus return that evening or the next day leaves the child humbled and his mother delighted.

The father does not expect Antoninus to learn the whole book. Antoninus nevertheless does so and returns to be admitted to the monastery.

The sailor with the Venus charm

An old sailor in the marketplace receives Antoninus’s denunciation of his Venus statuette with amusement. He has survived two shipwrecks while carrying it, though he claims little personal faith in its power. He then shows dice bought in Alexandria that he says were cast for Christ’s garments. Antoninus thinks they should be placed in a church.

Casimirro

A Florentine boy of Antoninus’s age, Casimirro draws constantly, observes the city’s inhabitants, and turns to epigrams after dark. His attention to hands leads into an elaborate account of palmistry. He claims he could draw a whole person from the hands alone. The narrator says he cannot and explains how the predictable children Antoninus brings make his demonstrations easier.

Casimirro encourages Antoninus to draw, write ballads, and keep a notebook. He draws Maddelena in devotional and provocative roles that disturb his friend. After several years he and Maddelena meet the novice with an ox cart and take him through the taverns. His name briefly appears as Casimirri; the narrator has already joked about having to look back to remember it.

At the theatre Casimirro appears ragged, curt, and unhappy. He recalls a life of painting, writing, occasional other work, and companionable poverty. He praises Maddelena’s generosity but resents her refusal to reject don Sebastian. As he recounts her kindness to other people, he struggles with the unhappiness it has brought him.

At Christmas he mistakes a new tenant at Maddelena’s old window for Maddelena herself and expects to spend the evening with her. At her new address he finds Sebastian. Casimirro says the discovery has left him in constant suffering. He ends his story by wondering whether right and wrong are merely childhood beliefs.

Maddelena

The boys’ sole model is thirteen when introduced. She poses without payment when free from work. Her saintly appearance suits the saints they draw, but she also poses as ordinary girls, ladies, and pagan beings. She wants to become a saint and an actress, imagining that public dancing need not exclude sanctity. The narrator says her frivolous conversation continues and she never becomes a saint.

In Chapter 4 she already knows Florence’s taverns and singers. She dances within a square of candles and proposes becoming Antoninus’s partner, imagining the two as sinners who will eventually interest hagiographers as saints. His refusal does not end their conversation: she disputes voluntary hardship and tells the story of the king and the milkmaid. Her dance returns in his erotic dream.

Casimirro describes an actress attentive to other people’s feelings. When her applause spoils another girl’s scene, she changes her conduct, sends roses anonymously, and apologizes to the author. He praises her hospitality and gifts while suffering from conduct he regards as betrayal. After moving in with don Sebastian, she offers to return to Casimirro when Sebastian tires of her. She cannot bear to make either man unhappy.

In the tower she accepts that her conduct is wrong and perhaps foolish, but insists that pity compels her to continue. Her compassion extends to people who have seriously harmed others. She imagines Hell as a refuge. When Maurizio proposes five years with an orthodox family, she agrees that he may try it if she is ever arrested and brought before him. She denies being a rebel incapable of compromise and announces that she will move in with a young painter the next morning.

The narrator compares her departing footsteps to those of a frightened child. He calls her the only woman to have entered Abraham’s room, then makes an exception for the devil’s appearances in female form.

Maybe that were best. I give you leave to try it if ever I’m arrested and brought before you.

Maddelena

Giovanni da Fiesole

Giovanni is introduced as a painter of roughly Antoninus’s age and his closest friend, identified by the narrator as the later Fra Giovanni Angelico da Fiesole. He understands his talent as a gift to develop, works in shadow, and has difficulty explaining his methods. In the debating circle he usually listens and sketches heads.

He objects to the demand for ancient costume in sacred painting: ordinary people may learn to mistake antiquated clothing for holiness. Time spent establishing historical details also takes time from learning to paint. Antoninus recommends shadow, allows slight invention, and admits that he cannot paint himself.

The narrator later praises Giovanni’s goodness and quiet manner but disparages his pictures. He thinks the painter’s reputation owes too much to his saintly character and accuses modern critics of finding qualities the pictures lack. Giovanni joins the men in Abraham’s tower room without speaking.

Abraham

Born Jewish, Abraham joins the order for its exceptional opportunities for study. He questions divine threats against doubt, argues that effortless creation need not avoid waste, and collects humorous religious legends. After Nicolo’s poem he tells of the Virgin trying to help people already condemned to Hell.

He avoids field work and talks to the laborers, who often ignore him. He claims that providence would supply food without farming, though the narrator says he does not believe it. His arguments range over language, public cruelty, competence, war, jokes, ritual, stigmata, and religious drama. He describes himself as left-handed and not strictly a believer.

He rejects the stock claim that Jews speak badly and love money, citing his own speech and poverty. Yet his account of language assigns moral characteristics to national groups and repeats a hostile claim about Romani speech and lying. He mocks an antisemitic assumption in one conversation and uses ethnic stereotypes himself in another.

His later subjects include public opinion, literary uniformity, psychic experiments, and the limits of scale models. He chooses his tower room for its isolation, view, and reputed haunting. His private library contains books on subjects such as the speech of monkeys and the cultivation of a superior attitude.

During the dispute with Maddelena, Abraham argues that the Lord should learn from mankind. He offers a less blasphemous formulation in which the customary conception of God changes, then acknowledges that this weakens his thought. After Maddelena departs, he continues talking as his companions withdraw. He ends alone, disputing the proverb that one receives from life only what one puts into it.

Nicolo

Nicolo prays and mocks while carrying a sorrow he cannot lose. He asks whether Christ would repeatedly suffer for innumerable worlds. He later declares that his faith has gone and recites his Ode to a Wooden Madonna. Although he no longer believes, he still visits the shrine and wishes God were present.

He also asks whether Christ could have authorized religious communities outside the familiar apostolic group. In Chapter 5 he tells the story of a bankrupt family whose extravagant final feast is followed by an ordinary morning and demanding creditors.

Nicolo ceases the painful pursuit of his lost faith and lives increasingly in imagination. He works in the fields, is pleasant in company, and sometimes solves advanced mathematical problems to assure himself that his mind has not weakened. The narrator compares his retreat to the story of a dreamer whose soul disappears completely, but says Nicolo has not gone so far.

He announces the girl at the gate and mocks the conventions of romances in which rain kills a traveller through exhaustion. When Maurizio threatens him with coercion and burning, he offers no defence. He later answers Abraham politely and retires to his own room.

Bertolommeo

Bertolommeo belongs to the monastic discussion circle. He has an astonishing memory and abundant information, but little ability to select from what he knows.

After completing his studies, Bertolommeo declines final vows. He lives on a prosperous farm with his wife Elena. He hopes to raise sons for intellectual distinction, writes pastoral verse in the manner of Virgil, and develops theories of the farmer’s place in society. His neighbours admire his learning without questioning how well he has absorbed it.

Maurizio

Maurizio first appears among the novices as the one who looks like an owl.

He is being trained as a judge for the Inquisition. The narrator credits his patience, composure, decisiveness, and fairness in examining evidence. He adheres firmly to institutional authority, although he knows less doctrine than Antoninus or Abraham. The narrator also acknowledges the shock that burning unrepentant heretics gives a sensitive person.

He proposes placing Maddelena for five years with an orthodox middle-class family. He hopes their care will recall her to belief and her affection will teach them to feel what they defend. She gives him leave to try it if she is arrested and brought before him.

He accepts Antoninus’s qualified argument about interpretation, then says he would hand Nicolo to the civil authorities and burn him to disturb his indifference. The men joke as they discuss this coercion. Maurizio is the first to leave after Maddelena’s departure.

The three minstrel girls

Three young street performers encountered with Casimirro and Maddelena alternate catalogues of songs and appeal to their listeners for money. Antoninus admires them as custodians of folk music, while Maddelena says that she knows them and that they earn well.

In a later tavern encounter they describe the pleasures and demands of performance. Good music makes one sad, while bad music sickens her; another admits that singing beats ordinary work; the third says she dislikes music. Having already earned enough, they sometimes describe songs and refuse to sing them.

The tavern couple

A man presses a woman to accept his seduction. She answers through refusals, wordplay, and an account of Sleeping Beauty preferring her dream to the prince. Antoninus and Maddelena listen to their banter; an intrusive stranger joins it to offer criticism.

The tavern poet

Introduced by Maddelena, the poet answers the company in six comic quatrains about sadness, drink, doubt, and transient love. He disappears after insulting Antoninus in verse. He later returns with a French girl and writes two courtship pieces, although he knows no French. Her destruction of the papers does not extinguish his enthusiasm.

The French girl

The poet’s companion is called a lassie from France and a grisette. She breaks glasses, dislikes poetry, laughs at his verses, and tears both compositions into pieces. The poet says her mother was a fairy. The company cannot understand her French.

The stranger defending Delilah

The stranger judges a performance by its manner without listening closely, then inserts himself into the tavern couple’s conversation. Returning after Maddelena’s comparison of Delilah and a sheep-shearer, he claims to own a Syriac book giving Delilah’s side of Samson’s story. In his telling, Samson frightens people with his hair and has no exceptional strength.

The friar-balladeer

Antoninus reads the manuscripts of a former friar who entered the religious house late in life after travelling as a singer. The house record describes him as short, thickset, dark-haired, light-eyed, learned in Latin, fond of food, and given to remarks that could provoke laughter at Mass. He keeps a cat by permission. He mixes fact with invention when recounting his travels, repeatedly sins, and continues to pray with a curious purity.

Antoninus uses the name Sermoq in a mock scholarly footnote to one poem. The friar’s verse fills three collections: Libr Canterm contains love poetry; Hilarion, humorous country ballads; and Duendajo, pieces for children or about fairies.

The fifth Innuendo returns to Sermoq, quoting a poem about a snarler and telling how he cut off his own fingers after an insulting handshake. The essay attacks commentators who intrude on poetry, then adds this gruesome biographical anecdote.

The young Medici

Antoninus meets the young trader at a western seaport. He has travelled in Holland and belongs to the De Medici family. He expects to control Florence when he becomes head of its banking and trading house.

His proposed censorship concerns quality, cliché, plagiarism, and artistic sincerity. He would execute bad artists and people who praise their work, serving as sole judge after promising an impartial staff of critics. He also proposes a daily bowl of soup for recognized masters. Antoninus rejects the killings and the castration of singers; the trader says he changes most of his schemes every day. He parts with a coat, a donkey, and money for Antoninus.

The old scholar

The scholar lives in one wing of a manor beside the sea. He owns the unused remainder of the house, whose furnishings are gradually stolen, and has gathered books and art into his occupied rooms. He describes himself as a bibliophile, cosmophile, philosopher, philologist, and former lover of women. His confident explanations are repeatedly challenged by Antoninus.

He possesses ancient wines and says a Greek footnote taught him the secret of living forever. He says that revealing it would kill him, as it killed its author. Antoninus calls him a ghost and asks what endless earthly reading can offer beside the Christian promise of eternal joy.

He discusses art, national character, drink, and imitation through stories, catalogues, and incompatible classifications. He says the abundance of books saves him from devising theories of his own. His conversation with Antoninus lasts nine hours.

The miser

A farmer first orders Antoninus off his land, then explains that his neighbours misrepresent him. He says he earns readily, gives badly, and washes when they do not. His wife left him, and a beggar’s death some miles away led to his prosecution. He gives Antoninus a purse that proves to contain a substantial sum.

The girl calls him old, ugly, exploitative, and responsible for his estranged wife’s death. Antoninus, having met him, denies that he is old or wrinkled. When she reports Moise’s violent robbery, he condemns the attack. She defends it and says the miser is too unpopular to obtain justice.

The girl who intends to marry Moise

Sixteen years old, she meets Antoninus at the inn and takes him to her family's house. She hopes to marry Moise and rejects the miser's proposal, though she accepts his expensive gifts. Her stated justification for extortion is that misers' money belongs to the people. She reports Moise's attack the next morning without admitting wrongdoing and warns that the miser is too unpopular to seek justice.

She welcomes Antoninus into the household and flirts with him, while speaking bitterly of the miser and defending Moise’s cruelty. Antoninus initially wonders whether she is joking, then argues against her account of justice. When they part, she offers him a place if he is unfrocked and advises him to beware of women.

Moise

The sixteen-year-old girl intends to marry Moise, a muleteer. She tells Antoninus that he entered the miser’s house through a window, nearly beat him to death, and stole goods.

The tinker

The father in the household that shelters Antoninus. He argues that ballad measure comes from hammer strokes and distinguishes the songs of metalworkers from those of cobblers. After singing a lullaby on the children's glockenspiel, he assigns its softer rhythm to a spinning wheel or loom. He explains its apparently inconsistent cow-bells and milk, then provocatively says that songs would have to be heard before one judged murders committed to inspire them. Later he finishes the wooden crucifix Antoninus has begun.

The young squire

A wealthy traveller with gold spurs and a green velvet hat, encountered some months after the old scholar. He denies that he presently leads a sinful life and resists Antoninus's demand to choose a side in the conflict between God and the devil. He considers himself kind, happily married, and unwilling to participate in a quarrel he regards as private. His final argument concerns the shortage of audiences and patrons able to support the arts.

Let God and the devil strive in the sun. I shall sit in the shade, and which of us three will be the wiser?

The young squire

Don Sebastian

Casimirro describes Sebastian as a ruthless duellist who delights in seducing reputedly virtuous women and taunting their lovers. He says Sebastian has no right to the title don. At Christmas he finds him seated comfortably in Maddelena’s rooms in an undershirt and carpet slippers. Maddelena later says Sebastian has been killed and that she alone visited his grave.

The girl at the theatre and her mother

A girl nearly of marriageable age sits beside Antoninus before yielding her place to Casimirro and moving to her mother’s knees. She describes earlier stage conventions and tells extravagant stories about her father. Her mother protests at some details and finally remarks that listeners cannot tell when she is joking. They leave after the epilogue; the narrator then mentions the many rings on the girl’s fingers.

Embedded Works

The mother’s dancing lullaby

Antoninus’s mother sings a remembered dancing tune as a lullaby, then carries its rhythm into her conversation, housework, and prayers. She tells her child to sleep and dream of saints and the moon; later lines invoke Mary, describe breadmaking, and praise God. Antoninus objects that the Lord deserves praise in saintly measures. A prose gloss translates the opening lines.

Ave Maria, santa Maria, Ora pro mia, ora pro mia.

Antoninus’s mother

Marriage legends in the vocation debate

Arguing against marriage, Antoninus tells his mother that only one married man reached Heaven: his wife’s complaints in Hell had threatened his sanity. He then cites Saint Abraham of Edessa, who left his bride and walled himself into a religious cell. His mother asks what became of the abandoned woman.

“On a trip to Egypt-land”

In Antoninus’s six-stanza ballad, the Holy Family’s donkey refuses to cross a bridge on the way to Egypt. Threats, curses, blows, and a fire beneath it fail. The child’s prayer makes it move. The opening leaves a comma after “Mary and”; the final prayer breaks off at “Pater noster qui-”.

Here the donkey halted, Wagged his monstrous ears, Wouldn’t budge another step For their wildest tears.

Antoninus’s ballad

Hands as an account of the soul

The account likens the left hand to an inherited endowment and the right to a changing balance sheet. It assigns meanings to the head, life, fate, heart, and marriage lines and to the mounts beneath the fingers. The narrator repeatedly invokes the agreement of sages. Casimirro boasts that he can draw a whole person from a hand, but the narrator explains how readily he guesses the children’s ages and circumstances.

A couple learn after sixty years that the man who married them had no authority to do so. They have the marriage regularized. A Gypsy says their hands have shown them married all along.

Antoninus’s notebook

Antoninus’s notebook discusses seven subjects: interrupted quotations in fiction; changes in the meaning of proverbs; the moods conveyed by pencil and colour; sensory experiences that resist depiction; professors’ glib generalizations; tunes heard in rain; and art made to suit performers, readers, or inherited themes. Its first example sets a sentence of prose beside the same speech arranged as dramatic dialogue.

Antoninus argues that a writer ought to lead the reader. The narrator then faults his borrowings, empty passages, faulty logic, and sweeping claims.

The business of the author is to precede the reader, not follow him.

Antoninus’s notebook

Casimirro on the eyes of animals

Casimirro likens dogs’ eyes to those of wanderers, cats’ eyes to those of secretive women, and drinkers’ eyes to those of weasels and fish. He compares woodsmen with bobcats and mountaineers with bears. The lion, he thinks, has forgotten something the other cats still know. These remarks help prompt Antoninus to keep a notebook.

Maddelena’s painted and performed roles

Maddelena poses as Saint Mary of Egypt, Saint Elizabeth, and Saint Cunegundes, then as maidens, virgins, working girls, ladies, and children. Casimirro draws her dancing and as a Siren, Wood Nymph, Water Nymph, and temptation of Saint Anthony. With a shawl and stick she acts the queen, nun, witch, hostess, peasant, and courtesan.

Antoninus objects to some of the poses. Maddelena hopes to become both a dancer and a saint, though the narrator says she never becomes a saint.

Dominican sanctity and learning

Chapter 3 quotes the Catholic Encyclopedia, volume XII, on Dominican saints, learning, asceticism, and mystical phenomena. The narrator follows it with William of Moerbeke; John Balbus and the Catholicon; Robert Holcot and the Philobiblion; Thomas Aquinas; and Antoninus, the Regola a ben vivere, and the Council of Florence.

He likens Dominican intellectual life to that of ancient Rome, finding the resemblance in dress, speech, household objects, and oratory.

The boy condemned for a dream

During the debate about guilt, a speaker recalls a legend he rejected as foolish. A boy who has avoided serious sin dies in his sleep, then tells the priest praying for him that a sin committed in his last dream has sent him to Hell. The speaker considers the terror such a story can cause boys and distinguishes an absurd story from one merely lacking proof.

