CAPÍTULO III: DE LA ÉTICA DE LA VIRTUD A LA ÉTICA POLÍTICA
5. LA MEJOR FORMA DE AMOR PROPIO EL CARÁCTER SOCIAL DE LA MORAL
Italian Renaissance heroic poetry represents a fusion of multiple literary genres: it builds on, rewrites, imitates, and combines the traditions of ancient epic, ancient Greek romance, medieval romance, and the chansons de geste.3 For this reason, various scholars define these poems as “romance-
epics.”4 In writing these hybrid poems, Renaissance writers allowed the two traditions of epic and
romance to openly engage and compete with each another.5 Epic in the Western tradition begins
with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, followed by Virgil’s Aeneid. 6 As Adeline Johns-Putra aptly
3 Shemek, Ladies Errant, 191. Moreover, medieval romance, also known as chivalric literature, is typically sorted into the three cycles: the matter of Rome, the matter Britain (Arthurian or Breton cycle), and the matter of France (Carolingian cycle). The matter of Rome narrates stories of the Trojan War, Alexander the Great, and other ancient heroes of Rome while the matter of Britain tells of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Lastly, the matter of France, made famous by its sub-genre, the chansons de geste (“heroic songs”), include narratives about the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, his knights (especially Roland), and his campaign against the Saracens. The chansons de geste are also categorized as Carolingian epics, or more generally as medieval French epics, because they sway more towards epic than romance in focusing less on the individual, and more on a collective group.
4 Dennis Looney, Compromising the Classics: Romance Epic Narrative in the Italian Renaissance (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 15. See also Giuseppe Mazzotta, “The Italian Renaissance Epic,” in The Cambridge
Companion to the Epic, ed. Catherine Bates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 94; Colin Burrow, Epic Romance: From Homer to Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 3; Barbara Fuchs, Romance (New
York: Routledge, 2004), 52. 5 Fuchs, Romance, 66.
6 Nevertheless, while the Odyssey shares an epic form with the Iliad, its difference in subject matter—a poem not about war, but about an individual’s return journey home— has led to a long-standing debate of whether the Odyssey is more of a romance than an epic. Moreover, the understanding of the Odyssey as a romance and
summarizes:
The Homeric poems precede the very concept of epic, and hence define it. Such is the case with the earliest epic theory, inaugurated by Aristotle’s Poetics. It is only with Virgil’s attempts to emulate Homer in the Aeneid, and thus to translate the Homeric poems into a Roman context, that the epic tradition begins in earnest.7
While Homer’s and Virgil’s poems presented worthy subject matter to treat in verse—war, homecoming, and the foundation of a nation—Aristotle’s treatise theorized epic as a fixed genre, outlining general characteristics of its form, such as a suitable length and an appropriate meter. Epic narrative and structure mostly revolve around “effective quests, corporate achievement, and the heroic birth of nations.”8 Their plots are unitary and actively move towards a predetermined end, the
“telos.” Moreover, as described by Aristotle, their storylines strive to strike a balance between what is plausible and what is marvelous. In contrast, romance typically features a wandering hero/knight whose individualistic desires guide her or his quête. Romance narrative is circular with digressions that lead into new, separate storylines, like erotic interludes or martial obstacles, that ultimately interrupt or delay the primary plot. In fact, as Fuchs states the main feature of romance is its “dilation or postponement of the object of desire rather than its achievement.”9 Additionally, the
intervention of magic or the supernatural is common in romance, featuring figures like
the Iliad as an epic has led to an overlying discussion that stems from “a determination to see the two Homeric poems as rootedly distinct from each other: the Iliad shows fighting, and heroic going-on, so it is epic; the Odyssey relates wanderings, magical adventures abroad, and a final comic reunion in the Hero to his wife and home, so it is a romance.” Burrow, Epic Romance: From Homer to Milton, 2. For more on this
discussion, see Adeline Johns-Putra, The History of Epic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 9. For more on the Odyssey as romance see John Dean, “The Odyssey as Romance,” College Literature 3, no. 3 (Fall 1976): 228–36; Fuchs, Romance, 13–15; Hubert McDermott, Novel and Romance: The “Odyssey” to “Tom Jones” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), 1–22.
