Orlando in Love

Orlando in Love
Author: Matteo Maria Boiardo
Publisher: Parlor Press LLC
Total Pages: 726
Release: 2004
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781932559019

Like Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, Boiardo's chivalric stories of lords and ladies first entertained the culturally innovative court of Ferrara in the Italian Renaissance. Inventive, humorous, inexhaustible, the story recounts Orlando's love-stricken pursuit of "the fairest of her Sex, Angelica" (in Milton's terms) through a fairyland that combines the military valors of Charlemagne's knights and their famous horses with the enchantments of King Arthur's court. Today it seems more than ever appropriate to offer a new, unabridged edition of Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, the first Renaissance epic about the common customs of, and the conflicts between, Christian Europe and Islam. Having extensively revised his earlier translation for general readers, Charles Ross has added headings and helpful summaries to Boiardo's cantos. Tenses have been regularized, and terms of gender and religion have been updated, but not so much as to block the reader's encounter with how Boiardo once viewed the world. Charles Stanley Ross has degrees from Harvard College and the University of Chicago and teaches English and comparative literature at Purdue University. "Neglect of Italian romances robs us of a whole species of pleasure and narrows our very conception of literature. It is as if a man left out Homer, or Elizabethan drama, or the novel. For like these, the romantic epic of Italy is one of the great trophies of the European genius: a genuine kind, not to be replaced by any other, and illustrated by an extremely copious and brilliant production. It is one of the successes, the undisputed achievements." -C. S. Lewis

Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato

Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato
Author: Jo Ann Cavallo
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 1993
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780838635346

Jo Ann Cavallo challenges the traditional tendency to view the Orlando Innamorato as "pure entertainment" and argues instead that the poem embodies the principal elements of fifteenth-century Humanist poets.

Teaching the Italian Renaissance Romance Epic

Teaching the Italian Renaissance Romance Epic
Author: Jo Ann Cavallo
Publisher: Modern Language Association
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2018-12-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1603293671

The Italian romance epic of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with its multitude of characters, complex plots, and roots in medieval Carolingian epic and Arthurian chivalric romance, was a form popular with courtly and urban audiences. In the hands of writers such as Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, works of remarkable sophistication that combined high seriousness and low comedy were created. Their works went on to influence Cervantes, Milton, Ronsard, Shakespeare, and Spenser. In this volume instructors will find ideas for teaching the Italian Renaissance romance epic along with its adaptations in film, theater, visual art, and music. An extensive resources section locates primary texts online and lists critical studies, anthologies, and reference works.

The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso

The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso
Author: Jo Ann Cavallo
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2004-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780802089151

In The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, Jo Ann Cavallo attempts a new interpretation of the history of the renaissance romance epic in northern Italy, focusing on the period's three major chivalric poets. Cavallo challenges previous critical assumptions about the trajectory of the romance genre, especially regarding questions of creative imitation, allegory, ideology, and political engagement. In tracing the development of the romance epic against the historical context of the Ferrarese court and the Italian peninsula, Cavallo moves from a politically engaged Boiardo, whose poem promotes the tenets of humanism, to an individualistic Tasso, who opposed the repressive aspects of the counter-reformation culture he is often thought to represent. Ariosto is read from the vantage of his predecessor Boiardo, and Cavallo describes his cynicism and later mellowing attitude toward the real-world relevance of his and Boiardo's fiction. The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso is the first critical study to bring together the three poets in a coherent vision that maps changes while uncovering continuities.