The narrator recalls this discarded legend when Antoninus dreams of Maddelena in Chapter 4 and is said to sin in his sleep. He wakes with guilt among his other feelings.

“Ode to a Wooden Madonna”

Nicolo introduces nine quatrains written after he lost his faith. He recalls his devotion, the questions that destroyed it, and his continued visits to churches where he wishes God were present. Darkness and sleet extinguish the final candle.

Kneel at your virgin shrine, Light up a flare, Wish with my heart that God Really were there. Held I a candle sweet Sheltered from doubt, Entered the dark and sleet- Blew it all out.

Nicolo

Nicolo says the poem now sounds cold and has scarcely moved his listeners, although he cried while writing it. Abraham asks why losing God has led him to address the Virgin, then tells his story of her intercession for the condemned.

The Virgin and the condemned

Abraham tells of people whom God has condemned irrevocably to Hell. The Virgin overtakes them and speaks with them beyond even the Lord’s hearing. She returns saying she will see what she can do. Abraham has admitted the story to a compilation, though he expects his humourless superiors to remove it.

He proposes a collection of humorous church legends, including stories of Saint Francis of Padua and his pet pig.

The minstrel girls’ song catalogues

The three singers name songs of death, desire, childhood, drinking, parting, and supernatural danger. Their lists include familiar refrains, scraps of narrative, and phrases chosen for their rhythm and rhyme.

Both catalogues occur in Chapter 4, first in the street and later in another tavern. Maddelena disputes the singers’ claim to be hungry. Later they refuse to sing the songs they have described. Their opinions of music differ as sharply as their songs.

Sleeping Beauty sends the prince away

The tavern woman retells Sleeping Beauty with the princess rejecting the prince’s kisses and asking to return to her dream. His heroic accomplishments do not persuade her. The woman applies the tale to the man beside her and again tells him no.

The tavern poet’s six quatrains

The poet answers the company in six quatrains: “Some folks are very good today”; “My thirst does raise a strife in me”; “My heart it is so full of pain”; “My heart moves quaintly to a maid”; “A lot of people talk about”; and “Some folks have lurid villanries.” He asks for beer, explains his silence, doubts the permanence of love, and ends by mocking Antoninus.

My heart it is so full of pain And is so full of doubt That if I ever oped my mouth My heart would jump right out.

The tavern poet

Delilah’s supposed Syriac apology

The stranger claims to possess a Syriac volume giving Delilah’s account of Samson. His terrifying hair, she says, made his reputation: once shorn, he was beaten by ordinary boys. Antoninus turns the story against Maddelena, suggesting that her beauty likewise depends on outward adornment.

The gardener’s blossoms

A quatrain about a gardener’s flowers withering beneath strange hands protests the stranger’s interference in the couple’s conversation.

The blooms of the gardener Make a golden cup But strange hands wither The blossoms up,

Unidentified speaker in the tavern exchange

Antoninus’s prayer for tavern people

In the cart at night, Antoninus asks the Mother in Heaven to bless tavern people, the joys of drink, street singers, and others he is too sleepy to name. He ends by insisting that she must not forget.

The poet’s French courtship verses

The poet writes two pieces for the French girl, beginning “J’aime te, chere” and “Ma mignonette.” The first declares his love; the second compares parts of her body to pastoral objects and offers a coin for a kiss. The narrator says that he knows no French. She laughs and tears up both poems.

The narrator briefly raises the muses and Apollo above the poet before returning to the girl’s laughter.

The saint who deceives the devil

A saint repeatedly rejects the women the devil brings him, asking each time for someone different. While the devil is away, he sleeps with those already delivered. The teller calls the story untrue and declines to name the saint.

The king and the milkmaid

On their wedding night, the milkmaid persuades the king to observe supposed peasant customs. She blindfolds him, puts a bedpan on his head, hangs anvils around his neck as lucky horseshoes, and leads him toward a pigpen. She calls the spectators’ laughter the voices of angels and the pigs’ grunting the devil’s envy. He falls headfirst into the mud.

The milkmaid returns to her cows. The king’s ban on bedpans sets civilization back, and the blameless pigs are eaten the next winter. Maddelena allows that this tale may be true, unlike the preceding story of the saint deceiving the devil.

“On such a night” and the theatrical city

After Antoninus’s dream, the narrator remembers other nights: Rossetti with Jenny; Shelley writing “Indian Serenade”; Macbeth killing the king; Saba and Salomon exchanging riddles; and Roman soldiers firing catapults at the moon. Antoninus recalls Sappho’s maidens dancing around the moon. The narrator then imagines the city as a play moving like Strindberg’s Dream Play, with a cast drawn from its streets.

Abraham’s speeches to the hay cutters

Abraham begins by excusing himself from work and telling of a thirsty farmer who sells his soul for water. He goes on to women carrying burdens, a lover hidden in a laundry basket, left-handedness, ugly surroundings, dogs and deer, language change, national speech, territorial war, physiognomy, novelty, divisive art, domestic competence, efficiency, and bravery.

The narrator says Abraham talks at random. The workers answer politely, grow exasperated, or cease listening. Among his arguments are a distinction between character and personality and an objection to judging thinkers by their competence at everyday tasks.

His explanations of national speech include a hostile stereotype of Romani lying. He also proposes deadlines after which nations must abandon territorial claims.

The seven original jokes

Abraham gives seven classes of joke: physical impossibility or mistaken observation; common assumptions; exaggeration; reasoning carried to absurdity; false assumption; puns; and sheer foolishness. His examples include a horse caught in its own stirrup, a boy keeping apples, a caveman asked to carry a burden, Alice mourning a daughter not yet born, a mishearing, and an irrelevant answer to a greeting. He has yet to discover the original pun.

He separates pranks from jokes, though his class of exaggeration includes long satire and burlesque. He objects to familiar assumptions about Jewish speech and money: he himself speaks correctly and has no money.

Alice imagines marrying Juan, having a daughter, and losing her when an axe falls. One member of the household after another joins her grief. Abraham praises their foresight.

Nicolo’s bankrupt family

Nicolo tells of a bankrupt family that borrows all it can and spends the money on a farewell feast, expecting to wake before an understanding divine judge. Morning brings an empty pantry and creditors. He points to the foolish aftermath of heroic gestures.

Antoninus’s millennial parallel

Antoninus compares the bankrupt family with people who destroyed their possessions before the year 1000 in expectation of judgment. He adds a town in the Alps whose inhabitants still lie waiting, sustained by faith and the thought that a divine instant may last centuries.

Fetish, fixed prayers, and changing conditions

Abraham calls fetish the devil’s last resource: the wish to settle things permanently and stop thinking about them. His examples include mechanical prayer, a charitable payment that ends concern for the poor, and refusal to consider altered circumstances. He says the church accommodates people who would leave it rather than compose thoughtful prayers. Antoninus answers briefly.

Abraham then argues that apparently clear language can falsify a difficult subject. He takes politics as an example of a profession whose work is distorted by demands to make it intelligible to everyone.

Playing cards as calendar and allegory

Abraham assigns the four suits to seasons, fifty-two cards to weeks, and thirteen ranks to moons. Adding the ranks in each suit and a joker produces 365. He supplies novices caught playing cards with an excuse: they are calculating Easter. His next allegory makes diamonds buy clubs, hearts win diamonds, and spades bury them all.

His candle goes out while he speaks. He lights it again and changes the subject.

Abraham’s proposed medical entry on stigmata

Abraham insists that religious associations are no reason to refuse investigation of a phenomenon. He claims to have seen stigmata four times and read records of nearly two hundred cases. His proposed medical entry describes wounds resembling Christ’s, recurrent bleeding, pain, ecstasy, little food, and prolonged survival. He reserves judgment on their supernatural origin.

He goes on to intense concentration, the postponement of death through ecstasy, and paintings of a youthful Mary at her Assumption. He constructs a chronology of Mary’s life to support the last argument. Antoninus answers with qualifications.

The Stations of the Cross as drama

Abraham describes the Stations of the Cross as a drama in which the figures stand still while the audience moves and speaks. He imagines fourteen outdoor stations joined by hymns and prayers, stressing participation, movement, and brevity. He calls this the first Christian dramatic and musical pageant.

The friar-balladeer’s manuscripts

Antoninus reads six specimens of verse, consults a house record about their author, and writes a report. He identifies three divisions: Libr Canterm, traditional love poetry; Hilarion, gay country and humorous ballads; and Duendajo, children’s and fairy pieces. A long catalogue of their subjects concludes his report.

The poet resists penance, anticipates judgment, and asks Jesus for forgiveness. Antoninus admires his verses and amuses himself by annotating them. Puzzled by the scent of roses, he cites authorities under deliberately illegible names. The demand to catalogue the manuscripts eventually sends him on to other work.

“Beer is my brother”

The speaker makes a family of food, drink, laughter, ballads, books, rafters, and candles. The excerpt breaks off at his uncle, the capon. Antoninus praises the lines and briefly imagines he may have written them himself.

Beer is my brother, My father not water, Meat is my mother, And wine is my daughter; Sons they are laughters And ballads by dozens; Books and dark rafters And candles my cousins.

The friar-balladeer

“Fasts I’ll not keep them”

In eight lines the speaker refuses fasting, mourns vanished pleasures, anticipates death, and asks Jesus to forgive him. The poem follows the account of his putting off thoughts of judgment.

Canta Natala

The Christmas poem begins in what the narrator calls a strange popular dialect, followed by English verses about the star, straw, rafters, and distant Nativity. Its speaker sends a poem from afar and invites candles, wine, and feasting. The narrator finds charm in the old pages despite their familiar sentiments.

Now dream of these when you read my line That I send from far away, And light your candles and drink your wine, For this is a feasting day.

The friar-balladeer

The poem leads him to connect star, straw, and strewing by their sounds and shapes. He dismisses his etymology as unfounded, but goes on to imagine art as a partial recovery of something long forgotten.

Tres dulcis rems

The title is glossed as “three sweet things.” Two stanzas describe the pain brought by rain, roses, and the beloved, then profess love for all three. The narrator calls the poem the original of several familiar kinds of verse.

But I love the rain though it gets me wet, And the rose though it makes me blue; And there’s three things dear till my sun shall set, The rain and the rose and you.

The friar-balladeer

Antoninus wonders how the scent of roses could be unpleasant and suspects a misreading of the dialect. He writes a learned footnote about Sermoq, then supplies two authorities whose names he makes illegible because they do not exist.

“Each time I watch the sporting whales”

The final specimen is the opening quatrain of a nonsensical ballad. Sporting whales and an ass eating asphodels bring sweet thoughts to its speaker.

Each time I watch the sporting whales That play upon the sea, Or see an ass eat asphodels, There come sweet thoughts to me.

The friar-balladeer

“Some hearts does music pull in two”

Two quatrains have music tear hearts apart and love roast them on a spit. The poet interrupts himself to admit that he is stretching the conceit. The narrator points to this self-burlesque among the verses of burning passion.

And some does love upon a spit Above a fire turn fleetly; Admittedly I’m stretching it, But you should catch it neatly.

The friar-balladeer

The books interrupted by Antoninus's departure

At the opening of Chapter 6 Antoninus moves among Quintessence of Mysticism, Dissertation of Aesthetics, History of Light and Shadow and the New Paintings, Life of St. Cletus, Legendary of Iuendus, Peregrinations and Pensées, a Gaelic grammar, and a book of spherical trigonometry. His superior orders him to put them away and travel.

The superior's manual for wanderers

Before sending Antoninus away, his superior recalls a manual of quotations he compiled for hitch-hikers and wanderers. He gave first place to Christ’s counsel about seeking hospitality, both for its wisdom and for Christ’s greatness. He finds the passage almost a pun, a rarity in a man he calls generally humourless.

The tinker's account of ballad measure

The tinker derives ballad measure from the hammer stroke. Metalworkers sing of crossroads and murders; cobblers sing of lanes and lovers. He assigns his own gentler lullaby to the spinning wheel or loom. Antoninus questions its order of milking and cow-bells, and the tinker explains the farm routine.

The tinker adds that balladeers have killed people to learn how to write murder songs. Before judging whether they were justified, he says, one would have to hear the songs.

The tinker's lullaby: Sun is a-sinking

The tinker plays his children’s glockenspiel and sings seven quatrains. Sunset and closing flowers give way to birds, kitchen sounds, milk, supper, crickets, and cow-bells. He hears the spinning wheel or loom in its rhythm.

Antoninus asks how the cows can still be heard in the fields after their milk has reached the kitchen. The tinker explains that they may have been turned out to graze again, or a neighbour may be bringing his herd home later.

The young Medici's programme for the arts

The young Medici proposes penalties for bad art and stale conventions. He would post 273 forbidden jokes, suppress romances ending in kisses or repeated tag lines, punish plagiarism and badly drawn heads of Christ, and forbid certain marches. His penalties run from apologies and duels to flogging and execution. Masters would receive a bowl of soup each day.

Antoninus objects to the killings and asks who will judge the art. The trader intends to decide everything himself and break his promises to protect sincere artists. He later admits to discarding most of his daily schemes, though he still means to rule Florence and patronize the arts.

The old scholar's library

The seaside scholar has spent years collecting alliterative titles for every letter of the alphabet. His shelves hold chess instruction, heraldry, comedies, essays, poetry, romances, ghost stories, histories, and philosophy. Abraham’s own collection appears later, in Chapter 9.

Opening examples include Precis of Premillennialism, Discourses on Diogenes, Theory of Theurgy, Almanac of Alcaics, Nineteen Variations of the King's Bishop's Gambit and a New Gambit of the Queen's Knight and the Queen's Castles Pawn, and a Handbook of Heraldry. The handbook claims to prove that nobles and commoners descend in separate streams. Absey books and bestiaries precede the plays.

The comedies include The Serpent and the Sibyl, The Apple with the Seven Seeds in It, The Rat Who Was Caught in a Mouse Trap, The Girl with the Green Shoe Laces, The Duchess of Dalmatia, The Scandal of Escarmucho or Who Ate the Prince's Supper?, Petronilla, the Jack of Clubs, At the Sign of the Red Headed Boar, Susanna and the Wag Named John, The Cobbler and the Cashmere, The Three Dandies and the Girl with the Straw Slippers, and The House That Nobody Owned.

A second run offers Terpsicore and the Three Tomes, The Dairy Maid and the Sailor or a Milk and Water Comedy, The Man Who Married His Own Wife, The Barber Who Clipped the Goats, A Night Cap for Nicodemus, The Letter That Nobody Wrote, The Cat and the Lady Named Ortensia, The Pickle-monger and the Three Sour Citizens, The Woman who Wouldn't Eat Cheese, Stephane and the Scare Crow, and The Witch With the Purple Stockings or a Comedy of Broomsticks. Asked about the barber, the scholar says that he cut capers.

The final comic titles are The Two Fiddlers and the Tune They Both Forgot, The Devil and the Diva or the Song One Must not Sing in Hell, The Infatuation of Felicita or What Makes the Moon so Yellow?, The Queen's in the Cellar or a Comedy of Wine Casks, and Man who Sat on His Wife's Lap or a Comedy of Broken Dishes.

Essays and miscellaneous prose include Promenades and Pacotilles, The Raven's Nest, Cobwebs and Corners, Concerning a Quire of Itinerent Inquiries by a Querulous Quianune, Of Songs in a Warm Room, Of Poets and Popingays, Of Awns and of Comets, Of Bonfires and Tidings, Cat and the Crocus, Of Fallen leaves, Where the Gods Have Walked, All Sweet Things Pass, Of Windmills, Notebook of a Nyctalops, Jottings From Jerico, Of Flowing Streams, Furrows of Eden, The Loaf and the Bottle, Missles From a Misogynist, Curvets and Capers, Flotsam and Frumenty, On a Number of Nothings, and Concerning a Matter of Infinite Delicacy.

The Delayed Plagarism, Being a Modern Literary Type describes middlemen who sell old philosophy anew, omitting difficult words. Poetry titles include Prairie Flowers and Anemones, From the House of the Eagle, and Nomads and Nixies. Later shelves contain the romances The Falcon and the Golden Sparrow, The Lance and the Castle, and The Lady in the Blue Gown, followed by These the Queen's Bones, The Wife Who Ate her Husband, and The Troll and the Little Girl who Went to Pick Hazel Nuts. Books of history, fourth-century philosophy, its abridgements, and cookery complete the tour before false book-backs reveal the wine bottles.

During the later discussion of the devil as artist, four more titles appear: Portrait of the Devil as the First Artist and a Brief History of All Artists Since Then, Sulphur Tints in the Earliest Art, The Devil's Paintbox, and This Infernal Art Business. Antoninus calls them documentary support for the scholar’s opinion.

Overture: the scholar's unwritten poetry collection

The scholar hoped to recover the passion of older songs with a little modern humour. His Overture recalls singers consumed by love, then considers the poet writing from memory after the passion has gone. The last stanza offers twinkling tinsel in place of gold. He has written a preface but cannot finish the book.

Antoninus suggests the title Preface to an Unwritten Book of Verses, which would let the poem stand as a curiosity.

Easel painting, criticism, and the farewell cipher

The scholar predicts a progression from plays about actors and books about books to pictures of easels. Schools, critics, symposia, handbooks, bibliographies, courses, and revisionist studies multiply until criticism severs its connection with painting. Antoninus objects to the analogy and calls it nonsense. Among the books is a Quintessence of the Giorgian School of Criticism of the Easel Painters Prior to the Third Quarter of the Fifteenth Century.

The scholar then offers an elaborate sentence whose initial letters read MYDEERWIFEIAMLEAVINGYOUFOREVER. It is a farewell to his wife, spelling DEER with two Es, concealed in an ostensibly scholarly footnote.

