Great Authors and Works of Italian Renaissance: Ariosto’s Orlando furioso

This class will read the most successful narrative poem of the Early Modern European period, Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (“The Madness of Orlando,” 1516-32), a work so popular it increased European literacy and rivaled the Bible in editions published. It combined the genres of chivalric romance, the crusading epic, and the classic heroic epic, but features ladies-errant along with knights and shrewdly satirizes hypermasculine late feudalism (the philosopher Hegel claimed it had destroyed chivalry). It helped drive Cervantes’ Don Quixote mad, fueled a fierce debate in relation to Tasso’s crusade epic Jerusalem Delivered, and in England influenced Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Lord Byron, and Virginia Woolf (Orlando, 1928). Depending on enrollment, we will read/discuss in Italian and/or English. Readers in English will field-test a new translation by Ariosto scholar Albert Ascoli to be published by Oxford University Press.