Gomez R. Bride swap: The medieval afterlife of Anna Perenna’s bed trick in the pseudo-Ovidian ‘De vetula’ and Boccaccio’s novella VIII.4 [Digital Resource] // Vox medii aevi. 2021 Vol. 2(9). С. 92–116. URL: https://voxmediiaevi.com/2021-2-gomez/
DOI: 10.24412/2587-6619-2021-2-92-116
Roberto Suazo Gómez
PhD in Literature at Universidad de Chile
PhD candidate University of Otago, New Zealand
suaro026@student.otago.ac.nz
Bride swap: The medieval afterlife of Anna Perenna’s bed trick in the pseudo-Ovidian ‘De vetula’ and Boccaccio’s novella VIII.4
Ovid’s account of Anna Perenna’s festival in ‘Fasti’ includes a comic vignette in which the aged goddess plays the role of a go-between, who is asked by Mars to help him woo Minerva. However, Anna manages to substitute herself for the virgin goddess in the wedding bed and then laughs (ridet) at Mars for having been tricked. The article tracks the influence of Anna’s bed trick in ‘De vetula’, a thirteenth century pseudo-Ovidian Latin narrative poem, in which an old procuress exchanges places with a virgin who is the object of the narrator’s passion. Anna’s bed trick later reappears in Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’, namely in the novella VIII.4 about the lustful provost of Fiesole and Monna Piccarda, a widow who tricks him into bed with her unsightly servant Ciutazza.
In these medieval works female characters take on many of the characteristics of Ovid’s aged Anna. At the same time, these medieval narratives rework the traditional motif of the bed trick by harnessing the peculiar social situation of the medieval widow, as a type of woman endowed with a degree of independence. These medieval versions of Anna’s bed trick conserve the memory of Ovid’s early picture of the goddess and her festival in which other rules of social interaction were allowed, while offering alternative perspectives upon power structures of medieval patriarchal society.
Keywords: Anna Perenna; Boccaccio; ‘De vetula’; female laughter; go-between; Ovid; widow.