The forecast's imaginary publications include a Symposium of Opinions of the Quintessence, handbooks to the Symposium, How to Read the Symposium booklets, a bibliography of its literature, Fresh Outlooks on the Quintessence, Overlooked Points in the Symposium, and Little Known Facts About the Symposium.

The old scholar's wines

The cellar is concealed behind book-backs. Its named wines are Vina Horna, Maronean, Pramnian, wine of Tmolus, Lesbian, Sebennytic, Setinum, Thalassites, and Falernian, together with a wine said to have grown on the farm a thousand years earlier.

The scholar claims to be as old as many of his wines. Thalassites has aged in deep seawater. As they discuss the bottles, Antoninus repeatedly pulls their corks with his teeth.

The dicers and kings rhyme

Antoninus quotes four couplets about dicers and kings, men who command fate and nations while knowing very little. The final speakers expect to take their gold. Antoninus uses the rhyme to question the greatness of rulers. The conversation turns to sour grapes, the Discourse Superior, and Cassandra-like artists who can expose public folly but cannot prevent it.

The scholar's classifications of men

They divide men first into good and bad, then good, bad, and tolerable. Other divisions follow: religious, artistic, scientific, pleasure-seeking, and utilitarian; wise, stupid, and doubtful; tall and short; boys, mature men, and old men; beer, wine, and whisky drinkers. The fivefold scheme assigns each type its own opposing values and praises men capable of judging in several ways.

The scholar finds four of the five types in Christ, excluding utility. He later divides nations by what they drink.

The imported stones and the inherited crutches

The scholar tells of a Spanish town that imports stones to execute women. Jewish peddlers collect the stones and sell them back. Asked why the town persists, its people say they copied the Jews; the peddlers answer that they themselves use stones because they have no trees. The tale joins the folly of imitation to stereotypes of Jewish profit and violence.

A son uses crutches throughout his life because his father does. Only in old age does he learn that his father has no legs.

The sinless girl who marries the devil

The squire tells of a good girl frightened by a preacher's insistence that everyone must repent. Unable to remember a sin, she accepts a stranger's offer to supply one. The devil is so impressed by her innocence that he marries her legally instead, and she remains happy and innocent in Hell while trying to reform her husband. Antoninus denies that the legend can be true; the squire replies by questioning the means of distinguishing true legends from false ones.

The squire's argument about supporting artists

The squire argues that artists outnumber the informed people who might support them. Public generosity cannot pay their way, and patrons reduce their work to entertainment. When Antoninus suggests patronage, the squire asks which artists have been able to support children and pass on their cultivation.

Their dispute about belief thus ends with the hunger of artists and the difficulty of raising a cultivated next generation.

Innuendo 1: Of Attitudes

The essay calls an attitude a selective way of looking, governed by desires for efficiency and truth. It distinguishes providential optimism, comfortable acceptance, levelling ignorance, and sceptical inquiry. Within the third class it separates complacent men from broken former thinkers, whom it treats more leniently.

Scepticism produces science and learning, but also doubts about their worth, and offers little peace. The religious man is told to avoid all four attitudes. He must live among the traps and seek the light; the difficulty is meant to keep his mind from rotting.

The nine Innuendos

Chapter 7 presents nine essays as a translation of a work by Antoninus. They begin with Of Attitudes and end with Of the Proper Amount of Reverence to be Paid Established Icons and Other Important Points for Iconoclasts.

Innuendo 2: Of Rumors as Taking the Place of Facts

The essay imagines a sarcastic remark at the discovery of the Venus of Milos becoming her reputation for beauty. It offers a different appraisal: frustrated desire, age, and weakness have made the statue a masterpiece of futility deserving pity.

A footnote says the discovery took place a hundred years after Antoninus and blames his bad dating.

Innuendo 3: Of the Paradox of Virtue

A pious painter produces coarse, wooden figures; a sinful painter depicts purity. The essay argues that innocence becomes visible through the temptation threatening it. In a painting of an autumn wood-nymph, the approaching winter gives beauty its danger.

A summer picture shows the weariness of uninterrupted comfort. The essay ends by comparing virtue with courage: neither becomes known until it is challenged.

For how do we know that this is supposed to be innocence unless temptation is shown in ambush?

The third Innuendo

Innuendo 4: Of the Sins to Be Fled and the Sins to be Reasoned with

A retreat lecturer recommends fleeing sexual temptation and reasoning with other sins. The essay reverses his advice. Reason may restrain sexual desire, depending on temperament and experience, but can also discover ways to steal, defraud, and take revenge. The worldly penalties for sexual misconduct give reason something to work upon.

The essay likens false proofs of religious doctrine to a vaccine: reason’s form survives after its power to disturb has been removed. It says that God’s existence, the Trinity, the virgin birth, and the afterlife must be accepted by faith or rejected on reason. It condemns the use of such proofs to quiet doubt.

Innuendo 5: Of Poetry

The breviary for balladiers urges generosity with ideas, economy of form, technical care, and restraint in reading lest life pass unnoticed. It prizes the force of sounds, defends sadness in art, censures bad rhyme and enjambment, and mocks the poet’s conceit.

Later observations concern ballads falling into the gutter and returning to literature, sounds and colours, poetry as intoxication, and readers who understand a poem better than its experts. Sermoq’s small poem acquires an enormous commentary about its snarler. The essay ends with his response to an insulting handshake: he cuts off his own fingers.

Sermoq's poem, its commentators, and his handshake

Sermoq asks a companion who has travelled with him to restrain her snarler and invite him indoors. Simon Magus takes the snarler for a dog; Thiers and Dalhart take it for her father. Their footnote quarrels over French phrases and missing words.

Having condemned these additions, the essay supplies a story about the poet. A nobleman gives Sermoq a three-fingered handshake. Sermoq cuts off his own fingers and presents them to the nobleman, who accepts them.

Innuendo 6: Of the Father of Superstition

The essay derives superstition from a gland governing position, direction, movement, and balance. Its writer refuses the qualification almost because it would weaken his rhetoric. An invisible thread trailing behind each person explains fears of ladders, doors, running water, and the journeys required in purgatory.

He extends the theory to turning around, a fatal breach of etiquette, the priest’s movements at Mass, dancers turning back on themselves, touching posts, avoiding pavement cracks, and lucky numbers.

Innuendo 7: The Serious Burlesque

An ancient hermit returns to find modern artists endlessly repeating earlier works. He assumes that they are making burlesques and cannot understand why they leave bad work alone. Told that they are sincere imitators, he remembers Roman performances in which the masterpiece appeared before its parody.

He argues that an unfunny imitation shames the original. His companion continues to explain, but the hermit refuses to listen and returns to the woods certain that he is right.

Innuendo 8: Of the Professor’s Curious Device

Professor Anastasius impresses and bewilders his listeners with quotations severed from their contexts and borrowed foreign sayings. Pupils search his comments for meanings he never intended. A girl complains to his wife that he has written bad words on her papers.

His wife asks why he does it. He answers that it makes the pupils think, even if it troubles their sleep or leads them to abandon their standards.

Innuendo 9: Of the Proper Amount of Reverence to be Paid Established Icons and Other Important Points for Iconoclasts

A revered old gentleman has done work of little value while occupying a place deserved by better men. His possible replacements are a disliked foreigner, a Jewish man, and an irreverent young thinker. Their achievements count for less with the public than the incumbent’s manners, appearance, and family.

The Jewish candidate’s achievements are affirmed through a description full of hostile bodily stereotypes. The essay decides to leave the old man in place: the others know how to bear injustice, while he could not bear his fall. A zealous reformer will probably mistake him for the wronged hero and give him another bouquet.

The theatre girl's stories about her father

Before the play, the girl tells how her father tried to cure an employee’s temper by ducking him in a horse-trough. The final attempt drowned him. She then describes the father’s experiments with a drink that destroys part of the house, sends animals into strange behaviour, and explodes when hissed at.

He may still be in the cellar with his pipe, almanac, and pet snake. Another account has him thrown into the air by the explosion and walking above the ground. Her mother says people cannot tell when the girl is fooling.

The unnamed siege tragedy

In the first scene, a girl prefers a lazy soldier to the officer who courts her. She cleans his musket while he eats an apple. Drinking, songs, mockery, and a contest for a place on the wine maiden’s lap accompany the preparations for battle. The soldiers rush out when the fighting begins.

The second scene brings reports of the officer’s heroic death. The wine maiden carries in the lazy soldier’s body: he has spent the battle eating apples and cheering. His lover still prefers him. The conqueror explains the city’s offences, promises restraint, and asks the bereaved girl to marry him. She accepts.

In the dressing room, the wine maiden praises the conqueror and reproaches the bride for mourning a worthless man. The bride delays the ceremony, asks the groom to enter, retrieves a knife, and kills him. The narrator calls the tragedy a confusion of dross and gold.

Three rises and falls of the curtain divide these scenes, which alternate with Casimirro’s account of Maddelena and Sebastian.

The excommunicated devotees of woman

Casimirro recalls knights devoted to woman in the abstract. Theologians warn them against excessive reverence for the Virgin; the knights insist that they mean woman herself. They refuse correction and are excommunicated. Casimirro credits them with some of the finest pages in history and literature.

Casimirro's musical calendar

Casimirro dates the last three years of his relationship with Maddelena by the music they heard. The names are Moon Gleams, The Dragon Fly and the Glow Worm, Glamour Girl, A Cup of Muscatella and a Blue Smoke Dream of You, Daughter of Eve, Castle Full of Cobwebs, Molincuaccio, and Girl with the Glockenspiel.

The songs recall days, places, and intimacies. Casimirro remembers hearing “Girl with the Glockenspiel” from a hill above Florence, with the music rising around them like fog.

My true-love went to the market

Five quatrains open Chapter 8, section 5. A woman’s three donkeys carry childhood, laughter, and virtue, which she exchanges for a bed of straw. The poem is attributed to Johanno Rustico, Herzstileeder and Herzbrekleeder.

The audience has left when the poem introduces Casimirro’s final account. Its exchange of precious gifts for tawdry goods recalls the tragedy’s dross and gold.

The siege play's epilogue

A maid enters with a candle and asks pardon for the stage dreams in six lines of verse. She sends the audience to dinner, to escort their sweethearts home, and to bed. She blows out the candle, leaving the stage dark. Casimirro and Antoninus remain after everyone else has left.

The dreamer whose soul disappears

A man lives in imagined worlds for sixty years. At his death God and the devil wait to see who owns his soul, but none appears. God borrows the devil’s pocket knife and opens the body. The soul has split and dwindled among its thousand and one imaginary lives until nothing remains for punishment or reward.

The narrator tells this story while describing Nicolo’s withdrawal, adding that he has not yet gone so far.

Abraham's proposed tests of psychic powers

Abraham proposes a thousand trials in which one person writes a number while another, turned away, tries to reproduce it. For second sight he recommends guessing the suits of twenty-six cards ten times. He claims that an average of eight correct guesses would prove the power. A lower score, he says, merely shows that the person lacks it.

The saints who accuse one another of plagiarism

Abraham argues that writers who reach the same truth will write alike. Antoninus answers with two saints who perform the same unusual miracle and accuse each other of theft. Christ rules for one; the loser produces earlier examples of Christ’s own miracles. Antoninus adds that the story is false.

Abraham's private library

Abraham carries most of his library in his head, but keeps rare books on a private shelf. The narrator gives a catalogue arranged by the authors’ elaborate learned names.

The first entries are Absolutissimus, Absalom: Allegory upon an Apple; Abozzo, Nathanial: Eschalology of Esch; Abosino, Succoso: Panegyric on the Color Blue; Acutissimus, Agustus: The Music Chest; Admonitatus, Claddius: Witch Craft for the Beginner; Adelphus, Adolph: Five Sure Cures for the Hiccups; Adeptus, Gaston: A Grammar of the Speech of Monkeys; and Adolatus, Susanne: Why I Am So Brilliant.

The remaining named entries are Affabilitas, Emanuel: Historia Latrinarum; Ambrosius, Anthony: Nine Ways to Irritate Good People and Make Them Growl; Antiquissimus, Melchior: Under These Rafters; Aquarello, Pintador: Of the Twenty Seven Noble Faces Which Run through the Paintings of All Ages and a Startling Theory Thereon; Arbitro, Arnold: Of the Development of a Superior Attitude toward the Everyday World of Affairs; Arragno, Benjamin: Of Ghosts and the Nine Places They Are Most Likely to Haunt; Aureo, Nicholaus: The Magnificent Scantling; Aurora, Dorotea: Castles in the Sand; and Avolo, Bigio: The Mechanism of Style.

The apple illustrates a supposedly regular world that is imperfectly shaped; the music chest collects songs purchased at the price of reputations; the witchcraft requires trefoil leaves, fox hairs, and bacon rind. Other works offer monkeys' reading exercises, daily practice in superiority, ghostly locations, songs all named Rain on the Roof, and 1,011 tasty words as the supposed whole of style.

A final run of honorifics extends the collection: Copiosus, Dulcifluus, Ecstaticus, Famosissimus, Mellifluus, Profundissimus, Scholasticus, Seraphicus, Speculativus, Sublimis, Subtilis, Succinctus, Universalis, Memoriosissimus, Sublunarius, Grammaticus, and Sophisticus. The narrator attributes Abraham's display to his own lack of such an honour, while allowing that some books are worthy.

The dissenter in Atlantis

In Abraham’s tower, Antoninus tells of an old dissenter in Atlantis, with a passing reference to the Miscellany of Misq. The farmer paints verses about the governing committee on his barn. Questioned by an informer, he claims all three poems, spits on the man, and sets his dogs upon him.

The committee demands equality, suppression of dissent and indifference, national supremacy, racial exclusion, material progress, control of reproduction, and confinement of eccentrics. The farmer refuses everything. He has no surplus to confiscate, never travels, cannot have children, and enjoys his neighbours’ mockery. The officials can find no effective penalty. They leave, and he fetches his paintbrush.

Abraham agrees that there will always be such conscientious objectors and begins his story of the whist expert.

The whist expert who does not know the cards

Abraham has met a celebrated whist player, the author of thirteen books and five hundred essays, who cannot identify elementary features of the court cards. He offers the encounter as a reason to distrust experts.

Childhood, adulthood, and civilization

Antoninus divides life into two developments. Childhood reaches a provisional completeness around thirteen; a more complicated adult life then begins, often falling short of its model. He finds counterparts in childhood for the poetic and sceptical years of youth, and distinguishes intelligence from judgment.

He applies the analogy to civilization. Its fragile early perfection gives way to larger powers and a period of confusion. At two centuries to an allegorical year, he expects a future human prime whose character he cannot foresee.

The Handbook on the Infinite and the Abstract

Abraham argues that infinite space differs from measurable space and eternity from enlarged time. At extreme scales, he thinks, models cease to resemble their subjects and even arithmetic may fail. Maurizio objects on mathematical and religious grounds.

Abraham cites the Handbook of Discourses Theories and Comments on the Infinite and the Abstract being a Collection of all the More Universal Dialogues Thereon Taken from a Hundred Sources and Designed Especially to Facilitate the Deep Conversation of Undergraduates Who Become Philosophical in their Cups. In its latest edition the theory has moved to an appendix reserved for graduate students drinking stronger liquor.

Maddelena's account of Hell as a refuge

Maddelena has read of a being who left Heaven to shelter people abandoned by the Lord. Calling herself an angel of the devil, she disputes Hell’s reputation as a torture chamber. She divides its inhabitants into arrogant wrongdoers and compassionate people who serve them, and reports gradual improvement.

Maurizio says she is harming people while trying to do good. She later agrees that his proposed life with an orthodox family might help her return to belief.

Abraham's closing reflections

After Maddelena leaves, Abraham mocks the claim that one’s own age is uniquely troubled. With rain outside, he advises strengthening roofs and doors against storms people have failed to expect. He then attacks practical instruction at the expense of reading, praising the concentration made possible by writing.

He turns to poems praising the heart above the head and expressions crediting madness with wisdom. He quotes Tertullian as another offender. Antoninus leaves; Abraham blows out his candle and disputes the proverb that one gets from life only what one puts into it. A poker player, he observes, may receive more than his stake.

Themes and Philosophy

Faith, doubt, and the fear of judgment

Nicolo asks how an immense universe can be reconciled with the Incarnation and redemption. Abraham answers that effortless creation need not avoid waste. He then asks why an agnostic’s honest uncertainty should incur divine punishment. Fear enters the debate as a threat against the doubter’s good faith.

Antoninus trusts that God has supplied the main outlines of the puzzle. Arguments repeatedly draw him away from this conviction, but he returns to it. He listens to objections that trouble his confidence without abandoning his belief.

The fourth Innuendo denies that reason can prove God’s existence, the rationality of the Trinity, the possibility of the virgin birth, or the certainty of an afterlife. These claims must be accepted on faith or rejected by reason, its speaker argues. He condemns arguments that imitate proof merely to cure doubt, even when they succeed. In the final conversation Abraham attacks the prestige of irrationality and denounces Tertullian’s paradoxes. He resents the claim that an absurdity deserves belief because it is absurd.

Mercy, justice, and correction

Maddelena adopts penitential dress to please an old priest whose concern has moved her. She admits that her conduct is wrong and perhaps foolish, yet calls it a service to people she imagines God rejecting. She claims to recognize their need for compassion where she believes God has failed them.

Maurizio defends divine pity and justice, then proposes placing her with an orthodox family. He hopes she will become fond of its awkward members and teach them to feel the faith they defend. Their affection may in turn restore her belief. Maddelena allows him to try this if she is arrested and brought before him.

