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Orlando Innamorato, the first Renaissance Epic About the Common Customs Of, and the Conflicts R Between, Christian Europe and Islam

Orlando Innamorato, the first Renaissance Epic About the Common Customs Of, and the Conflicts R Between, Christian Europe and Islam

Renaissance Literature I Boiardo RLANDO NNAMORATO O O I T “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. IN LOVE A For like these, the romantic epic of is one of the great trophies of the European genius: RLANDO a genuine kind, not to be replaced by any other, and illustrated by an extremely copious and L brilliant production. It is one of the successes, the undisputed achievements.” —C. S. Lewis I Like Ariosto’s and Tasso’s , Boiardo’s chivalric stories of lords and ladies first entertained the culturally innovative court of in the Italian Translated with A . Inventive, humorous, inexhaustible, the story recounts Orlando’s love-stricken LOVE IN ORLANDO pursuit of “the fairest of her Sex, ” (in Milton’s terms) through a fairyland that an Introduction N combines the military valors of ’s and their famous horses with the and Notes by enchantments of ’s court. I Charles Stanley Ross Today it seems more than ever appropriate to offer a new, unabridged edition of Boiardo’s NNAMORATO , the first Renaissance epic about the common customs of, and the conflicts R 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. E 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. N Charles Stanley Ross has degrees from Harvard College and the University of Chicago and A teaches English and comparative literature at Purdue University.

Cover Illustration: Saint Demetrius, by L’Ortolano (Giovanni Battista Benvenuti), early I Cinquecento; courtesy of Stanley Moss and Co., Riverdale-On-Hudson, New York. The S image evokes the poet Boiardo in meditative . S Parlor Press 816 Robinson Street • West Lafayette, IN 47906 A www.parlorpress.com S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9  N ISBN 1-932559-10-8 Parlor C Press E Orlando Innamorato

Orlando Innamorato Orlando in Love

Matteo Maria Boiardo

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Charles Stanley Ross

Parlor Press West Lafayette, Indiana www.parlorpress.com Parlor Press LLC, West Lafayette, Indiana 47906

Ross, Charles S. “Angelica and the Fata Morgana: Boiardo’s Allegory of Love.” MLN 96.1 (1981): 12-22. © The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

An earlier translation by Charles Stanley Ross was first published by the University of California Press, 1989, and an abridged version by , 1995.

Cover illustration detail from Saint Demetrius by L’Ortolano (Giovanni Battista Benvenuti) early Cinquecento. Courtesy of Stanley Moss and Co., Riverdale-On-Hudson, New York.

© 2004 by Parlor Press All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America

S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2003116554

Boiardo, Matteo Maria, 1440 or 1441–1494 Orlando innamorato (Orlando in Love) English : / Matteo Maria Boiardo; translated with an introduction and notes by Charles Stanley Ross. p. cm. This edition is an unabridged translation. Includes illustrations, notes, bibliographical references, and index.

1. (Legendary character)—Romances. I. Ross, Charles Stanley. II. Title.

ISBN 1-932559-01-9 (Paper) ISBN 1-932559-10-8 (Adobe eBook) ISBN 1-932559-11-6 (TK3)

Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and mul- timedia formats. This Adobe eBook is also available in trade paper and Night Kitchen (TK3) formats, from Parlor Press on the WWW at http://www.parlorpress.com. For submission in- formation or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 816 Robinson St., West Lafayette, Indiana, 47906, or e-mail [email protected]. For Clare

Che in l’universo, in tutte le contrade Quanto il sol scalda e quanto cinge il mare Cosa più bella non si può mirare.

CONTENTS

Preface to the Parlor Press Edition xi Acknowledgments xiii Boiardo and His Poem xv Chronology of Matteo Maria Boiardo xxxi Map of Northern and Central Italy xxxiii Boiardo’s Life xxxiv Boiardo and the Derangement of Epic l Angelica and the Fata Morgana: Boiardo’s Allegory of Love lxv Text and Translation lxxv Annotated Bibliography lxxix Maps lxxxii