7 Johns-Putra, The History of Epic, 7. 8 Fuchs, Romance, 66.
enchantresses who spellbind and hold captive the wandering hero.10
Theories and arguments outlining the differences between epic and romance were well- discussed topics in Renaissance Italy, especially since heroic poetry remained a popular literary form throughout the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. The following texts along with their publication dates highlight this point: Luigi Pulci’s Morgante and the first two books of Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato (1484), Ludovico Ariosto’s first edition of the Orlando furioso (1516), Moderata Fonte’s Floridoro and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581), Margherita Sarrocchi’s
Scanderbeide (1623), and Lucrezia Marinella’s Enrico (1635).11 While an evident gap appears between
the publication dates of Ariosto’s and Tasso’s poems, this lapse does not signify a decrease in the genre’s popularity. In fact, between these years, the production of heroic poems still flourished; for instance, Gian Giorgio Trission wrote La Italia liberata da’ Gothi (1547–1448), Bernardo Tasso composed his Amadigi (1560), and Giarldi Cinzio published his Ercole (1557).12 Nevertheless, out of
all the poems published during this period, Ariosto’s and Tasso’s poems were the most influential because, as Rinaldina Russell explains, the Furioso and Liberata represented two different models of heroic poetry by which a work would be judged.13 Contemporary critics of Ariosto such as Giovanni
Battista Giraldi (1504–1573) and Giovambattista Pigna (1529–1579), who were also supporters of Ariosto’s poem, believed the Furioso adhered closer to the romance genre, finding much of its
10 Fuchs, 66.
11 Boiardo’s Innamorato and Ariosto’s Furioso “were the first best-sellers ever in Italian literature, with sales in the sixteenth century handily surpassing those of the Bible.” Valeria Finucci, “Moderata Fonte and the Genre of Women’s Chivalric Romances,” in Floridoro: A Chivalric Romance, by Moderata Fonte, ed. Valeria Finucci, trans. Julia Kisacky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 16.
12 Moreover, Marina Beer estimates that between the years 1501 and 1600, about 625 heroic poems were published. Romanzi di Cavalleria (Rome: Bulzoni, 1987), 230.
13 Rinaldina Russell, “Margherita Sarrocchi and the Writing of the Scanderbeide,” in Scanderbeide, by Margherita Sarrocchi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 18.
influence in chivalric literature, with a plot that alternates between the deeds of Charlemagne’s paladins and the romantic endeavors of Arthurian knights.14 Other neo-classicists who closely
followed Aristotle’s Poetics and Horace’s Ars poetica like Camillo Pellegrino (1527–1603), believed in classical epic poetry’s superiority over chivalric romance, finding the Furioso’s structure problematic because of its interweaving plot lines and numerous digressions.15 The combination of the
complaints made about the Furioso and the publication of the Liberata in 1581 led to a full-blown debate, pitting the two poems against one another to discern which of the two heroic poems was a better vernacular model to follow.16
In writing the Furioso, Ariosto was continuing where Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato left off, borrowing many of the same characters and plot threads. For both these texts, but even more so in the Furioso, there is a tension between martial duty and erotic detour that inherently structures the narratives of these poems.17 Though the backdrop of the Innamorato focuses on the struggles of
Charlemagne’s knights against pagan forces, the poem primarily follows a well-known martial hero, Orlando (Roland), taken from the chanson de geste tradition, whose story centers on his enamorment with Angelica, the Indian princess from Cathay. This fifteenth-century work is important in the
14 Giraldi and Pigna exchanged letters between 1548 and 1554 defending Ariosto’s poem, which were then collected into a pamphlet, and probably appended to or included with Giraldi’s Discorsi intorno al comporre dei
romanzi (1554). These letters primarily defend Ariosto’s poem against detractors who believed that the Furioso
could not be considered a serious piece of literature because it did not adhere to Aristotle’s Poetics. For details of Girladi and Pigna’s arguments see Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 957–71.
15 Translations into Latin of Aristotle’s Poetics led to its rediscovery during the sixteenth century in Italy. For example, in 1536, Alessandro de’ Pazzi translated the text into Latin. For more on Pellegrino’s belief in the
Liberata’s superiority over the Furioso see Weinberg, 991–1000. Moreover, as Albert Ascoli writes, “for
orthodox classicists, the choice of the pluralistic and digressive romance would come to represent an illicit deviance from the epic norm.” Albert Russell Ascoli, “Introduction,” in The Quest for Epic and Romance, by Sergio Zatti, trans. Dennis Looney and Sarah Hill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 16. 16 Shemek, Ladies Errant, 80. For more on the quarrel over Ariosto and Tasso see Weinberg, A History of
Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 954–1073.