Abraham broadens the dispute into a demand that God change his standards, then offers the less blasphemous alternative that human ideas of God should change. Antoninus agrees only in a qualified way: human beings differ across places and times, rites have differed, and interpretations may need revision. He expressly denies a present need to change the letter of doctrine.

Maddelena portrays the devil as a charitable dissenter who founded Hell to shelter those rejected by God. Antoninus calls her position horrible. Maurizio condemns the harm she does in attempting good, but hopes she can return to the faith.

Art, judgment, and historical dress

Drawing teaches Antoninus and Casimirro to notice what they previously overlooked. Yet a sketch cannot preserve the sound, smell, temperature, or feel of a place underfoot. Antoninus’s notebook considers how the chosen materials affect what a picture can suggest.

Giovanni defends painting sacred figures in recognizable clothes and vehicles. Antoninus objects to fashions that rapidly become ridiculous, but also allows shadows, selective invention, and slight innovations. Giovanni asks when the painter who researches every detail will find time to learn his craft. Antoninus ends by mocking his own readiness to give instruction in an art he cannot practise.

The third Innuendo argues that painted innocence becomes moving through the fear of its loss. Its speaker finds the holy painter’s figures wooden and coarse, while praising the purity conveyed by a disreputable painter. He compares virtue to a pearl visible only by the light of a fire that can destroy it.

The narrator praises Giovanni’s goodness but attacks his reputation as a painter. He believes reverence for the saint has led admirers to find artistic qualities his pictures do not possess. In his account, goodness can mislead a critic who assumes it must be visible in the work.

Childhood, beauty, and sexual danger

Maddelena is thirteen when she models for the boys. They draw her as saints, ordinary girls, ladies, and mythological figures. Antoninus protests when she lowers her clothes from her shoulders and Casimirro draws her as a nymph or a temptation of Saint Anthony. The picture of her in red garters sends him back to the Decretals, hoping to enter the order soon. He remains their friend.

The same child supplies devotional and erotic images. Maddelena wants to become a saint and an actress; Antoninus fears the attraction he feels. The scene sexualizes her youthful beauty even as the narration emphasizes her chatter, play, and talent for impersonation.

In the final chapter Maddelena speaks confidently about conduct, compassion, and divine justice. Maurizio still calls her a child when proposing his remedy. She leaves with a candle, and the narrator compares her footsteps on the dark stairs to those of a frightened child.

Childhood, memory, and the limits of models

Antoninus’s childhood dreams take him through unfamiliar historical worlds. The narrator imagines children dreaming back through the history of their kind and attributes the boy’s later knowledge to dreams, study, and aptitude. Antoninus cannot remember the heavenly dream, but it remains an ideal and promise. The narrator adds that some readers will think he invented it.

During the storm Antoninus proposes two stages of development. Childhood supplies a first model; a larger and more complicated apparatus then begins, often failing to attain the model’s completeness. He extends the analogy to civilization and wonders what kind of creature it will become.

Abraham questions whether a small model can disclose what happens at an immense scale. He denies that eternity is merely time enlarged. For support he cites an elaborate handbook whose title recommends it to students drinking and talking philosophy.

Authority, dissent, and coercion

The young De Medici plans to consolidate ownership and govern the country. He would regulate artistic subjects, appoint critics, and ultimately judge the quality of art himself, with execution among the penalties. He also proposes soup for recognized masters and gives Antoninus a coat, a donkey, and money.

In Antoninus’s Atlantis tale, a committee demands conformity, racial exclusion, and control over reproduction in the name of equality. Its elderly dissenter defeats each threat because the officials keep proposing to take things he no longer values or uses. Their power fails against the particulars of his life.

Maurizio’s training as an inquisitorial judge suits his patience, fairness in examining evidence, and readiness to decide. He has no doubts about the Church’s authority. The narrator nevertheless acknowledges the horror of burning heretics. In the tower conversation Maurizio proposes affection and religious instruction for Maddelena, then threatens to burn Nicolo to break his indifference.

Ethnic description and the critique of stereotypes

Abraham is born Jewish and joins the order for its opportunities for study. Among the novices he contributes arguments, legends, linguistic theories, and extended jokes. His interest in scholarship leads him from religious questions to language, medicine, and literary criticism.

While discussing familiar jokes, Abraham attacks the assumptions that Jews speak badly and love money. He offers his own correct speech and poverty as counterexamples. A habitual joke survives even when its premise fails to describe the person telling it.

His account of language, however, assigns fixed dispositions to national and ethnic groups. He accuses the people called Gypsies in the novel of habitual lying. The narrator describes him as speaking at random and rejects his convenient claim that providence would supply food without farming. Abraham delivers these ethnic judgments among arguments his listeners often ignore.

Abraham’s rejection of antisemitic jokes does not prevent him from repeating a hostile stereotype about Romani people. His criticism is selective: he sees the absurdity of assumptions directed at himself while making comparable claims about others.

Books, work, and experience

The monastery requires physical labor as well as study. Abraham avoids the fields and claims that providence would supply food without farming. The narrator says he does not believe this excuse. His listeners keep cutting hay and often give him little attention.

Antoninus’s superior sends him out to meet the world. The miser, the girl, and the squire force him to reconsider judgments he makes before hearing them. Ordered to wander for a year, he returns to the monastery after a year and a half.

Near the ending Abraham attacks the fashionable preference for practical demonstration. He argues that writing teaches more quickly, while the senses distract a pupil from what matters. Antoninus has learned through both books and encounters: drawing sharpened his observation, and conversation repeatedly unsettled his judgments during the journey.

Jokes, burlesque, and the correction of pride

At eight, Antoninus discovers that people laugh at his manner instead of hearing what he wants to teach. He examines his archaic speech, his ignorance of the people he condemns, and his confidence in his judgments. He changes how he speaks and becomes more companionable.

Abraham sorts jokes into seven kinds, turning the classification into an argument with their familiar premises. He disputes the Jewish joke by citing his own speech and poverty. His account of humour keeps departing from its orderly scheme into anecdotes, objections, and performance.

Abraham argues that a master must be able to laugh at himself and retain a sensible scale of values. Mere devotion to an occupation does not suffice. The superstition essay’s speaker prefers an absolute claim to a more accurate qualification because qualification would weaken his rhetoric.

Evidence, scholarship, and invented authority

Antoninus writes a scholarly footnote containing names he makes illegible because he has invented them. The poetry essay stages a quarrel over whether a snarler is a dog or a girl’s father. Commentators multiply, and a proposed erased reading promises to settle the dispute.

Abraham’s library promises specialized knowledge through elaborate titles and authors’ names. His argument about models later invokes a handbook recommended in its title for students drinking and talking philosophy. These books borrow the formal appearance of learned authorities for increasingly absurd subjects.

The footnote makes its authority literally unreadable. The commentators pile conjecture onto a short poem, and the catalogue advertises expertise in monkeys’ grammar and superior attitudes. The jokes expose how readily the appearance of learning can be mistaken for knowledge.

Imagination as refuge

Nicolo’s lost faith finds expression in the Ode to a Wooden Madonna. He still visits churches and wishes God were there. At the poem’s close, the candle he has sheltered from doubt goes out in darkness and sleet. He says that the paper was wet with more than ink when he wrote it.

The narrator compares Nicolo’s retreat into imagination to a legend about a man whose soul has dispersed among invented worlds and cannot be found at death. Nicolo has not gone so far. He has lost joy, sorrow, hope, compunction, and fear, but remains healthy, courteous, and capable of difficult mathematics.

Maurizio threatens to burn Nicolo to provoke a response from his indifference. Nicolo offers no defence. Later he answers Abraham politely and retires to his room, continuing the outward courtesies of life among the monks.

Superstition and the body

The sixth Innuendo proposes a small gland that supplies a sense of orientation and generates superstition. Its examples include an invisible thread trailing behind a person, ladders, doors, running water, turning around, social embarrassment, and the movements of a priest at Mass.

The speaker concedes that “almost all” would be more accurate, then discards the qualification because it weakens his rhetoric. His ambition to explain superstition encourages a certainty his own admission has already undermined.

A young man turns to relieve his uneasiness; observers take the movement as an insult to a lady, and he is ordered killed. The essay’s imagined bodily impulse becomes dangerous when others assign it a social meaning.

Historical Annotations

Antoninus of Florence

Antoninus Pierozzi was born in Florence on 1 March 1389 and died on 2 May 1459. He entered the Dominicans in 1405, became archbishop of Florence in 1446, and was canonized in 1523. His Dominican feast falls on 10 May.

St. Antoninus, Catholic Encyclopedia (1907); The Feast of Saint Antoninus of Florence

The novel’s account of his admission to the order includes the Decretals episode from saints’ lives. Chapter 3 also lists his writings and offices.

Totila and the siege of Florence

Procopius records that Totila sent commanders to besiege Florence. They withdrew toward Mucellis when a relieving force approached. Florence remained under the Roman commander Justinus.

Wars, Book VII, chapters 5 and 6

Lafferty opens with Totila looking back at Florence and prophesying its greatness. The narrator doubts that the prophecy was ever made, then jokes that the city has produced too many great men to identify its intended subject.

Fra Angelico and the novel’s Giovanni

Fra Angelico, born Guido di Pietro around 1395, took the religious name Fra Giovanni. He died in 1455. The Metropolitan Museum’s account discusses his use of perspective and his modeling of form through light and shadow. The name Angelico was applied after his death.

Fra Angelico (Guido di Pietro), ca. 1395–1455

Lafferty’s Giovanni argues with Antoninus about sacred painting, historical dress, artistic technique, and the lives of saints.

Raymond of Peñafort

Raymond of Peñafort was the Dominican canonist who compiled Gregory IX’s Decretals. He appears as Pennafort in the novel’s list of learned Dominicans.

St. Raymond of Peñafort, Catholic Encyclopedia (1911); Papal Decretals, Catholic Encyclopedia

The Book of Decretals

Gregory IX commissioned Raymond of Peñafort to compile the collection of papal canon law known as the Decretals of Gregory IX or Liber extra. The bull Rex pacificus promulgated it on 5 September 1234.

Papal Decretals, Catholic Encyclopedia

Antoninus must learn the Decretals before entering the order. The narrator gives twelve months as the duration reported in saints’ lives, then entertains the legend’s year and a day.

Vincent Ferrer

Vincent Ferrer, born in Valencia in 1350, was a Dominican preacher of penance. He appears in the novel’s quoted list of Dominican saints.

St Vincent Ferrer

The Catholic Encyclopedia passage

The passage quoted in Chapter 3 comes from Pierre Mandonnet’s “Order of Preachers,” in volume 12 of the Catholic Encyclopedia (1911). Its account of Dominican sanctity emphasizes learning, preaching, and practical work.

Order of Preachers, Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 12 (1911)

Where the novel reads “holiness in the apostate,” Mandonnet’s article reads “holiness in the apostolate.”

Order of Preachers, Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 12 (1911)

Love’s Labour’s Lost

The novel describes a king who binds his court to five years of study without women. In Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act 1, scene 1, the King of Navarre’s vow lasts three years.

Love’s Labor’s Lost, Act 1, scene 1

The narrator compares this austere scheme with Antoninus’s appetite for study.

Tertullian and the impossible

The final Latin quotation comes from Tertullian’s De carne Christi, chapter 5, which defends the reality of Christ’s flesh through his birth, death, and resurrection.

De carne Christi, chapter 5; On the Flesh of Christ, chapters 4 and 5

The novel’s quotation begins with Natus est Dei Filius, “the Son of God was born.” The corresponding sentence in Tertullian begins crucifixus est dei filius, “the Son of God was crucified.” The quotation ends by declaring the resurrection certain because it is impossible.

De carne Christi, chapter 5

Abraham quotes Tertullian while attacking the prestige of irrationality. He continues speaking as Antoninus leaves and ends with a comparison to poker.

The comet of 1456

Callistus III’s bull of 29 June 1456 ordered prayers in response to the Turkish threat. It contains no reference to the comet. John Stein distinguishes Antoninus’s mention of the comet from the papal prayers.

Bartolomeo Platina, Catholic Encyclopedia (1911); The Pope and the Comet

The Venus of Milos

The Venus de Milo was discovered on Milos in 1820. The Marquis de Rivière bought it and gave it to Louis XVIII, who presented it to the Louvre in March 1821.

An ideal of Greek beauty: Venus de Milo

The second Innuendo attacks the statue’s reputation for beauty and the judgments sustained by that reputation.

The old scholar’s ancient wines

The old scholar’s cellar includes Tmolus, Sebennytic, and Setinum, names found in classical writing about wine.

The Natural History, Book XIV

In Odyssey 9, Maron gives Odysseus wine that is mixed with twenty measures of water to one of wine. Lafferty’s narrator describes a dilution of twelve measures of water.

The Odyssey, Book IX

Pliny’s Natural History, Book XIV, describes wine from Tmolus used to sweeten other wines, Lesbian wine, and Sebennytic wine made from three named grape kinds.

The Natural History, Book XIV

Lilith and the apple core

In the Alphabet of Ben Sira, Lilith is created from earth for Adam and disputes his claim to precedence.

Alphabet of Ben Sira 78: Lilith

Casimirro invokes Lilith while praising Maddelena’s thoughtfulness. His Lilith returns to remind Adam to throw away the apple core before it attracts flies.

The Council of Florence

The council moved to Florence in January 1439 and issued its decree of union with the Greeks that July. Proceedings moved to Rome in 1443 and continued there until 1445.

Council of Basel–Ferrara–Florence: introduction and decrees

The novel calls Antoninus a theologian of the pope at the council. His Catholic Encyclopedia biography reports his participation in 1439.

St. Antoninus, Catholic Encyclopedia (1907)

See also: Antoninus of Florence

Dominicans and intellectual holiness

The Catholic Encyclopedia article “Order of Preachers” describes Dominican holiness through preaching, learning, and practical work. The narrator quotes it while recounting Antoninus’s studies.

Order of Preachers, Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 12 (1911)

After the quotation, he turns to the order’s work, dress, and manners, comparing its members with Roman scholars and orators.

William of Moerbeke

William of Moerbeke translated Greek works into Latin, including writings by Aristotle, Proclus, and Archimedes. The Dominican translator appears in the novel’s account of scholarly labor.

William of Moerbeke, Catholic Encyclopedia (1912)

John Balbus and the Catholicon

The Catholicon is the Latin reference work of Johannes de Janua, also called Balbi. The British Library records these names in its description of Stowe MS 981. Lafferty calls him John Balbus.

Stowe MS 981: Catholicon

The narrator places the dictionary beside translations and books of practical counsel in his account of Dominican learning.

Robert Holcot and the Philobiblon attribution

The novel credits Robert Holcot with Philobiblion, as does the Catholic Encyclopedia article it quotes.

Order of Preachers, Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 12 (1911)

E. C. Thomas’s edition names the work The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury. Its prologue identifies the speaker as Richard, Bishop of Durham.

The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury

Regola a ben vivere

The Catholic Encyclopedia lists Antoninus’s Regola a ben vivere under the title used in the novel. Its biography of Antoninus also records Italian works of practical counsel addressed to Medici women.

Order of Preachers, Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 12 (1911); St. Antoninus, Catholic Encyclopedia (1907)

See also: Antoninus of Florence

Syriac

Syriac is a form of Aramaic used across the Middle East and Asia in theology, philosophy, medicine, and other fields.

Syriaca: the Syriac world

Antoninus studies Syriac. In the tavern, a stranger claims to possess a unique Syriac book containing Delila’s account of Samson.

Hobson-Jobson and fanciful etymologies

Hobson-Jobson, by Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, is a glossary of Anglo-Indian words and phrases. Its preface explains the title through the reshaping of borrowed words into familiar English sounds. Lafferty calls the supposed linguistic law Hobson-Dobson.

Hobson-Jobson, 1903 edition; Hobson-Jobson: front matter

Teresa of Ávila and the vision of hell

Teresa of Ávila describes youthful influences and conversation in chapter II of her Life. In chapter XXXII, she recounts seeing during prayer the place in hell she believed her sins had deserved.

The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus, chapters II and XXXII

The narrator compares Maddelena’s chatter with Teresa’s frivolous conversation. He says that Maddelena continued talking, never received Teresa’s warning vision, and never became a saint.

Thais the penitent

Thais is the Egyptian penitent of Christian hagiography. The Catholic Encyclopedia summarizes two surviving lives of her.

St. Thais, Catholic Encyclopedia (1912)

Maddelena invokes Thais as her example of a woman who was both a public performer and a saint. She hopes to become both herself.

Shelley’s Indian Serenade

Shelley’s “The Indian Serenade” begins with a lover waking from dreams of his beloved. Lafferty names it “Indian Serenade” during Antoninus’s moonlit excursion.

The Indian Serenade

Strindberg’s A Dream Play

In the prefatory note to A Dream Play, Strindberg describes the disconnected yet apparently logical form of a dream, freed from the ordinary constraints of time and space.

A Dream Play, in Plays: First Series

After Antoninus’s dream, the narrator imagines the moonlit night as a comedy moving as aimlessly as Strindberg’s play.

Purgatory and the invisible thread

The Catholic Catechism describes purgatory as the purification of those assured of salvation and distinguishes it from the punishment of the damned.

Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 1030–1032

In the sixth Innuendo, people must retrace in purgatory an invisible thread unwound during their lives. Ordinary return journeys wind it up again; ladders can tangle it and require painful extra journeys. The adherents of this supposed heresy divide over the extent of a ladder’s damage.

Limbo and the explanation of fairies

Antoninus considers souls from Limbo as one possible explanation of fairies.

The International Theological Commission describes infant limbo as a medieval theological hypothesis that was never defined as Catholic doctrine.

The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die without Being Baptised (2007)

Stigmata and claims about the body

In Christian devotion, stigmata are wounds or marks associated with Christ’s Passion.