 ORLANDO INNAMORATO Book I, Cantos i–xxix 1 1 Angelica in Paris 3 2 Charlemagne’s Tournament 14 3 The Stream of Love 23 4 War in 33 5 Orlando’s Quest for Angelica 45 6 A Cup of Forgetfulness 55 7 Gradasso’s Siege of Paris 64 8 Castle Cruel 73 9 Dragontina’s Garden 81 10 The First Battle of Albraca 91 11 in His Nightshirt 98

vii CONTENTS

12 Medusa’s Garden 105 13 The Evil King of Baghdad 116 14 Poliferno’s Prison 123 15 Nine Knights at Albraca 132 16 The Indian Army 140 17 Feeding Orgagna’s Beast 148 18 Marfisa’s Sword 156 19 The Death of Agricane 163 20 Three Giants and a Camel 171 21 Leodilla’s Footrace 179 22 What Women Do to Old Husbands 188 23 The Savage Man 195 24 The Horn Tests 202 25 The Treasure Fairy 210 26 Ranaldo Kills Trufaldino 217 27 Orlando v. Ranaldo 226 28 Angelica Intervenes 233 29 Origille in Distress 240

Book II, Cantos i–xxxi 249 1 Agramante, Alexander, Africa 249 2 The Bridge of Roses 259 3 Searching for Rugiero 268 4 Falerina’s Garden 277 5 ’s Thefts 287 6 Rodamonte Invades Provence 296 7 The Fata Morgana’s Lake 304 8 The Underworld of Treasure 312 9 Fortune’s Forelock 320 10 Balisardo’s Metamorphoses 328 11 King Manodante’s Lost Children 336 12 Recognized 343 13 The Fay 351 14 Ranaldo Travels West 360 viii CONTENTS

15 The God of Love 368 16 The Tournament at Mt. Carena 377 17 The Story of Narcissus 385 18 The Fall of Albracà 393 19 Cannibals 401 20 The Tournament 409 21 Orlando Returns to France 417 22 Agramante’s Thirty-Two Kings 424 23 The Border War at Montalbano 432 24 Saving Charlemagne 442 25 Febosilla’s Palace 450 26 Doristella 458 27 The Flower of Liza 465 28 The Biserta Hunt 473 29 Agramante Invades France 480 30 Feraguto Beaten 489 31 Atalante’s Phantom Army 497

Book III, Cantos i–ix 505 1 ’s Mistresses 505 2 The Crocodile of the Nile 513 3 Lucina, A Syrian Princess 521 4 Rugiero at Montalbano 529 5 in Love 536 6 Fighting for Durindana 544 7 The Laughing Stream 551 8 Back to Paris 558 9 Fiordespina’s Impossible Love 567

Notes to the Poem 571 Bibliography 583 Index of Names and Places 591

ix

PREFACE TO THE PARLOR PRESS EDITION

Today it seems more than ever appropriate to offer a new edition of Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato, the first Renaissance epic about the common customs of, and the conflicts between, Christian Europe and Islam. Written in Italy during the (and first translated by me in the 1970s), the story of a French ’s pursuit of an Eastern princess seemed hopelessly out of date by the end of the fifteenth century. Europeans had found two new continents, and Italy had been invaded, in1494, by the French, who were soon replaced by Spanish troops. The world of Italy changed, as, we are told, our own has done. Paradoxically, however, our new horizons turn our attention back to the arena where Boiardo placed the most wondrous elements of his poem, the area from Chechnya to Turkestan, around the Cas- pian Sea—not just the regions beyond ancient Persia, but imaginatively to the furthest regions that westerners could hope to reach. The legacy of Alexander the Great, power- fully invoked in the second half of the Innamorato, was dim to American and European minds when I first translated Boiardo. It has returned in force as we struggle to under- stand not only foreign cultures but ourselves. For this new, complete edition, printed without a facing Italian text in a format as close as possible to the original, I have somewhat loosened Boiardo’s stanza from the restraints of a line-for-line rendering and allowed more rhyme. Tenses have been regular- ized. 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 Purdue University

xi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I first read Boiardo early in 1974 for a University of Chicago seminar on Arthurian romance. Immune to awkward strokes of battle after reading many minor romances, I quickly succumbed to the Innamorato’s spell. The idea that literary works must have consistent, developed characters had burdened generations of Boiardo critics, but since that notion held no weight in our seminar, I was free to see Boiardo’s characters as products of the Innamorato’s plot. I remember that as I charted the movements of men and armies across a long stretch of brown wrapping paper taped to my study wall, I drew a pencil line to trace ’s eastward voyage in pursuit of Orlando, and the impetuous sweep of that curve seemed to reflect Astolfo’s personality and at the same time to symbolize the particular pleasure of reading this romantic epic. Of those I acknowledged in the California edition I want to renominate my teach- ers and mentors, William Dowling, Michael Murrin, and Allen Mandelbaum, and add Giovanni Ponte for a personal communication on Boiardo’s geography, Jo Ann Cavallo for keeping Boiardo alive at Columbia, and David Blakesley for giving Boiardo another chance on stage. CSR

