Parergon

In this compelling book, Jo Ann Cavallo shows that the two most influential chivalric poems from late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Italy are in fact a world apart. Lodovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (‘Raging Roland’) was first published in 1516 as a continuation of the narrative in Matteo Maria Boiardo’s 1495 Orlando Innamorato (‘Orlando in Love’). Two decades might not seem much – especially from our distant vantage point – yet, this span of time radically changed the literary and geopolitical perception of Europe and the East. Cavallo describes vividly the contrast between the joyful, open-minded, and utopic world of chivalry in Boiardo’s poem and Ariosto’s return to the conflict between Christians and Saracens underpinning the Carolingian epic. Cavallo does so by offering a thoroughly researched examination of the literary sources that shaped Boiardo’s narrative and Ariosto’s reinterpretation of the material.

From the outset, Cavallo explains that the court of Ferrara, for which the two poems were written, was a significant centre for the production and consumption of maps, histories, and accounts of pilgrimages to the East. Several sources on the Crusades and the East were readily accessible to the Ferrarese court, as Boiardo’s Historia Imperiale (c. 1473) demonstrates: from the Greek histories by Herodotus and Xenophon to Giovanni da Pian del Carpine’s Historia Mongalorum (c. 1245), John Mandeville’s Travels, and Hayton of Corycus’s The Flower of Histories of the East. The lords of Ferrara were also keen collectors of oriental carpets, Arabian horses, and treatises on astrology. Chivalric poems and cantari offered, therefore, a rich platform on which the connections and frictions between the East and the West played out.

Cavallo’s book is a tribute to Boiardo’s ‘global interpenetration under the banner of a universal chivalric code’ (p. 260) and his insatiable curiosity about African, Asian, and Middle Eastern landscapes and traditions. Ariosto did not share the same positive worldview. His reinterpretation of the Orlando Innamorato is an outright rejection of Boiardo’s chivalric cosmopolitanism. As Cavallo explains in the final section of her work, the wars and invasions that plagued Italy at the turn of the sixteenth century left a mark on Ariosto. Admittedly, they had also made Boiardo abandon his own poem at the beginning of Book III. Ariosto’s changed perception of the universality of chivalry drove the hero Rinaldo to the Po valley, where dangers were then greater than any remote African or Asian city. Understandably, Cavallo [End Page 227] indulges on Boiardo’s ‘multiculturalism’ and leaves less room for Ariosto’s more religious and moralising view of the ‘other’.

This volume skilfully takes the reader through Boiardo’s key non-European characters and their journeys across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Italian Po valley: Cavallo sheds light on Boiardo’s syncretic use of sources to narrate the adventures of African king Agramante, his cousin Rugiero, and Rodamonte. Boiardo’s poem was not impermeable to current affairs. As Cavallo argues, the threat posed by Agramante’s invasion of Europe mirrored the Ottomans’ forays into Southern Italy in the 1480s. These shadows became greater and more menacing in Ariosto’s poem, as the last two sections of the book demonstrate: the adventurous, chivalrous, and open minded Frankish knight described in the Orlando Innamorato became a staunch and narrow-minded defender of Christianity against the ‘other’.

The book’s most insightful case-study is the analysis of the treatment of the Saracen knight Brandimarte in the two poems: in Boiardo’s text this knight is an unfaltering champion of universal knighthood, whereas in Ariosto’s he is rewritten as a minor character, condemned by his non-Christian identity.

Cavallo’s work follows in the footsteps of Pio Rajna and Neil Harris and their ground-breaking research on the literary richness and vitality of Boiardo’s poem. Given the imbalance...