Mystical Stigmata, Catholic Encyclopedia

Abraham proposes a mock medical entry on stigmata, then speculates that ecstasy can suspend bodily needs and postpone death.

Abraham of Edessa and the deserted bride

Alban Butler’s life of Abraham the Hermit recounts the marriage arranged by his parents, his withdrawal after the wedding, and fifty years of ascetic practice. His cell has a sealed doorway and a small window for necessities. Antoninus tells the same story about Abraham of Edessa.

St. Abraham, Hermit, and His Niece St. Mary, a Penitent

Butler says Abraham informed the bride of his resolution and later obtained his relatives’ consent. Antoninus’s mother asks what became of the abandoned bride and why such treatment should be admired.

St. Abraham, Hermit, and His Niece St. Mary, a Penitent

See also: Antoninus of Florence

The saints in Maddelena’s sketches

Mary of Egypt is the converted sinner and desert ascetic of Christian tradition. In her life as retold by the Orthodox Church in America, she tells Zosimas of her repentance in Jerusalem and her years beyond the Jordan.

Venerable Mary of Egypt

Cunegundes is a form of Cunigunde, wife of Henry II. She is one of the saints for whom Maddelena poses.

St Cunegund: biographical authority record

Rossetti’s “Jenny”

In Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Jenny,” the speaker watches Jenny rest her head on his knee and later places gold coins in her hair. Lafferty recalls both details during Antoninus’s moonlit night.

“Jenny”

The novel names Rossetti in its account of the scene; the poem assigns the actions to its first-person speaker.

“Jenny”

Narrative Voice

The narrator as compiler and maker

The narrator chooses names, consults sources, declines to consult others, and rearranges a saint’s life. He gives Antoninus’s birth year from memory and refuses to look it up. Later he complains that he cannot remember Casimirro’s name without turning back.

The dream of Heaven receives two explanations: it protected Antoninus through later dangers, or the narrator invented it.

The statement of method

In Chapter 6, section 4, the narrator defends inserting a late-remembered incident wherever it proves useful. He would contradict a casual accusation of taking liberties and ignore one supported by proof.

He imagines borrowing adventures from Albertus Magnus to fill uneventful years, then expressly denies having done so.

He invokes Heine’s travels in Italy as an example of assigning a forgotten detail to the town reached when it returns to mind. The encounter with the rich squire and the return to Fiesole follow.

Notebooks, essays, and competing speakers

The narrator introduces Antoninus’s notebook after Casimirro’s lessons in observation. He then criticizes its imperfect logic, empty paragraphs, borrowed notions, and sweeping statements.

Chapter 7 presents nine translated essays by Antoninus. They prescribe, argue, tell fables, and sometimes exaggerate deliberately.

Footnotes and the appearance of learning

The note on the Venus of Milos acknowledges an anachronism and adds an inaccurate interval of its own.

An ideal of Greek beauty: Venus de Milo

Antoninus writes fictitious authorities illegibly to conceal the absence of names behind them. Commentators bury Sermoq’s poem beneath a quarrel over its snarler. The old scholar finds the secret of longevity in a footnote and says that revealing it would kill him.

Departure without a final verdict

Maddelena leaves with a candle after announcing that she will move in with a young painter. Her footsteps sound like a frightened child’s. The narrator says that she alone among women has entered Abraham’s room, except when the devil has appeared there in that form.

Abraham talks about historical excitement, education, poetry, and irrationality while the other men withdraw. At last he extinguishes his candle and continues an argument to his beard.

His audience dwindles until no one remains to hear his reply to the proverb about what people get from life.

Timeline

Childhood in Florence

The story moves from Florence’s past to Antoninus’s childhood, placing his birth in 1389. Family life, dreams, religious precocity, and studiousness occupy his early years. He is slow to recognize how absurd he sometimes appears to other people.

See also: 1. Of Chimeras and Childhood

At eight: a change of manner

At eight, Antoninus examines why people laugh at him and changes his speech and conduct. He becomes more companionable, collects pets, and continues his studies.

See also: 1. Of Chimeras and Childhood

At fourteen: the decision to enter the order

Antoninus decides to become a Dominican at fourteen. After his mother’s objections, he goes to Fiesole. The father who receives him lends him the Decretals to memorize. He returns home and begins studying it.

See also: 1. Of Chimeras and Childhood

While studying the Decretals: artistic friendships

While studying the Decretals, Antoninus learns from Casimirro, writes in his notebook, and draws Maddelena. She is thirteen, and Casimirro is Antoninus’s age. The chapter ends with Antoninus returning to the book he has studied each night since the father gave it to him.

Admission after the book is learned

The narrator gives twelve months as the period of memorization and also reports a legend of a year and a day. Antoninus is admitted to the monastery.

After several years: a visit to Florence

Antoninus returns home for a few days after several years. He is still a novice and has not taken his vows. Casimirro and Maddelena accompany him through the taverns and streets.

The following day: return to Fiesole

The day after the tavern excursion, Antoninus returns to the religious house. He resumes study and teaching, talks to Giovanni about painting, and listens to Abraham among the field workers. Later he examines the friar-balladeer’s manuscripts.

The journey: one year ordered, a year and a half travelled

The superior orders a year of wandering, beginning on a cold autumn evening. Antoninus walks three days after leaving the tinker's household and reaches a western port on the fourth morning. After the Medici encounter he travels two more days beside the sea before meeting the scholar. The squire encounter is some months later. The final report gives the whole journey as a year and a half.

Spring theatre night and the preceding Christmas

Antoninus attends the theatre on the first night of spring. Casimirro recalls the songs of the preceding three years and describes finding don Sebastian at Maddelena’s rooms the previous Christmas.

The rainy season and the continuous tower conversation

Several years bring changes among the young men. With the return of the rainy season, they gather one stormy evening in Abraham’s tower room. Their conversation continues into the final chapter as Maddelena climbs the stairs and joins them. She remarks that at least half her companions are legally men.

Maddelena's announced next morning

Maddelena announces that she will move in with a young painter the next morning and live sensibly. She also reports that Sebastian has been killed and that she visited his grave. She leaves the tower, and the novel ends that evening as the men disperse and Abraham continues talking alone.

Glossary

A Cup of Muscatella and a Blue Smoke Dream of You

One of the songs Casimirro remembers from a week with Maddelena, when a professor played it on a spindly harpsichord along with “The Dragon Fly and the Glow Worm,” “Glamour Girl,” and “Daughter of Eve.” The music becomes his calendar of their three years together: he remembers each occasion through the tune that accompanied it.

See also: Molincuaccio; Maddelena; Casimirro

Abosino, Succoso

Author of Panegyric on the Color Blue in Abraham’s catalogue. The book also treats first love and the writing of lyrics.

Abozzo, Nathanial

Author credited with Eschalology of Esch in Abraham’s alphabetized catalogue.

Abraham

Member of the Fiesole circle who was born Jewish and entered the order for its opportunities for study. He argues about language, war, humor, stigmata, literature, and education. His challenges to received ideas often give way to elaborate theories of his own. After the other monks leave, he extinguishes his candle and continues talking to his beard.

Abraham of Edessa, St.

Saint whom the young Antoninus cites while discussing his vocation with his mother. In Antoninus’s story, Abraham marries at his parents’ request, immediately retreats to a cell, and walls up its door. His mother asks what became of the deserted bride and whether such conduct was boorish.

Absey Books

Books named with bestiaries in the old scholar’s library, immediately before the catalogue of comedies.

Absolutissimus, Absalom

Author of Allegory upon an Apple, the first item in Abraham’s alphabetized catalogue. The apple, intended to be perfectly formed, resembles a pear almost as much as a ball. The subtitle makes it an image of a world likewise intended to be regular and complete. The book includes woodcuts.

Abstinence

The young trader challenges Antoninus for believing a beggar’s claim to be starving. He argues that a healthy person can endure fasting and accuses monks of letting imagination exaggerate its effects. His argument gives him a reason to withhold charity.

Acolytes

Word paired with agnostics in Chapter 3’s title. Antoninus enters the monastery, where study, work, and prayer occupy the novices’ days and theological arguments occupy their nights.

Acutissimus, Agustus

Author of The Music Chest in Abraham’s catalogue. It collects songs for which reputations have been sold and promises documentary evidence of the foolishness of such exchanges.

Adelphus, Adolph

Author of Five Sure Cures for the Hiccups in Abraham’s catalogue.

Adeptus, Gaston

Author of A Grammar of the Speech of Monkeys in Abraham’s catalogue. The subtitle promises simplified instruction, reading exercises, and an etymological appendix, with Simian and Latin characters.

Admonitatus, Claddius

Author of Witch Craft for the Beginner in Abraham’s library. Its thirteen easy charms require three leaves of trefoil, fox hairs, and a little bacon rind.

Adolatus, Susanne

Author of Why I Am So Brilliant in Abraham’s catalogue. She admits that her brilliance puzzles her and offers several explanations.

Affabilitas, Emanuel

Author of Historia Latrinarum in Abraham’s catalogue. Its accompanying discourse concerns the origin of the Christian idea of Hell and the devil.

Agnosticism

The novices debate whether withholding belief in God differs morally from denying him. They weigh the agnostic’s devotion to reason against his fear of judgment and ask whether belief adopted at the approach of death would be a betrayal. Their discussion also asks whether faith can be acquired by argument or an effort of will.

Alberti

Family named among those who struggled for Florence. The opening lists the Alberti, Buondelmonti, Uberti, Cadolinghi, and Ubaldini before turning to the Guelphs and Ghibellines.

Albertus Magnus

The narrator considers borrowing incidents from Albertus’s life to fill dull years in Antoninus’s, then says he has not done so. In the sixth innuendo, the essay’s speaker proposes looking in Albertus’s books for the name of the gland he believes governs balance and orientation.

Alice the Prudent

Girl in Abraham’s fourth original joke. Sent for wine, she imagines marrying Juan, having a daughter, and losing that daughter to an axe hanging in the cellar. Her maid and relatives successively join her weeping. Abraham classifies their behavior as conjecture carried to absurdity.

Almanac of Alcaics

Book in the old scholar’s collection of alliterative titles, beside works on premillennialism, Diogenes, and theurgy. He says that gathering such titles took years.

Ambrosius, Anthony

Author of Nine Ways to Irritate Good People and Make Them Growl in Abraham’s catalogue.

Anfanamento

The mother’s dismissal when Antoninus begins to cite St. Augustine against her singing. He wants praise in saintly measures; she continues her dance tune.

Angelico, Fra

Giovanni, the painter in the monastic circle, whom the narrator identifies with Fra Giovanni Angelico da Fiesole. He regards his talent as a gift to develop in God’s service. Usually a quiet listener, he presses Antoninus on modern clothing and vehicles in sacred pictures. The narrator later disparages his painting while acknowledging his goodness and lasting reputation.

Antiquissimus, Melchior

Author of Under These Rafters in Abraham’s catalogue, a collection of songs named Rain on the Roof.

Antonino / Antoninus

The protagonist’s two principal name forms. The opening explains Antonino as Little Anthony and reserves his episcopal title for middle life. His childhood, studies, travels, and friendships occupy the story. Chapter 7 presents the nine innuendos as his writing, translated by a narrator who claims to possess its only copy.

See also: Antoninus of Florence

Apple with the Seven Seeds in It, The

Comedy in the old scholar’s library, listed between The Serpent and the Sibyl and The Rat Who Was Caught in a Mouse Trap.

Aquarello, Pintador

Author in Abraham’s catalogue of a book on the twenty-seven noble faces recurring in paintings through the ages. Its title promises a startling theory about their recurrence.

Aquinas, Thomas

Dominican saint and scholar named in the narrator’s account of the order’s learning. He appears in the quoted list of saints and again in the narrator’s praise of his charm and scholarship.

Arbitro, Arnold

Author in Abraham’s catalogue of a manual on developing a superior attitude toward everyday affairs. It includes easy daily exercises for maintaining that attitude.

Archbishop

Antoninus’s later office, anticipated by the novel’s title and the narrator’s account of his public accomplishments. The story follows the childhood and education that precede it.

Arragno, Benjamin

Author in Abraham’s catalogue of a book on ghosts and their nine preferred haunts: graveyards, crossroads, garrets, bridal chambers, haylofts, streets between theatre and lodging districts, stables, churches, and cellars.

Assiettes

Plates, in the tavern poet’s French comparison of the girl’s large eyes. His second poem also compares her blond hair with summer grain and offers a small coin for a kiss.

Atlantis

Setting of Antoninus’s story about a revolutionary committee and a farmer who refuses to submit to it. The committee professes equality while suppressing dissent, claiming national superiority, excluding racial outsiders, and proposing restrictions on reproduction. The farmer mocks its officers, whose punishments fail to touch the life he already leads.

Atlantis, the Committee

Rulers in Antoninus’s Atlantis story. They treat indifference as opposition, common sense as the highest law, and material progress as the highest goal. Their doctrine of equality excludes racial outsiders. Against the old farmer they threaten confiscation, restricted travel, a ban on having children, denunciation, and confinement, but leave without subduing him.

Atlantis, the Old Farmer

The ninety-four-year-old dissenter who paints insulting verses about the committee on his barn. He admits authorship and refuses its political creed. He is poor, seldom travels, has long endured mockery, and has neither wife nor partner, so its threatened punishments change nothing. After the officials leave, he fetches his brush again.

Attitudes, the Four

The first innuendo examines complacent optimism, comfortable acceptance, a denial that anyone knows better, and the skeptical search for truth. It rejects each as a sufficient attitude for a religious person. The believer must continue seeking light and avoiding traps, even where the ground between them seems to disappear.

Aureo, Nicholaus

Author of The Magnificent Scantling in Abraham’s catalogue, a two-volume compendium of all knowledge to date.

Aurora, Dorotea

Author of Castles in the Sand in Abraham’s catalogue, a meditation on child poets.

Avolo, Bigio

Author of The Mechanism of Style in Abraham’s catalogue. The subtitle offers one thousand and eleven agreeable words, sorted by their stress positions, whose dexterous use is said to contain the beginning and end of style.

Baisser

Final word of the tavern poet’s second French poem, following his offer of a small coin. The narrator has introduced him as a man who knows no French. The girl tears up this poem as she did the first.

Balbus, John

Author credited with the Catholicon in the narrator’s account of Dominican learning. He appears beside William of Moerbeke and Robert Holcot and receives praise for his Latin scholarship.

Ballad / Balladeer

Ballads appear as written poems, performances, manuscripts, and practical craft. Antoninus composes a ballad about the journey to Egypt; the street singers earn money from their songs; a former friar leaves poems for scholars to catalogue. The tinker traces ballad rhythm to hammer strokes, and the fifth innuendo sets out advice for poets.

See also: Libr Canterm; Hilarion; Duendajo

Barber Who Clipped the Goats, The

Comedy in the old scholar’s library. When Antoninus asks about it, the scholar calls its title ambiguous and replies that the barber cut capers.

Beer Is My Brother

Opening of a poem in the vanished friar’s manuscripts. Beer, meat, wine, books, ballads, laughter, rafters, and candles become members of the speaker’s family. Antoninus admires the lines so much that he momentarily fancies he wrote them. The account of their author joins his appetite for pleasure to his fear of judgment.

Bertolommeo

Novice with a remarkable memory and wide information but little discrimination. He declines final vows and farms prosperously with his wife Elena. His neighbors admire his learning, and his social theory makes agricultural security the basis of society. He writes rustic verse and transfers his ambition for greatness to the sons he intends to raise.

Bibliophile, Cosmophile, Philosoph, Philolog

The old scholar’s descriptions of himself when he meets Antoninus beside the sea. Books, the world, philosophy, and language remain his interests. He adds that he was also a gynephile in his youth, but that his interest in women passed with time.

Bonfires and Tidings, Of

Title among the old scholar’s essays and miscellaneous studies, near works on songs in a warm room, poets, awns and comets, and a cat and crocus.

Bonfires at the End of the World

Nicolo tells of a ruined family whose extravagant last feast is followed by another morning and impatient creditors. Antoninus compares this with the conduct of people expecting the world to end in the year one thousand. They burn their possessions and prostrate themselves for a judgment that fails to arrive. He says that one Alpine town still lies waiting.

Breviary for Balladiers

Description of the fifth innuendo, “Of Poetry.” Its advice covers generosity with inspiration, brevity, sound, rhyme, technique, reading, and the damage done by intrusive annotation. The opening apology for occasional breviary language extends the comparison between poetry and a religious discipline.

Brillait

Was shining, in the French sentence after the poet’s second composition is torn up. The sun shines, the birds sing in the French manner, and the day is beautiful. He renews his declaration of love after the girl has compared poetry with the products of a barnyard.

Buondelmonti

Family named after the Alberti and before the Uberti in the opening account of struggles for Florence.

Burlesque, The Serious

The seventh innuendo imagines an ancient hermit encountering modern artistic schools. He mistakes earnest imitations and failed achievements for deliberate burlesques. His hosts defend the artists’ sincere efforts, but he complains that an unfunny parody shames its original and returns to the woods.

Cadolinghi

Family named among those who struggled for Florence, between the Uberti and the Ubaldini in the opening catalogue.

Candles

Lights for study, performance, and conversation. Antoninus’s mother removes his reading candle; Maddelena dances within four candles; a stage maid extinguishes one after the play’s epilogue. The monks bring candles to Abraham’s room during the storm. Maddelena takes one when she leaves and sets it at the foot of the stair. Abraham extinguishes his own while still talking.

Canta Natala

Christmas poem in the vanished friar’s manuscripts. Its dialect opening gives way to English verses about the star, straw, rafters, candlelight, and feasting. The narrator calls its subject conventional but finds charm in the old pages. The poem prompts his speculation about the association of stars with straw.