xiii

BOIARDO AND HIS POEM

Half a century ago C. S. Lewis championed the form of Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato when he sought to guide readers into the complex paths of ’s Faerie Queene. a poem structurally similar to the text Boiardo first published in 1482 or 1483: I must say a word of Spenser’s immediate model—the Italian epic. This vast body of poetry has in our time fallen strangely out of favour. But its products were familiar masterpieces to readers so diverse as Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Hurd, Macaulay, and Scott, and young ladies in the eighteenth century would have been ashamed to neglect what is now not infrequently neglected by scholars. Our oblivion of these poets is much to be regretted, not only because it vitiates our understanding of the Romantic Movement—a phenomenon which becomes baffling indeed if we choose to neglect the noble viaduct on which the love of and “fine fabling” travelled straight across from the to the nineteenth century—but also because it robs us of a whole species of pleasures 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.1 Lewis’s use of words like “pleasures,” “epic,” and “kind” serves to remind us that the wandering ways of the Italian epics have baffled analysis for ages. The controversy began in sixteenth-century Italy when critics, faced with Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato and its sequel, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, sought to explain why these popular masterpieces of sword and sorcery could be successful and yet violate the rules for epic set forth in the

xv BOIARDO AND HIS POEM newly recovered text of ’s Poetics. Giraldi Cintio, associated with the Este court of Ferrara as Boiardo and Ariosto had been, a writer perhaps best known to English readers as the author of the source story of Shakespeare’s Othello, cleverly suggested that the new works did not need to follow Aristotle’s rules, because they belonged to a form unknown to Aristotle. Neither comedies nor tragedies, said Cintio, these heroic poems should be labeled romances.2 The questing knights and polished cantos of the Italian romances established the varying and inventive conventions used in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Influence is too weak a word, argued Lewis: rather than list countless similarities, we should say that Spenser fought in the armor of the Italians.3 In The Discarded Image, Lewis quietly separated Boiardo from Ariosto by including two of the Innamorato’s fairy women in his discussion of supernatural beings.4 His insight confirms Boiardo’s ability to fire the imagination, and indeed the Innamorato is famous for its enchant- resses, figures like Dragontina, Falerina, Morgana, and Alcina. These women, some of whom continue the tradition of fays found in earlier French romances, inhabit a series of magic domains whose allegories have only recently been unveiled by schol- ars but whose influence on later literature, especially on Tasso’s Armida, Spenser’s Bower of Bliss, and their imitators, is a commonplace of literary history. In Italy today Boiardo’s masterpiece is administered in small doses to school- children and is thus as well known and loved as was castor oil in an earlier genera- tion. Classroom anthologies invariably choose the conversion and death of King Agricane (Book 1, canto xix) to illustrate the Innamorato. Based on the topos that compares the value of learning to that of military proficiency,5 the scene is one of Boiardo’s best. But by isolating it from the network of the poem, editors attempt to eliminate the poem’s distance from us, its “alterity,” under the illusion that the familiar schemes of classical rhetoric can cut through the complexity of Renaissance literature. English readers unschooled in Italian have had to rely on testimonials to the Innamorato’s charms by such readers as Mary Shelley, Leigh Hunt, Violet Paget, and John Addington Symonds, who have long made Orlando Innamorato a beacon in the literary distance.6 Today the Innamorato is the kind of story often heard of but seldom read, because literary hearsay reports that allegorical romances exist in larger numbers than is the case—tales of knights in armor, jousts, wicked witches, dragons, and magicians where, in Milton’s phrase, “more is meant than meets the ear” (“Il Penseroso”). A major purpose of the present translation is to allow readers appreciative or apprehensive of Spenser’s celebration of and her England to experience the beginnings of an allegorical mode known in Italy a century before. It is also hoped that many of the difficulties of translation have been overcome, that dim passages have been made clear, and that this first-ever translation into English xvi BOIARDO AND HIS POEM of what might be titled The Infatuation of Count Orlandowill at last allow Boiardo’s light to shine unobscured.