study of Renaissance heroic poetry because it is the first to fuse together Carolingian and Arthurian cycles.18 Much like the Innamorato, the Furioso is a carefully constructed web of plots and digressions,
consisting of three main narrative threads: the conflict between Charlemagne’s knights and the Saracen forces, the seemingly never-ending love-saga between Bradamante and Ruggiero whose eventual marriage is to found the Este dynasty, and most notably, Orlando’s pursuit of Angelica, who symbolizes elusive desire, and his subsequent descent into madness. Even more so than Boiardo, Ariosto pushes to the extreme the technique of entrelacement, a narrative tool from the French romance tradition that “involves the multiplication of narrative threads through the interweaving of encounters and conflicts among various characters.”19 While the Furioso seems to
privilege romance in the first half of the poem, it evolves into a vehicle for “a ‘closed,’ and therefore ‘epic’” ending.20 Ariosto’s “grafting” of classical epics with chivalric romance, to use a term from
Daniel Javitch,displayed his mastery of two literary worlds, though it frustrated some of his
18 As Brady Spangenberg notes, “rather than depicting a harmonious relationship confluence of Carolingian martial pursuits and Arthurian romantic endeavors, Boiardo plays these two plot sequences against each other, the one serving as a distraction or deviation from the other and vice versa.” “Delay the War But Not the Sex: Boiardo on Action and Time,” Arthuriana 20, no. 1 (2011): 97. Further detailing how the Innamorato borrows from both Carolingian and Arthurian cycles, Norris J. Lacy explains, “the framework of the poem is essentially Carolingian, recounting the struggle of the Christian forces of Charlemagne with those of the pagan Agramante. However, the focus of the romance is on the Arthurian elements, including the
innumerable fantastical adventures of knights-errant, magic fountains and enchanted forests, and particularly love, which has frequently been seen as the motive force behind a highly energized series of complex `episodes, commencing with that of the hero-protagonist, Orlando.” “Boiardo, Matteo Maria,” in The New
Arthurian Encyclopedia, ed. Norris J. Lacy (London: Routledge, 2013), 43. See also Peter Marinelli, Ariosto and Boiardo: The Origins of “Orlando Furioso” (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987).
19 Sergio Zatti, The Quest for Epic: From Ariosto to Tasso, ed. Dennis Looney, trans. Sally Hill and Dennis Looney (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 17.
20 Looney, Compromising the Classics, 15. David Quint similarly argues, “Ariosto intends his poem to divide into two equal parts. [It] jettisons pure romance midway in order to proceed to an epic closure.” Epic and Empire:
Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 84. See also David
contemporary readers in search of a more unitary, epic plot. 21 Nonetheless this technique of mixing
two modes, in combination with the inclusion of a wide array of characters from all backgrounds who do not conform to their normal social standards, allowed Ariosto to unveil the non-binary complexity of his literary world, while surpassing older literary traditions by creating a new, altered form.22
While the Furioso’s fictional world is loosely based on Charlemagne’s eighth-century wars against the Saracens, Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata uses the First Crusade as its historical backdrop, placing the strife between Christian knights and Saracen warriors at the forefront and delineating a clearer opposition between the “good” and the “bad.” The Liberata follows the knights of the Crusade who overcome their army’s initial setbacks and problems of disunity to ultimately succeed in capturing Jerusalem together, their longtime awaited goal. Utilizing a remote historical event, like the capturing of Jerusalem, to ground a narrative allows the poet certain mimetic liberties: the historical event should be recognizable to audiences, but far enough back in time to permit artistic freedom while maintaining elements of verisimilitude.23 Tasso’s poem has a much stronger Christian
telos than Ariosto’s; it not only details the Christian effort to retake Jerusalem, but also its “subject matter conjoined historical credibility with the Christian marvelous—consisting in miracles, visions, and interventions of angels and demons.”24 With regards to the use of romance elements, Tasso had
contradictory opinions. On the one hand he critiqued romance structure, arguing in his Discorsi
21 Daniel Javitch, “The Grafting of Virgilian Epic in Orlando Furioso,” in Renaissance Transactions: Ariosto and
Tasso, ed. Valeria Finucci (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 56–76.
22 Shemek, Ladies Errant, 80–81.
23 In Virginia Cox’s words, selecting a historical subject matter for a heroic poems entails “choosing episodes from history sufficiently recent and well documented to ensure the reader’s credence yet sufficiently distant to permit of discreet fictional embellishment.” The Prodigious Muse: Women’s Writing in Counter-Reformation Italy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 168.