Cappuchies

Hoods pushed back in warm weather, leaving the Dominicans bareheaded. The narrator makes their dress part of his comparison between the order and Roman scholars and orators.

Carpet Slippers

Don Sebastian wears carpet slippers and an undershirt when Casimirro finds him comfortably installed in Maddelena’s room after midnight Mass. Casimirro has brought food and drink for the Christmas meal she promised to share with him. The sight sends him away in horror.

Casimirro

Antoninus’s friend, a sketcher and painter who studies Florence’s faces and bodies and makes epigrams about its inhabitants. He introduces Maddelena and later accompanies Antoninus through the taverns. Their reunion at the theatre finds him withdrawn. His account of a promised Christmas meal gradually explains the loss behind his silence.

Cassandra-like

In the conversation with the old scholar, artists are compared with Cassandra: they perceive the foolishness accompanying public greatness but can do little beyond stating their objections in speech, painting, writing, or music.

Catholicon

Book credited to John Balbus in the account of Dominican scholarship. It appears beside Aristotle translation and the Philobiblion among the order’s contributions to learning.

Censorship of Quality

The young Medici proposes suppressing bad art, stale jokes, and formulaic romances, with punishments ranging from whipping to death. Antoninus objects to killing artists. The trader later admits that he devises new plans daily and discards most of them, though he still intends to rule Florence and patronize the arts.

Chansons

Songs, in the street singers’ catalogue of colloquial titles, familiar situations, and extravagant musical descriptions. Their appeal for supper persuades Antoninus and Casimirro to pay them. Maddelena says that they earn plenty of money; later, one singer refuses to perform because the group already has cash.

Charlemagne

Named in Totila’s prediction of Florence’s future greatness. The narrator says that Charlemagne did spend Christmas there, then questions whether Totila ever made the prophecy. He also doubts which great man Totila intended, given the number of celebrated people born in Florence.

Chimeras

Word in Chapter 1’s title. Antoninus’s childhood is filled with allegory, ancestral dreams, imagined dangers, and a dream of Heaven. The stars predict that he will read the world as a book of fairy tales or a stained-glass window.

Chloris / Daphne

Subjects painted by the sinful artist in the third innuendo, alongside Virgins, St. Catherines, and Inez. The essay argues that he conveys purity through a hint of its possible loss. It contrasts his work with the wooden figures of innocent painters.

Claire flambeau

Bright torch, in the poet’s second French comparison of the girl. It precedes the lines likening her eyes to plates and her blond hair to summer grain.

Cobbler and the Cashmere, The

Comedy in the old scholar’s library, listed between Susanna and the Wag Named John and The Three Dandies and the Girl with the Straw Slippers.

Concerning a Matter of Infinite Delicacy

Book Antoninus calls a prize during his tour of the old scholar’s essays, studies, and miscellaneous writings.

Copla

Term used for songs said to come from Spanish lands and Gypsy hearts. These follow religiously inflected songs in the singers’ repertoire, before another singer turns to a college song.

Council of Florence

Council at which the narrator says Antoninus served as papal theologian. The reference appears beside his Regola a ben vivere in the account of Dominican accomplishments.

Cunegundes, St.

Saint among the roles for which Maddelena poses during the boys’ shared sketching. Her image follows those of St. Mary of Egypt and St. Elizabeth and precedes the drawings of maidens at ordinary tasks.

D’ete blé

Summer grain, in the poet’s comparison of the French girl’s blond hair. The same poem compares her eyes with plates and offers a small coin for a kiss. She tears it up.

Decretals, The

Volume of ecclesiastical law assigned to Antoninus when he first requests admission at Fiesole. He is horrified by its size but commits it to memory. The narrator sets the saints’ life’s twelve months beside the legend’s year and a day: God delays the last page to disturb the boy’s perfect schedule. His mastery of the book prepares him for further study.

Delayed Plagarism, The

Manual in the old scholar’s library for intermediaries who copy the wisdom of thirty years earlier and sell it again. The scholar says the practice arose in the eastern half of the Empire when readers could no longer follow philosophers closely. The manual provides a list of hard words to leave out.

Deus altissimus, virgo dulcissime

Fragment of angelic praise heard as Antoninus returns from his dream of Heaven. The Latin names God most high and the Virgin, then breaks into repeated syllables. He wakes repeating the final sound and cannot recall the dream, though it remains an ideal and promise within him.

Devotees of Back Rooms and the Discourse Superior

People who see through public greatness and withdraw into private conversation. Antoninus and the old scholar argue over whether their disdain is merely sour grapes. Their discussion turns to artists whose objections to public folly can find expression but accomplish little.

DEVS

The written name of God in the devil’s prediction of Antoninus’s future. On an old parchment, DEVS will become another object of the scholar’s attention, beside a stained-glass halo and the letters XT. The devil expects images, inscriptions, and footnotes to consume the devotion they ought to direct toward God.

The stars predict that allegory will teach Antoninus to read the world as divine art. They imagine him interpreting it as he would a stained-glass window, reading the Latin at the foot of its figures.

Dialogues on the Infinite and the Abstract

Abraham cites the Handbook of Discourses Theories and Comments on the Infinite and the Abstract to defend his argument about scale and infinity. The book’s subtitle promises to aid undergraduates who become philosophical in their cups. He adds that the theory appears near the end and, in the latest edition, in an appendix reserved for graduate students and stronger liquor.

Diana, the Huntress

Figure in Abraham’s discussion of bodily proportion. A huntress capable of carrying stags or wild oxen might have the heavy muscular measurements he describes. He allows the same for Atalanta but considers such a body unsuitable for Psyche.

Diogenes

Subject of Discourses on Diogenes in the old scholar’s collection of alliterative titles.

Dionysus

Figure whom Antoninus studies in his reading of mythology. The narrator says that he refutes claims of a resemblance between Christ and Dionysus while developing a taste for strange and somewhat blasphemous analogies.

Dominican Order

The order Antoninus chooses and the community in which he studies, teaches, works, prays, and debates. The narrator emphasizes its preaching and scholarship and quotes an encyclopedia account of its saints. The novices pursue different lives: Bertolommeo leaves before final vows, Giovanni paints, Maurizio prepares to judge heretics, and Abraham continues his arguments.

Don Sebastian

Maddelena’s paramour. Casimirro finds him in her room when he brings provisions for their promised Christmas meal. Sebastian sits comfortably in an easy chair, wearing an undershirt and carpet slippers. In the last chapter Maddelena reports that he has been killed and that she alone went to his grave.

Doubt

The novices test belief against reasoning, guilt, and experience. Nicolo grieves over his lost faith, while the agnostic’s fear of death raises the question of whether belief can honestly be adopted for safety. The fourth innuendo later attacks false proofs offered as a vaccine against doubt.

Dovanno pensere

Words with which Professor Anastasius closes his explanation to his wife. He invokes a Venetian saying after defending quotations that bewilder and distress his students: whatever else they do, he insists, they make the students think.

Dream of Heaven

Antoninus dreams of a Heaven beyond color, sound, form, space, and time. On waking he remembers none of it, though its promise remains within him. The narrator suggests that the dream protected him through later temptations, then allows the reader to suspect that he has just invented it.

Dreaming Ancestral History

The narrator proposes that children dream backward through racial history. Familiar people become coarse and threatening, and familiar places give way to scenes from earlier ages. Antoninus’s nightmares and his unusually precise dreams of ancient Rome accompany this theory of inherited memory.

Duchess of Dalmatia, The

Comedy in the old scholar’s library, listed between The Girl with the Green Shoe Laces and The Scandal of Escarmucho or Who Ate the Prince’s Supper?.

Duendajo

Third division of the vanished friar’s writings, devoted to children’s pieces and fairy pieces. Antoninus lists it after the traditional love poetry of Libr Canterm and the country humor of Hilarion.

Easel Painters / Giorgian School

The old scholar predicts that artists will begin painting their own easels. Critics, schools, symposia, handbooks, and university courses will follow, eventually severing criticism from painting altogether. His projected Quintessence of the Giorgian School of Criticism of the Easel Painters Prior to the Third Quarter of the Fifteenth Century becomes the object of this multiplying commentary.

Easter Songs

The singers compare a lover’s happiness with Mary’s at Christ’s birth and Magdalen’s on Easter morning. The Easter kiss appears within a long compound description of the song, followed by songs invoking the Queen of Heaven.

Egypt, St. Mary of

The first saint for whose image Maddelena poses during the boys’ sketching. St. Elizabeth and St. Cunegundes follow her in a list that moves through ordinary maidens, ladies, a dancer, and a siren.

Elena

Bertolommeo’s wife after he declines final vows and establishes himself on a prosperous farm.

Elizabeth, St.

Saint for whose image Maddelena poses during the boys’ sketching. Her name appears between St. Mary of Egypt and St. Cunegundes.

Encyclopedia, Catholic

Reference work quoted by the narrator in his account of Dominican sanctity. The excerpt discusses scholarship, public religious service, asceticism, mystical experiences, and stigmata.

Epicure

The old scholar says that even the wisest epicure learns only just before death what Christ understood about pleasure: the excellence of fasts and feasts, the charm of the frugal and the fancy, and the tastelessness of the mediocre. His larger argument distinguishes religious, artistic, scientific, pleasurable, and useful pursuits.

Epilogue of the Play

Six-line speech delivered by a maid after the tragedy’s footlights go out. She asks the audience to forgive its sad dreams, dine, escort their sweethearts home, and sleep. She then extinguishes her candle. Everyone departs except Antoninus and Casimirro, who remain seated in the dark.

Evanouie

Word in the narrator’s French aside after Maddelena leaves the tower room. Her footsteps recede down the dark stair, and Abraham resumes talking.

Excommunicated Band

Knights recalled by Casimirro for their worship of women in the abstract. Theologians warn that their creed overemphasizes the adoration due the Virgin; the knights distinguish the Virgin as woman from woman herself. Papal warnings and excommunication fail to change their beliefs, and Casimirro praises the writings and lives that follow.

Fadette oiseau

The poet’s address to the French girl in his first poem. Oiseau means bird. She laughs and tears up his paper; he confides to Antoninus that he is inclined to believe the story that her mother was a fairy.

Fairies

Antoninus asks whether fairies are souls from Limbo or disembodied pagan nymphs. He wonders what judgment awaits them: perhaps they prepared people for true religion; perhaps they have always served the devil. Their appeal to innocent ages makes the second explanation seem doubtful to him.

The tavern poet reports that the French girl’s mother was a fairy and half believes it himself. Fairy pieces also form part of the vanished balladeer’s Duendajo, alongside children’s verse.

Faith / Faithless

Nicolo desires belief and grieves over its loss. Antoninus returns to trust in God after arguments carry him away from it. The novices ask whether faith depends on innocence and whether it can be acquired through proof or effort. The innuendo on sin later rejects pseudo-logical demonstrations offered as a cure for doubt.

Falcon and the Golden Sparrow, The

Romance in the old scholar’s library, named with The Lance and the Castle and The Lady in the Blue Gown before the shelf of ghost stories.

Falernian

Wine the old scholar handles during his conversation with Antoninus. The narrator says that its sweet variety comes from seasons of persistent southerly wind and presents this lore as something every schoolboy knows.

Felicita, Infatuation of

Name in the comedy title The Infatuation of Felicita or What Makes the Moon so Yellow? in the old scholar’s library.

Ferrer, Vincent

Saint named in the quoted account of Dominican sanctity, alongside Dominic, Peter of Verona, Thomas Aquinas, Raymond of Pennafort, and Antoninus.

Fiesole

Place of Antoninus’s monastery. He first walks there to seek admission and returns home with the Decretals to memorize. Later he studies, teaches, and works in its fields. Abraham’s tower room becomes the setting for the final storm, Maddelena’s visit, and the debate over pity and justice.

Figlio mio, dormi t’ nla cuna

Opening of the mother’s lullaby. The narrator translates its request that the child sleep in his cradle and dream of saints and the moon. She adapts the same dance tune to prayer, baking, and other tasks, despite Antoninus’s objection to praising God in dance time.

Florence

Antoninus’s native city, with its markets, artists, singers, taverns, and theatre. The opening recounts struggles for its possession and its growing wealth. His visits home from Fiesole renew his friendships with Casimirro and Maddelena and bring him back into the city’s pleasures and disputes.

Fo la focaccia, formo il pane

Line sung by Antoninus’s mother as she makes focaccia and shapes bread. It follows her line about kneading with her hands. She compresses the syllables to fit the dance tune she also uses for her lullaby and prayers.

Four Candles

Lights set on the floor around Maddelena’s dance. She dances in her chemise, wearing soft slippers for seductive dances, going barefoot for pensive dances, and putting on wooden shoes for a country dance. Antoninus later dreams of her within the candles and wakes with mingled regret, guilt, amusement, and desire.

Francis, St., Emulation of

Saint whom Antoninus imitates by keeping pets. At eight he has cats, dogs, birds, a snail, rabbits, and chickens, and lets other people borrow or keep them. This generosity accompanies his growing popularity after he abandons some of his more ridiculous habits.

French Love Verses

Two poems written by the tavern poet for a French girl despite his ignorance of French. She tears up both sheets, laughs, and compares poetry with the products of a barnyard. He continues to declare his affection.

Friar-Balladeer

A singer who entered the order late in life and left manuscripts Antoninus examines. The house’s record describes his appetite, Latin learning, humor, mingling of truth and invention, and permission to keep a cat. His poems celebrate bodily pleasures and ask forgiveness. Antoninus enjoys them, adds a learned footnote of his own, and classifies the collection before moving on.

See also: Sermoq; Libr Canterm; Hilarion; Duendajo

Furrows of Eden

Book among the old scholar’s miscellaneous studies, between Of Flowing Streams and The Loaf and the Bottle.

Fyeter fyevet

Final words of a proverb Professor Anastasius quotes as Russian in the eighth innuendo. His listeners agree that it suits the occasion because they cannot argue with a man who knows Russian.

Gaelic Grammar

One of the books Antoninus studies by turns before his year of travel. It shares his desk with mysticism, aesthetics, painting, hagiography, legends, and spherical trigonometry.

Gambit, Chess

Word in the old scholar’s chess title, which promises nineteen variations of the king’s bishop’s gambit and a new gambit involving the queen’s knight and the queen’s castle’s pawn. The narrator describes it as newly translated from Persian and containing lore beyond the experts’ knowledge.

Genesis

Book invoked in the novices’ debate over whether a faithful member of the church could believe that another god exists elsewhere. The reference leads into their questions about creation, other worlds, and the limits of human knowledge.

Ghibellines / Guelphs

Factions named in the opening account of struggles for Florence’s rule. They follow the list of noble families before the narrator turns to the city’s wealth and influence.

Girl with the Green Shoe Laces, The

Comedy in the old scholar’s library, listed between The Rat Who Was Caught in a Mouse Trap and The Duchess of Dalmatia.

Girl with the Red Garters

Casimirro’s drawing of Maddelena that prompts Antoninus to withdraw from their company. He judges their way of life too exposed to temptation for his own weakness and returns to memorizing the Decretals.

Gland, the Inner

The sixth innuendo proposes a gland governing balance, direction, movement, and position. Its disturbances are made to explain fears of ladders and thresholds, compulsive turning, ritual gestures, and social awkwardness. The speaker suggests looking in Albertus Magnus for the gland’s name, then traces superstition through its supposed effects.

Glockenspiel

The tinker’s children have a little instrument of many bells. Their father plays it and makes gentle rhymes as they grow sleepy, singing of evening, home, and supper. Casimirro later recalls a separate tune, the Girl with the Glockenspiel, in terms of blue notes and silver overtones.

God’s Attitude toward Changing Humanity

Antoninus argues that humanity differs across places and times and that God must, in a sense, revise his attitude as humanity changes. A creature with new powers might face sins and duties unlike the present ones. He nevertheless maintains that the letter of doctrine needs no change today, though many interpretations must go.

Gospels, Christ in the

The novices invoke the Gospels in their discussion of miracles and the powers granted by God. Later, the old scholar praises Christ’s appreciation of fasts and feasts, frugality and richness, and artistic distinction, saying that he despised only material utility.

Gothic Architecture

Antoninus contrasts steep Gothic buildings with flatter Roman forms. He connects these differences with national temperaments and recalls his own nightmares of roofs, gables, and falling. When the old scholar objects that Romans were good sailors, Antoninus replies that a mast offers more to hold onto.

Grognard

Gloss attached to snarler in the commentary on Sermoq’s poem. Simon Magus takes it to mean a dog; Thiers and Dalhart favor the girl’s father. A French gloss seems to settle the matter until Thiers proposes a longer reading comparing the father with a dog and suggests that the missing words were erased.

Gynephile

The old scholar’s description of his interest in women during his youth. He says that this passed with time, while books, the world, philosophy, and language remain his occupations.

Gypsy Palmist

Person cited in the narrator’s account of a couple who discover after sixty years that an impostor married them. The palmist says their hands showed them married throughout. The anecdote accompanies the suggestion that palm lines may record a settled relationship.

Hagiographers, Maddelena’s Imagined

Maddelena proposes that Antoninus become her consort and imagines future biographers delighted by their story: a public dancer and a tavern philosopher who become saints after years of sinful life. Antoninus objects, but she continues urging him away from the monastery.

Hairbreadth

Abraham compares popular opinion with a pendulum that crosses a hairbreadth line of correctness only briefly. For half its swing, however, it moves in the right direction. He recommends opposing its movement differently according to which phase it occupies, distinguishing a sound opinion from movement toward one.

Haley’s Comet

During the storm at the tower, the narrator recalls Antoninus’s composure when the comet appeared. He says that Antoninus sent reassuring letters to a frightened pope. This recollection accompanies the scene in which Antoninus alone is untroubled by the thunder.