The Innamorato is not merely the precursor to one of the most celebrated poems in English. It is a great work in its own right, one of the supreme products of the ; yet, almost contradictorily, the poem captures the waning of the Middle Ages. It gives sophisticated form to a simpler world of knights and ladies. Even the contradictions in this strange poem are contradictory: Just as Boiardo’s imitation of popular poetry disguises his skill as a maker of verses, so his complicated episodes challenge the seemingly straightforward values of the earlier world portrayed in the poem. Allegories add dimension to the fairy-tale surface of the Innamorato, often by reversing what seems to be the poem’s message. The unity of the poem is felt rather than easily explained, as the single theme of love struggles to contain various interwoven stories, armies of characters, soaring flights of poetry, and what Croce called the primitive energy of Boiardo’s art.7 Fierce individualism battles aristocratic loyalty in Boiardo’s poem, a conflict also characteristic of Ferrara, home of the court to which Boiardo was bound. Love and enchantment lure the Innamorato’s heroes, Orlando and Ranaldo, away from the de- fense of Paris, their chief military obligation to Charlemagne. But political power ef- fectively constrained personal freedom in Ferrara, a middle-sized state in the Po ba- sin whose reach extended deep into the northern slopes of the Apennines. The Este family maintained control of the city and its surrounding territories throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Their court and bureaucracy never displayed the republican virtues sometimes found in Florence, yet all was not darkness. The Este generally supported the arts; they provided protection for one of the largest Jewish Communities in Italy, a population that swelled after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492; and they carefully watched Italy’s balance of power to prevent wars. As a producer of literary novelties for the court of his sovereign, Ercole d’Este, Boiardo demonstrated his capability by writing the most technically sophisticated sequence of short poems in the Quattrocento, his canzoniere called the Amori libri. If we ignore the counterclaims of and, perhaps, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Boiardo may be called the greatest lyric poet of the fifteenth century. But he is best known as a storyteller. His Orlando Innamorato creates a world of valor and beauty by por- traying Charlemagne’s knights on a variety of martial and amatory adventures. To encompass the story about the ardors of these champions of Christianity, Boiardo developed a plot capable of indefinite extension. He left it unfinished at his death in 1494, a poem of more than four thousand stanzas. A year later a new edition was published with Boiardo’s beginning to a third book added to the first

xvii BOIARDO AND HIS POEM two. TheInnamorato had such a high value that , the greatest poet of the next age, spent his life finishing it. There were fourteen editions within fifty years, making it a best-seller. A copy appears in ’s fictitious library. Those once famous whom rime has forgotten suffer greater and lesser degrees of misfortune. Boiardo could not foresee that changes in the would cause future audiences to lose esteem for his style. Within two generations his work ceased to be printed in its original form. Moreover, the political ruin of Italy during the years of the Counter-Reformation, some scholars say, made people unreceptive to Boiardo’s vision of life, at once comic and noble. The death of his son and heir, perhaps by poisoning, and the ensuing dispossession of Boiardo’s wife and daugh- ters by his cousin did not allow the family the means to cultivate Boiardo’s fame in later years, although publishers issued the Innamorato regularly.8 In England, Boiardo’s work did not have the good fortune to find a competent translator. While , godson to Queen Elizabeth, brilliantly rendered Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Edward Fairfax, a contemporary Renaissance Englishman, produced a classic version of Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, Boiardo’s Innamorato found no better than , a minor sonneteer, who gave up after three cantos.9

Before going into more detail about the nature of Boiardo’s literary achievement, I will try to define the essential qualities of his poetry. Boiardo projects the perennial anxieties of human beings into a fictional world of lyrical images. He summons up a verbal countryside, drawing on his own Amorum libri for winds, roses, rocky cliffs, fugitive wild creatures, wastelands, gardens, and ships of desire, to create a fairyland. The sense of joyous discovery and freedom I have in mind may be illustrated by comparison with a passage from Virgil. At the start of the seventh book of the Aeneid, refugees from the fall of Troy sail up the Tiber toward the future site of Rome. Their ship sails through trees and past shores that were domesticated in Virgil’s day, more than two thousand years ago. As Aeneas “enters, glad, the shadowed river,” Virgil merges the dense overhanging foliage on the riverbanks with the stream’s reflection.10 This Virgilian theme, the vigorous pursuit of distant desire through the world or an ambiguous mirror of the world, is one that Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Boiardo’s most obvious source for love potions and other marvels, cannot account for alone. In the third canto of Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato, Ranaldo pursues Angelica until he reaches the fountain of Merlin in Arden Wood—this is the same Forest of Arden that Ariosto later passed on to Thomas Lodge and thence to Shakespeare in . The waters of the fountain alter his quest by quenching his passion for Angelica just before her passion for him is roused by a nearby stream of opposite effect. Boiardo’s mingling of sermons and stones, his conjuring of the past that xviii BOIARDO AND HIS POEM permits Merlin’s magic and the Tristan legend to intrude on Charlemagne’s court, makes Arden Wood a Renaissance version of Virgil’s intersection of worlds, a liminal space, framing the romantic imagination, that has a valid claim on our attention today. In Boiardo’s art, the landscape fuses with Ranaldo’s emotions; the heat of his body registers the intensity of his passion: Inside the woods the ardent baron began his search and looked about. He saw a shady stand of trees encircled by a small clear stream. Enchanted by that joyous place, he entered with no hesitation and saw a fountain in its midst that human art could not have made.