dell’arte poetica (1587) that romance’s construction is monstrous for the way in which multiple
storylines constantly interrupt and weave in and out of the narrative, so much so that they resemble the snakelike creature wrapped around one of the sinners found in canto 25 of Dante’s Inferno:
se questi poemi son molti e distinti di natura, come si prova per la moltitudine e distinzion delle favole, ha non solo del confuso, ma del mostruoso ancora il traporre e mescolare le membra dell’uno con quelle dell’altro, simile a quella fera che ci descrive Dante:
Ella abbarbicata mai non fue ad arbor sì, come l’orribil fera
per l’altrui membra avittichiò le sue. 25
On the other hand, Tasso believed that love, a theme strongly rooted in the romance tradition, was a permissible and even worthy subject to treat in a heroic poem. In a 1576 letter to Luca Scalabrino, a philosopher and respected critic, Tasso writes, “[i]o voglio defender contra tutto il mondo, chè l’amore è materia altrettanto eroica quanto la guerra; e ‘l difenderò con ragione, con autorità di Aristotele, con luoghi di Platone che parlano chiaro chiaro chiaro, chiarissimamente chiaro.”26 As Jo
Ann Cavallo notes, “what he [Tasso] objected to in romance was not its central elements of love and magic, but rather the technique of interlacing that overtaxed the reader’s memory and the poet’s intervention in poems and elsewhere which upset the sense of verisimilitude created by a consistent third-person narrator.”27 Thus, Tasso finds a middle ground between these two beliefs, allowing his
knights to fall in love, but ensuring his plot is unitary so that the romance episodes do not deter from the primary plotline. To do so, he lessened the number of narrative digressions in an attempt to keep the core of the poem’s plot linear and converted romance episodes into epic unity, so that they are “straightened out” to fit in with the main narrative subject of the Liberata: the Christian
25 3/18/20 3:32:00 PM
26 Tasso to Scalabrino, Rome, 9 April 1576, as quoted in Torquato Tasso: Lettere, ed. Ettore Mazzali, vol. 1 (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), 54.
27 Jo Ann Cavallo, “Tasso’s Armida and the Victory of Romance,” in Renaissance Transactions: Ariosto and Tasso, ed. Valeria Finucci (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 107.
capture of Jerusalem.These two different models of Ariosto and Tasso are crucial for understanding the ways in which later poets like Margherita Sarrocchi would adopt their modes and style.
The Scanderbeide also belongs to a group of heroic poems authored by women, which was initiated with the publication of Moderata Fonte’s unfinished text, I tredici canti del Floridoro in 1581. As of today, six sixteenth- and seventeenth- century heroic poems have been attributed to Italian women writers.28 Included with Fonte’s and Sarrocchi’s poems are Tullia d’Aragona’s Il Meschino, altramente detto il Guerrino (1560), Lucrezia Marinella’s L’Enrico ovvero Bisanzio acquistato (1635), Barbara
Albizzi-Tagliamochi’s Ascanio errante (1640), and Francesca Turina’s recently discovered and unpublished Il Florio (1640). 29 The extent to which the earlier female-authored poems influenced
Sarrocchi’s is hard to determine. However, Moderata Fonte was well known outside of Venice, so Sarrocchi may have been at least familiar with the Floridoro.30 Additionally, there are striking
similarities between Sarrocchi’s and Marinella’s poems as they both take on historical subjects and feature prominent female friendship. While an in-depth study comparing these female-authored heroic poems is for further research, it is safe to say that the texts named above can be grouped together as they constitute a small oeuvre or micro-tradition of women writers who either attempted or succeeded in writing a full heroic poem– therefore their importance cannot be overlooked.31
28 In addition to these six texts, we know of several other unfinished attempts at epic including Maddalena Salvetti’s biblical-chivalric poem David and an untitled poem by Laura Battiferra based on material from the Old Testament. Isabella Andreini, Veronica Franco, and Maddalena Campiglia were also said to have been working on their own epic poems during the early to mid-1590s, though nothing remains of their attempts. There may be more that have yet to be discovered. Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650, 151.
29 There has been recent scholarly debate as to whether d’Aragona is the true author of the poem. John McLucas and Julia L. Hairston attribute authorship to d’Aragona, while Virginia Cox is wary of making any absolute claim. See John McLucas, “Renaissance Carolingian: Tullia D’Aragona’s 1560 Il Meschino, altramente
detto il Guerrino,” Olifant 25, no. 1–2 (2006): 314; Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650, 312 n167.
30 As I will note later in my discussion of the Scanderbeide, there is an excerpt in Sarrocchi’s poem that bears close resemblance to the stanzas that open the fourth canto of the Floridoro.
31 In delineating a micro-tradition of female epics, we still should be careful: “Un’epica femminile, allora— cioè, non solo un’epica scritta da autrici anagraficamente donne—ma un’epica che incorpora una prospettiva
Before the publication of the abovementioned poems, women’s relationship to heroic poetry was mainly as readers. These poems were extremely popular among their female readership despite the fact that there were a number of moralists who found them unsuitable and improper for women’s minds.32 Nevertheless, this did not stop women from reading such texts nor did it stop
them from reflecting on them, evident in Laura Terracina’s Discorso sopra tutti li primi canti d’Orlando
furioso (1550), a verse commentary on the Furioso that was printed thirteen times after the original
edition published in Venice. Finucci argues that Terracina’s work could arguably be considered a chivalric romance though there is no original plot or new independent story line.33 Instead, Terracina
uses the first line of each canto in the Furioso to develop an argument that centralizes a woman’s point of view on the issue at hand, making her work a “platform for feminist criticisms of her
society.”34 Indeed, Terracina makes it clear that her reading of the Furioso is from the perspective of a