Handbook of Heraldry

A book in the old scholar’s library explaining shield devices, colors, and the arrangement of family trees. Its appendix defends a division between noble and common lines of descent, turning the manual into an argument for inherited rank.

Hebrew / Aramaic / Arabic / Syriac

Languages named alongside Greek among Antoninus’s studies. The narrator associates Aramaic with Christ’s speech and describes Antoninus as knowing the Bible in the languages in which it originated.

Hedge Priest

The miser’s insult when he finds Antoninus resting on his property. He orders Antoninus to move on, then complains about the neighbors who call him greedy. He says they resent him because they can no longer borrow his money.

Heliogabalus in Hell

An example in the tavern conversation about taking comfort in a bad arrangement. A man says his companion at least keeps him warm, then compares himself with Heliogabalus thanking his tormentors for warmth in Hell, despite the pain and the lack of olives.

Hercules / Hermes

Abraham invokes Hercules and Hermes in his argument against fixed rules of bodily beauty. Equal circumferences for calf, biceps, and neck might suit either figure, he says, but would suggest muscular imbalance in an active modern person. He also tests the rule against Diana, Atalanta, and Psyche.

Herod with Kid Gloves

Giovanni defends painting Herod in kid gloves by pointing to the abundance of goats in Palestine and the practical design of modern gloves. Antoninus objects to their modern style. Giovanni then challenges him over Pilate’s gloves and the coach in which he wants to paint Mary traveling.

Hilarion

The second division of the vanished friar’s writings, comprising cheerful ballads about country scenes and humor. Antoninus places it between Libr Canterm, the traditional love poems, and Duendajo, the children’s and fairy pieces.

History of Light and Shadow and the New Paintings

One of the books Antoninus studies by turns before his superior orders him to travel. He moves between painting, mysticism, aesthetics, saints’ lives, language, and mathematics, returning to each book without losing the thread.

Hobson-Dobson

Antoninus’s name for the linguistic process by which ancient ideas survive in riddles. He believes their rhythm and some of their phrasing remain after their meaning has been lost. Altered through this process, they become jokes that people continue to tell.

Holcot, Robert

A Dominican included in the narrator’s account of the order’s scholars. The narrator credits him with the Philobiblion, which he praises as a book about books and their lovers.

Homer and Herodotus

The old scholar observes that Homer sometimes nods, then questions Herodotus’s report that a lioness bears only once because the cub destroys her womb. He argues that such reproduction would cause lions to dwindle away.

Horace

A poet recalled in the old scholar’s wine cellar. The discussion of Vina Horna associates him with pleasure in four-year-old wine; later, the narrator recalls his description of Lesbian wine as innocent.

Horse-Troughs

As a child, Antoninus chooses drinking water from horse-troughs and bird baths because it is likely to be brackish. A horse-trough also figures in the young theatre-goer’s story of a father trying to cure a man’s temper by repeatedly ducking him. That cure ends in drowning.

House That Nobody Owned, The

A comedy in the old scholar’s library, among the plays whose titles tempt Antoninus to read further.

Iconoclasts

The ninth innuendo asks whether a kindly, celebrated mediocrity should give way to people of greater achievement whom the public dislikes. Its answer favors leaving him in place, while conceding the injustice. The portraits of his possible replacements include xenophobic and antisemitic caricatures.

Iddio / Lodo il Iddio

Words Antoninus’s mother sings when he asks her to praise God. She accepts his subject but keeps the dance tune he considers unsuitable for prayer. When he begins to cite Augustine against her, she dismisses his objection.

Idol-Worship

The young Antoninus accuses sailors of idol-worship for carrying small images of Venus as charms. He warns an older sailor against being caught in thunder with one. Amused, the man says he carries it because the others do and mentions surviving two shipwrecks. Antoninus credits God with saving him.

Impasto il pasto

The opening of the mother’s dough-making verse. She sings of working with her hands, making focaccia, and shaping bread, using the tune of her lullaby and prayers. She compresses syllables as needed to keep its rhythm.

Indian Summer

The season of a woodland picture discussed in the third innuendo. Thinning leaves, brown grass, a southbound goose, and hazy air announce the cold that will kill the wood-nymph. The essay finds her beauty inseparable from this threat. A second picture shows her in midsummer, when uninterrupted pleasure gives way to weariness.

Inez

One of the sinful painter’s subjects in the third innuendo, alongside Chloris, Daphne, Virgins, and St. Catherines. The essay argues that his paintings convey purity by suggesting the danger of its loss.

Innocence and Scruples

The novices debate whether guilt measures wrongdoing. They compare the scruples of the innocent with the misgivings of the guilty and consider a legend about someone damned for a dream. Antoninus rejects the legend as foolish.

Innuendos, the Nine

Nine prose pieces the narrator presents as a translation of a work by Antoninus, claiming to own its sole copy. They concern attitudes, rumors, virtue, sin, poetry, superstition, serious burlesque, a professor’s quotations, and established reputations.

Inquisition

Maurizio is preparing to become an inquisitorial judge. The narrator describes his composure, decisiveness, fidelity to the law, and freedom from doubt. During the final discussion, Maurizio proposes placing Maddelena with an orthodox family if she comes before him and threatens to burn Nicolo.

Insu de ta mere

A parenthesis in the second French poem suggesting secrecy from the girl’s mother. It appears between the poet’s offer and his mention of a small coin. The girl tears up this poem as she did his first.

Insurgents and Engines

The title of Chapter 10. Maddelena joins Antoninus and his companions in a discussion of virtue, punishment, divine justice, and religious belief. She rejects the justice that the monks defend, while Antoninus continues to seek a faith that can withstand his companions’ objections.

Interdict of Florence

The ecclesiastical restriction that the narrator says had recently been lifted before Antoninus’s childhood. Its mention accompanies the opening account of Florence’s wealth, pleasures, and power.

Iuendus, Legendary of

A book Antoninus reads by turns with works on mysticism, aesthetics, painting, St. Cletus, travel, Gaelic grammar, and spherical trigonometry. His superior interrupts these studies by sending him on a year of travel.

J’aime te, chere

The opening of the tavern poet’s first declaration in French, a language the narrator says he does not know. The girl laughs and tears up the page. He makes a second attempt, which she also destroys, but continues to love her.

Jenny

The sleeping street girl in the narrator’s moonlit sequence, associated with Rossetti and gold pieces shaken through her hair. Her head rests on his knee. The scene follows Antoninus’s dream of Maddelena in a sequence that also recalls Shelley, Macbeth, and Solomon and Sheba.

Jesus, Joseph, Mary: the Egypt Ballad

A ballad Antoninus writes in Chapter 2. The Holy Family’s donkey stops at a bridge. Appeals turn to curses and blows, but only the child’s prayer finally moves him. The poem mingles devotion, impatience, violence, and a fragment of the Lord’s Prayer.

Johanno Rustico

The name attached to a poem about a beloved who takes childhood, laughter, and virtue to market and exchanges them for a bed of straw. The attribution names Herzstileeder and Herzbrekleeder. The poem appears during Casimirro’s theatre conversation, before his Christmas story.

Jokes, Seven Original

Abraham divides jokes into physical impossibility, supposedly humorous assumptions, exaggeration, logic pursued absurdly, false assumption, puns, and foolishness. He gives examples and questions the stereotypes behind familiar jokes, including stereotypes of Jews. His final example answers a question about one’s health with yes.

Jottings From Jerico

A title among the essays, remnants, and miscellaneous studies in the old scholar’s library. It precedes Of Flowing Streams, Furrows of Eden, and The Loaf and the Bottle.

Jour

French for day, used in the description of sunshine and birdsong after the tavern poet’s second unsuccessful poem. The beautiful day accompanies his continued devotion to the girl who has torn up both attempts.

Joy and That Which No Man Can Tell

What remains of Heaven’s description after the narrator has set aside ordinary sensation, space, and time. Antoninus cannot remember the dream when he wakes, but it endures in him as an ideal and a promise. The narrator then questions whether he has invented it.

Justice, Maddelena’s Objection

Maddelena pities wrongdoers even after pitying their victims, and she hates the justice that punishes them. She is shocked that God should insist on it. When Maurizio connects goodness with deserved reward, she challenges the distinctions he would impose on mercy. She says she serves those whom God would reject.

Karamazov, Brothers

The narrator compares the novices with the Karamazov brothers when they set immediate events aside to discuss God, the devil, justice, and existence.

Kopfs

Heads, in the sixth innuendo’s account of a small gland said to govern balance and orientation. The term appears amid the essay’s anatomical speculation.

Lady in the Blue Gown, The

A romance in the old scholar’s library, named alongside The Falcon and the Golden Sparrow and The Lance and the Castle.

Lance and the Castle, The

A romance on the old scholar’s shelves, listed between The Falcon and the Golden Sparrow and The Lady in the Blue Gown.

Latin, Dominican

The narrator praises the Dominicans for preserving the purity and complexity of early Latin. He also attributes a Roman manner of oratory to them, even when they speak other languages, as part of his comparison between the order and Roman intellectual life.

Letter That Nobody Wrote, The

A comedy in the old scholar’s catalogue, listed after A Night Cap for Nicodemus among the plays that arouse Antoninus’s curiosity.

Libr Canterm

The first division of the vanished friar’s writings, comprising traditional love poetry. Antoninus places it before Hilarion, the cheerful country ballads, and Duendajo, the children’s and fairy pieces.

Life of St. Cletus

A volume in Antoninus’s course of study before his superior sends him traveling. He reads it by turns with books on mysticism, aesthetics, painting, legends, travel, Gaelic grammar, and mathematics.

Lilith

In a story Casimirro recalls from Antoninus, Lilith leaves the scene of her first love but returns to remind Adam not to leave an apple core where it will attract flies. Casimirro tells the story to praise Maddelena’s thoughtfulness.

Limbo

A possible origin of fairies in Antoninus’s studies of mythology and legend. He wonders whether they are souls from Limbo, disembodied pagan nymphs, a prelude to true religion, or creatures of the devil. He also considers their fate on the day of judgment.

Loaf and the Bottle, The

A title in the old scholar’s miscellaneous collection, listed after Furrows of Eden.

Lombards

The kings of the Lombards appear with Tuscany’s margraves among the earlier possessors of Florence. The opening account follows the powers, noble families, and factions that held the city and lost it.

Lucifer, Pride of

The novices’ debate identifies open-mindedness with Lucifer’s pride: the doubter insists on thinking for himself despite religious warnings. They concede that if there is no God, the agnostic may have lived with wisdom, courage, and virtue. His wager depends on whether his belief proves true.

Lullaby, the Mother’s Tune

A dance tune Antoninus’s mother heard once and never forgot. She sings it as a lullaby, adapts it to an Ave Maria, kneads dough to it, and uses its rhythm to call people and chickens. Antoninus objects that praise should follow the measures of the saints.

Macbeth

Macbeth kills the king in the catalogue of famous nights that follows Antoninus’s dream of Maddelena. Around him are Rossetti with Jenny, Shelley writing “Indian Serenade,” Saba exchanging riddles with Salomon, and Roman soldiers firing at the moon. The narrator gathers these scenes into the night Antoninus has entered.

Maddelena

Antoninus and Casimirro’s model, who wants to become a saint and an actress and later dances in the public houses of Florence. Her generosity, theatrical gifts, and sexual conduct trouble both friends in different ways. Casimirro recounts his attachment and her involvement with Don Sebastian. At the final meeting she defends serving those God would reject and declares her hatred of justice. She permits Maurizio to attempt his proposed remedy if she is ever brought before him.

Magdalen

The second minstrel girl sings of a lover whose joy in an Easter kiss exceeds Mary’s at Christ’s birth and Magdalen’s. The long compound description occurs among songs of homesickness, desire, grief, and remembered affection.

Maoris

The old scholar names the Maoris while arguing that the sea unites peoples. His talk moves among the words mare, mer, meer, and maru, then turns to physical wonders that Antoninus disputes, including a shell that supposedly holds more water than its volume.

See also: Old scholar, the

Marionette

Antoninus advises a sailor to replace his Venus charm with a marionette, immediately glossed by the narrator as a little Mary. The boy then takes an interest in the sailor’s dice, supposedly used for Christ’s garments, and thinks they should be displayed in a church.

In the third innuendo, the pious painter’s angels have the fixed smiles of marionettes. Their stiffness contributes to the essay’s attack on pictures praised chiefly because their maker was holy.

Maurizio

The owlish novice being prepared to become an inquisitorial judge. His patience, firmness, and fidelity to the letter of the law recommend him for the office, though Antoninus and Abraham know more doctrine. He proposes placing Maddelena with an orthodox middleclass family for five years if she comes before him. He later threatens to burn Nicolo merely to see whether he would notice the fire.

See also: Maddelena; Nicolo; Inquisition

Memory, extraordinary

The narrator credits Antoninus with an exceptional memory preserved by his continued goodness. Other gifted people, he says, are liable to destructive tendencies. This reflection follows two accounts of memorizing the Decretals: twelve months in the saint’s life and a year and a day in the legend. In the second, difficulty with the last page defeats Antoninus’s carefully calculated schedule.

Minstrel girls

Three young singers whom Antoninus, Casimirro, and Maddelena first hear on a street corner and later meet in a tavern. Their songs are named by scenes, feelings, refrains, and occasions. One singer distinguishes music that makes her sad from music that makes her sick, admitting that middling pieces earn the most. Another complains of travel, hunger, and indifference, then concedes that singing beats ordinary employment.

Moerbeke, William of

Editor and translator of Aristotle named in the narrator’s account of Dominican learning. William stands beside John Balbus and Robert Holcot in a list that also celebrates the order’s theologians, historians, painters, and sculptors.

Moise, the muleteer

The muleteer whom the sixteen-year-old girl intends to marry. According to her account, the pair try inducements and threats to obtain the miser’s money. After he refuses them, Moise climbs through a window and nearly beats him to death. They steal what they can carry after failing to find his hoard. Antoninus condemns the attack; the girl insists that the money belongs to the people.

Molincuaccio

A song Casimirro and Maddelena first hear at grey dawn after a night together. By noon the town is whistling it; by nightfall people are writing parodies. It joins the tunes through which he remembers their three years together.

Moonlight and theatre

After waking from an erotic dream of Maddelena, Antoninus goes outdoors into brilliant moonlight. Pleasure, regret, and guilt accompany him. The narrator recalls famous literary nights while animals converse, clouds catch in branches, and flowers turn toward the moon. Antoninus remembers Sappho’s dancing maidens. The night becomes the setting for an imagined comedy, and the people outside move through it like performers.

Multiplication tables

At seven, Antoninus finds an image of the universe and divine grace in multiplication, especially the nines. “How like the grace of God!” he thinks, associating their mutability and constancy with justice. Much later Abraham speculates that multiplication may fail at sufficiently great magnitudes. Maurizio calls this unorthodox, untrue, and mathematically fantastic.

Natala, Canta

Canta Natala heads a Christmas poem among the vanished Dominican balladeer’s manuscripts. A line in a strange popular dialect introduces English verses about the star, straw, rafters, candles, wine, and a feast day. The narrator finds charm in the old pages despite the familiar subject. The poem leads him into speculation about the likeness of stars and straw.

National character and language

Abraham explains the sounds of languages through ethnic stereotypes: French solicitude, English sneering, Italian singing, and habitual lying among the people he calls Gypsies. He also predicts that languages may eventually become too confused for their speakers to understand. His listeners doubt the seriousness of that question, and the hay cutters continue their work.

Naufrage

Shipwreck, in Antoninus’s warning to the sailor carrying a statuette of Venus. The sailor has survived two wrecks. Antoninus credits God with preserving him and recommends a marionette, a little Mary. The sailor then displays dice supposedly used for Christ’s garments; the narrator remarks that they seem quite new.

Neologisms

Giovanni applies this word to innovation in painting. If Antoninus’s criticisms rule out new devices, he says, he cannot paint. Historical research also takes time from his work. He asks why the apostles should not wear pants or Herod wear kid gloves, then reasons from the goats available in Herod’s country.

Nicolo

The novice who has lost his faith but continues to pray and mock. His “Ode to a Wooden Madonna” recalls former devotion and the wish that God were present. He later finds relief in imagined worlds, works in the fields, and loses interest in advancement. His withdrawal leaves him pleasant in company but listless. Maurizio threatens to burn him to see whether he would take notice.

Novice

Antoninus, Giovanni, Abraham, Nicolo, Bertolommeo, and Maurizio belong to the circle of novices. Study, prayer, field work, and little sleep occupy their days. Before Antoninus has taken vows, Casimirro and Maddelena invite him to examine the life he would be leaving. Bertolommeo eventually declines final vows and establishes a farm with Elena.

Nyctalops, Notebook of a

Notebook of a Nyctalops stands among the old scholar’s essays and miscellanies, following All Sweet Things Pass and Of Windmills. Antoninus reaches this shelf after browsing the comedies.

See also: Old scholar, the

Nymphs

Casimirro draws Maddelena as a wood nymph and a water nymph. During his studies, Antoninus wonders whether fairies might be disembodied pagan nymphs and asks what judgment awaits them. In the third innuendo, a painted wood nymph faces the coming winter; another summer picture of her prompts a reflection on the sadness of being sated with pleasure.

Octavio, the Syriac

The tavern stranger claims to possess the only copy of an old Syriac octavio containing Delila’s account of Samson. In his version, Samson frightened the boys with his hair. Once shorn, he went unrecognized and they beat him. The stranger offers this account to rebuke Maddelena for repeating scandal about Delila.

Ode to a Wooden Madonna

Nicolo says he wrote this poem a year earlier, after losing his faith. Its speaker remembers devotion to the Virgin, recognizes her image as wood, and continues visiting churches while wishing God were present. The final candle goes out in the dark and sleet. Nicolo says he cried while writing, although his listeners are scarcely moved. Abraham notices that, having lost God, he still addresses the Virgin.

Held I a candle sweet Sheltered from doubt, Entered the dark and sleet- Blew it all out.

Nicolo

Old scholar, the

The reader who lives in a wing of a manor above the sea. Antoninus finds him building sand castles. He offers his time in exchange for attention, then shows the visitor his library. Book-backs conceal ancient wines. A Greek footnote, he says, taught him to live forever, but anyone who reveals its secret dies. Antoninus calls him a ghost; he denies it. They talk for hours about eternity, art, religion, and knowledge.

Ondouse pré

“Un ondouse pré” is the comparison applied to the woman’s breast in the poet’s second French verse. She laughs and tears the paper apart. The narrator compares the scattered fragments with fragrant steam rising from the earth. The poet has undertaken both poems despite knowing no French.

Ortensia

The lady in The Cat and the Lady Named Ortensia, one of the old scholar’s comedies. Its title appears between The Letter That Nobody Wrote and The Pickle-monger and the Three Sour Citizens. Antoninus wishes he had time to read the collection.

See also: Old scholar, the

Overture

The old scholar’s opening to a projected book of poems. He hoped to combine passion with light humour after the passing of the golden age of song. His verse considers the distance between love and its recollection: if he were in love again, he would have more to do than write about it. The book remains unwritten. Antoninus suggests calling the surviving piece a preface to an unwritten book of verses.

See also: Old scholar, the

Palmistry

The narrator compares hands to bankbooks recording inherited gifts and the course of a life. His account assigns illnesses, marriages, lifespans, and dispositions to particular lines. Casimirro boasts that he can reconstruct a person from a hand, although the narrator admits that he cannot. His successful guesses about children depend on their age, sex, hair, and the limited group Antoninus brings him.

Peregrinations and Pensées

One of the books Antoninus studies at the opening of Chapter 6, beside works on mysticism, aesthetics, painting, saints, grammar, and spherical trigonometry. He alternates among them without losing his place in any argument. His superior interrupts the reading and sends him out to learn hardship and care for others.

Pictures of easels

The old scholar predicts that painters will turn to easels because these are the things they know best. Schools and rival movements follow, then critics, symposia, handbooks, bibliographies, and university courses. Eventually criticism seeks complete separation from painting. Antoninus repeatedly objects as the scholar carries the example further.

Poets and Popingays, Of

Of Poets and Popingays appears among the old scholar’s miscellanies, between Of Songs in a Warm Room and Of Awns and of Comets. Casimirro earlier uses popingay for a Florentine who acts like a wealthy merchant.

See also: Old scholar, the

Precis of Premillennialism

One of the first titles in the old scholar’s library, beside Discourses on Diogenes, Theory of Theurgy, and Almanac of Alcaics. He says that he spent years finding alliterative titles for every letter of the alphabet.

See also: Old scholar, the

Prometheus

Maddelena denies that she is a Prometheus destined to preserve the last opposition to the gods. She considers compromise and a less theatrical position after years of trying to inspire others. She gives Maurizio leave to try his proposed remedy if she is ever arrested and brought before him. Abraham then takes up her complaint against God.

Psalms

Abraham names the Psalms, chess, and the rosary as places to find numerical analogies, allegories, and legends. He starts to explain, then trails off. The narrator describes his habit of accidentally blowing out his candle, relighting it, and changing the subject. Just before this he has described the pack of cards as a calendar and an allegory of love and death.

Purgatory and the thread of life

The sixth innuendo describes a supposed heresy in which the dead must retrace the thread unwound during life. Outward and return journeys cancel. Walking under a ladder tangles the thread and may require another journey over hot stones. Disagreement about how long the tangle persists divides the heresy. The essay traces such fears to the instinct that keeps people from losing their way.

Quality, censorship of

The young Medici proposes imprisoning and killing makers of bad art, then murdering those who praise it. He would promise impartial critics and protection for sincere effort, break both promises, and judge alone. Antoninus argues that this would destroy the arts. He asks how the young man would distinguish good work from bad. The trader later gives him a coat, a donkey, and money.

Querulous Quianune

The phrase closes the title Concerning a Quire of Itinerent Inquiries by a Querulous Quianune, found among the old scholar’s essays and miscellanies. It appears between Cobwebs and Corners and Of Songs in a Warm Room and elicits the response “I love that one.”

See also: Old scholar, the

Quintessence of Mysticism

The first book in Antoninus’s study pile at the opening of Chapter 6. He reads it in rotation with aesthetics, painting, saints’ lives, a Gaelic grammar, and spherical trigonometry, resuming each subject where he left it. His superior interrupts him with the order to travel.

Raymond of Pennafort

St. Raymond of Pennafort appears among the Dominican saints in the quoted Catholic Encyclopedia passage, with Dominic, Peter of Verona, Thomas Aquinas, Vincent Ferrer, and Antoninus. The list introduces the narrator’s account of Dominican sanctity and learning.

Regola a ben vivere

Antoninus’s work named in the account of Dominican learning and praised as the ancestor of designs for living. The narrator places it beside his service as papal theologian at the Council of Florence, briefly anticipating the young scholar’s later career.

Roman character and architecture

The narrator likens Dominican scholarship, speech, clothing, and household objects to Roman antiquity. Later Antoninus argues that Roman and Gothic building forms express different national temperaments. He connects the Romans’ low buildings with their fear of heights and recalls his own nightmares of steep roofs and falling.

Rossetti

Rossetti appears in the narrator’s moonlit sequence with Jenny asleep, her head on his knee, and gold coins shaken through her hair. The scene accompanies allusions to Shelley, Macbeth, and Solomon and Sheba after Antoninus’s dream of Maddelena.

Rumors as Taking the Place of Facts

The second innuendo argues that an accepted reputation can prevent people from looking for themselves. A count’s sarcastic remark about the Venus of Milos becomes a claim that the statue is beautiful. The essay disputes that judgment, praising the sculpture instead as a masterpiece of futility whose subject should move the viewer to pity.

Saba, Queen of

The queen walks with Salomon and exchanges riddles under the moon. Her night joins those of Rossetti, Shelley, Macbeth, and the Roman soldiers in the narrator’s catalogue after Antoninus wakes from his dream of Maddelena.

Sackcloth

Nicolo sees an apparently penitent girl at the monastery door, though the rain makes her clothing hard to judge. Maddelena explains that she wears sackcloth and goes hungry to please an old father who wants her to reform. She admits that she still sometimes follows her former life. Later she allows Maurizio to try placing her with an orthodox family if she comes before him.

Samson as a bull

In the stranger’s account of Delila, Samson needs a haircut so badly that farmers ask her the breeding fee for her big hairy bull. The boys fear his hair and mistake their fear for his strength. Once shorn and unrecognized, he is beaten when he tries to bully them. The stranger claims to have found Delila’s words in his unique Syriac manuscript.

Sanscrit and the star-straw comparison

A language named in the narrator’s digression after the Christmas poem. His thoughts move from the star and straw of the Nativity scene to the beginnings of speech before he returns to the balladeer’s manuscripts.

Sappho

Antoninus recalls Sappho’s maidens dancing around the moon as if it were a pagan altar. He imagines the moon resting on a hill at the horizon and regrets not having seen the dance. His recollection comes after the dream of Maddelena and before the narrator imagines the moonlit world as a theatre.

Sebennytic

Wine in the old scholar’s collection, said to be made from three kinds of grapes. It follows Lesbian wine and precedes Setinum. The narrator also describes honey-thick wines before turning to the scholar’s claim that a bottle from his own farm is a thousand years old.

Sermoq

The vanished balladeer named in Antoninus’s mock note on a poem about rain, roses, and love. The later innuendo on poetry quotes his playful request to restrain a snarler and attacks the footnotes piled upon it. The essay says he held no grudges, then tells how he cut off his own fingers after an insulting handshake and presented them to the nobleman who had offended him.

Setinum

Wine in the old scholar’s concealed collection. The narrator calls it Bacchus’s favourite and adds that he should know his wines. It follows Sebennytic and precedes the scholar’s bottle from his own farm, which he says is exactly a thousand years old.

Shelley, Indian Serenade

Shelley writes “Indian Serenade” in the narrator’s catalogue of famous nights after Antoninus’s dream. He also appears earlier studying Greek and mathematics at midnight, an occupation the narrator calls more characteristic of him than writing lyrics in the wind.

Simon Magus, commentator

The commentator in the mock annotation to Sermoq’s poem who takes its snarler to be a dog, possibly a mastiff. Thiers, supported by Dalhart, argues for the girl’s father. Their quarrel draws in a French gloss, a supposedly erased phrase, and an attack on Simon’s morals.

See also: Sermoq; Thiers and Dalhart; Grognard

Stigmata

The quoted account of Dominican sanctity mentions stigmata among religious women. Abraham later argues that medicine should acknowledge the wounds whatever their cause. He claims to have seen four cases and to possess records of nearly two hundred. His proposed medical entry is followed by reflections on fear, concentration, and ecstasy, including his belief that ecstasy might postpone death indefinitely.

Strindberg, Dream Play

The narrator imagines a comedy moving as aimlessly as Strindberg’s Dream Play, with the moonlit night as its setting. Princesses, pirates, alchemists, servants, priests, and many others would fill its cast. People then move through the light like performers, bring bedding onto their roofs, and play quiet serenades.

Stupidity as sin

Antoninus asks whether mental laziness should count among the capital sins. He distrusts appeals to devotion that excuse neglect of study. Those whose work requires learning must study as well as pray; the mind deserves care as the body does. He cannot persuade the others that stupidity is as sinful as moral depravity.

Sweet thou beast and holy

The address to the donkey in Antoninus’s early ballad of the Flight into Egypt. The animal refuses to cross a bridge. Pleading gives way to a curse, blows, and a fire beneath it. At last the child begins the Lord’s Prayer and the donkey moves.

Syriac

One of the languages Antoninus studies, alongside Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. In a later tavern conversation, the stranger claims to possess a unique Syriac octavio containing Delila’s account of Samson. He cites it when defending her against familiar scandal.

Teresa, St.

The narrator compares Maddelena’s fondness for conversation with St. Teresa’s impediment to perfection. Teresa’s vision of the place in Hell her faults deserved prompts reform; Maddelena receives no such vision and continues her chatter. Nearby, Maddelena imagines becoming both a public dancer and a saint like Thais.

Tertullian

Abraham invokes Tertullian while attacking praise of irrationality. He calls the passage an antique inanity and quotes its claims about Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection. Antoninus leaves before the reflection is finished. Abraham continues with another objection, this time to the proverb that people get from life only what they put into it.

Thais

Maddelena hopes to become both a public dancer and a saint, as Thais was, showing that the Lord despises no profession. She places this hope beside her ambition to act. The narrator has just compared her fondness for conversation with St. Teresa’s early impediment to perfection.

Thalassites

A bottle the old scholar regards fondly before classifying people by their governing interests. The wine is described as aged in deep sea water. His five classes are the religious, artistic, scientific, pleasure-seeking, and utilitarian, and he proceeds to consider people who combine several of these interests.

The devil

The devil challenges the stars’ prediction of Antoninus’s future, expecting learned symbols to become substitutes for God. In later tales a saint deceives him by sinning during his absence, while a sinless girl moves him to marry her instead of seducing her.

God borrows the devil’s pocketknife to search a dead man for his soul in the legend preceding Nicolo’s retreat into imagination. Maddelena later describes the devil as the founder of a refuge for those God rejects. She tells this story while defending her own service to the condemned.

When Maddelena leaves Abraham’s room, the narrator calls her its only female visitor apart from the devil on the occasions when he appeared as a woman.

The Singer’s Weariness

The second singer interrupts her songs to complain about travel, rain, hunger, and the world’s indifference. She then admits that singing beats working for a living. Her complaints follow the singers’ earlier appeal for supper.

Thiers and Dalhart

Commentators in the mock footnote to Sermoq’s poem. Thiers, supported by Dalhart, takes the snarler to be the girl’s father. Simon Magus takes it to be a dog. A quarrel over a French gloss and an allegedly erased phrase becomes an attack on Simon’s morals.

Tinker and the ballad

The father of the girl who intends to marry Moise. He claims that hammer strokes produced ballad metre and distinguishes tinkers’ songs of crossroads and murder from cobblers’ songs of lanes and lovers. That evening he plays his children’s glockenspiel and sings them a gentle lullaby. Antoninus questions its reference to cattle bells, and the father explains how cows may be returned to pasture after milking.

Tmolus, wine of

Wine in the old scholar’s collection, described as too wonderful to drink alone and used to flavour other wines. It appears between Pramnian and Lesbian wine. When Antoninus asks where to begin, the scholar proposes moving from the mildest to the strongest.

Tortola

The Christmas dish Maddelena promised Casimirro. In his account, its name is that of the turtle dove, noble families eat it after midnight Mass, and it must cool in the Christmas night air. The woman he watches putting one on a windowsill is a new tenant whom he mistakes for Maddelena. At Maddelena’s new rooms he finds Don Sebastian in an undershirt and carpet slippers.

See also: Maddelena; Casimirro; Don Sebastian

Totila

Totila looks back at Florence as he departs in the opening scene and predicts wealth, political power, artists, traders, Charlemagne’s Christmas, and a great man. The narrator says that these things came true while doubting whether the prophecy was ever made. Florence’s abundance of great men makes its intended subject uncertain. Antonino Vescovo seems an unlikely candidate.

Ubaldini

The last of five families named in the opening account of struggles for Florence, following the Alberti, Buondelmonti, Uberti, and Cadolinghi. The city continues to grow through the contests for its possession.

See also: 1. Of Chimeras and Childhood

Uberti

One of the families struggling for Florence in the opening account, named between the Buondelmonti and Cadolinghi. Their contest belongs to the succession of rulers and factions through which the city grows wealthy and powerful.

Ulysses and Maronean wine

The old scholar’s Maronean wine is compared with the wine carried by Ulysses. The narrator describes it as black and so strong that it must be mixed with twelve parts water before drinking. It stands in a collection whose bottles are said to rival the scholar and his books in age.

Venus of Milos

The subject of the second innuendo on the power of reputation. In its story, a count’s sarcastic remark convinces workmen that the newly discovered statue is beautiful, and the judgment spreads. The essay calls it a masterpiece of futility and argues that its suffering subject deserves pity. A footnote attempts to account for the statue’s appearance in Antoninus’s writing by making him careless with dates.

Vescovo

Bishop, in the novel’s title. The narrator explains that Antoninus acquires the office in middle life, having been known before it as Antoninus or Antónino, Little Anthony. The explanation introduces the child before the stars and the devil contend over what learning and religious images will mean to him.

Virgil

Bertolommeo writes rustic idylls in Virgil’s manner after declining final vows and establishing a prosperous farm with Elena. He also paints his outbuildings and develops theories of agricultural security. His former ambitions for intellectual greatness pass to his sons as he imagines himself founding a line of cultivated country gentlemen.

Virgin, intercession for the damned

Abraham’s legend gives the Virgin pity for people just condemned to Hell. She overtakes them, speaks beyond even the Lord’s hearing, and returns saying that she will see what she can do. Abraham has allowed the story into a compilation but expects his superiors to remove it. He wants to publish a collection of humorous church legends.

Virtue, paradox of

The third innuendo argues that losing virtue may teach what untested innocence cannot. It attacks a pious painter’s wooden figures and praises another painter’s purity, which carries a hint of danger. A wood nymph facing winter and another surrounded by summer pleasure illustrate different struggles. The essay compares virtue to a pearl visible only by the fire that can destroy it.

Vocation

At fourteen Antoninus decides to join the Dominicans. His mother questions his reasons and objects to his example of a saint who abandoned his bride. She eventually packs provisions and an extra shirt for his walk to Fiesole. There he is challenged to memorize the Decretals.

Wandering year

Antoninus’s superior sends him out for one year to feed the hungry, clothe the cold, save souls, and learn hardship. He leaves without money or a coat and returns after a year and a half. On the way he meets the miser, the girl and her family, a Medici trader, the old scholar, and another travelling disputant. He returns with a half-penny for his superior. His innocent handling of a heavy cudgel has helped protect him from insult and injury.

XT

Letters in the devil’s prediction that God will become for Antoninus a halo, an inscription, or an ancient myth pursued through footnotes. XT follows DEVS in the list of written signs. The prediction answers the stars’ promise that Antoninus will read the world as divine art.

Yeux

Eyes, in the poet’s second French verse: “Avec gros gros yeux / Comme des assiettes.” He compares the girl’s large eyes to plates. His companions imagine the muses and Apollo above him as he writes, despite his ignorance of French. She laughs and tears up the poem.

Yule-tides and the acrostic

The Yule-tides in the old scholar’s example supplies the Y of YOU in an acrostic. The first letters of its words spell MYDEERWIFEIAMLEAVINGYOUFOREVER, including DEER. He offers this hidden farewell while imagining scholarly footnotes devoted to jokes, ciphers, and love messages. Antoninus resolves to inspect passages he now suspects of using the same device.

Zachary, St.

The saint to whom the narrator attributes “a snap” when explaining Casimirro’s easy guesses from children’s hands. Antoninus supplies children of readily estimated age, all Italian and black-haired. These ordinary clues account for the apparent success of Casimirro’s more extravagant claim.

Zenith, the beverage

The drink a girl’s father tries to perfect in her theatre story. Tasting it makes him spit blue fire. An explosion destroys half the house; the girl suggests that he may still be in the cellar or may have been seen walking above the ground. Her mother supplies some of the mixture for blasting, then warns that people never know when her daughter is fooling.