This fount was formed entirely of alabaster, polished stone, and so ornately decked with gold it bathed the flowered green in light. Merlin constructed it, so that Tristan, the valiant cavalier, would drink from it and leave Isolde, the reason for his final ruin.

Unfortunate, unlucky Tristan! He never came across that fountain, although he often sought adventures and searched that country many times. The nature of this fountain was that any cavalier in love who drank from it fell out of love and hated whom he once adored.

The sun was high, the day was hot, when Prince Ranaldo, drenched in sweat, arrived along the flowering bank and beckoned by that sparkling stream he climbed down from Baiardo’s back. He freed himself of thirst and longing since the cool water that he drank thoroughly chilled his ardent heart. (I iii 32-35) xix BOIARDO AND HIS POEM

The full force—and humor—of this threshold to fairyland depends on the large literary landscape the reader has covered to reach it. Just as Aeneas’s entrance to the golden world of the Tiber is counterpointed by his previous exit from hell through the gate of false dreams, so Ranaldo’s arrival in Arden is attended by the anxiety of others who are also pursuing Angelica. In particular, Orlando worries what a man of Ranaldo’s reputation will do if he finds Angelica first, for, broods the Count, “His lechery’s a well-known fact: / She’ll never leave his hands intact!” (I ii 25). Often the fields and streams of love are contiguous to the poem’s battlefields, for the Innamorato is not just a love story but an imaginative chronicle of Christendom’s conflicts with North Africa and Asia. The wars that rack Boiardo’s fairyland add splendor, through contrast, to the meadows where lovers frolic. Not far from the battle of Albraca, Brandimart receives the favors of Fiordelisa in “the shady forest, / Spread with fresh grass and violets, / where they could take delight and share / their joy undaunted by warfare” (I xix 58). What follows is one of “Boiardo’s descrip- tions of love returned, and crowned with full fruition,” which a hundred years ago Symonds regretted could not be published in translation.11 Today the sensuousness of the forest scene seems to depend as much on the powers of the landscape as the prowess of the lovers: Six times they went back to that dance before their passion was extinguished. Then, talking softly, they began to tell of troubles, torments past. The cool glade beckoned them to rest, as a breeze rose and whispered over that meadow, breathing through the leaves that hid the lovers in the grove. (I xix 63) The poetry of the Innamorato is found in verses that imitate popular, often oral, storytellers whose techniques were familiar in the Ferrara of Boiardo’s day. In the above stanza, Boiardo’s rough line structure suits the lovers’ impetuosity. Ariosto, striving to recreate in Italian the elegance of the Latin , presented a poem with a far more polished exterior. When he reworked Boiardo’s picture, a few lines later, of the lovers’ kiss—they ought to talk “since each one’s mouth possessed two tongues” he added an image of twined ivy drawn from Horace.12 In a sense, then, Boiardo is less allusive than Ariosto but more veiled. In the sixteenth century, Teofilo Folengo said that Ariosto, who admitted that without Boiardo’s example he would not have composed on Carolingian themes, should have titled his work The Finish xx BOIARDO AND HIS POEM of the Great Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato, Composed by His Disciple Ludovico Ari- osto.13 Mimicking the form of the Innamorato and borrowing the characters Boiardo invented, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso privileges Boiardo’s text the way Virgil’s Aeneid subsumes Homer’s epics. The sequel ties up every loose end of Boiardo’s vast fab- ric, although the result is a very different work, for Ariosto felt no obligation to Boiardo’s particular and, arguably, inimitable vision. Ariosto’s popular poem became the great stylistic model and the first chivalric poem to achieve modern levels of character development and vivid detail, techniques that were inappropriate, however, for the late-Gothic edifice of seemingly random design that Boiardo intended. Although materially similar, the Innamorato and the Furioso are stylistically so individual that critics sometimes attribute to history, spe- cifically to the French invasion of Charles VIII in 1494 that shattered Boiardo’s peaceful world, what may be better accounted for as the difference between two supreme artistic temperaments. Romantic legend has it that Boiardo’s frail muse could not survive under the new dispensation and that Boiardo died of heartbreak months later, unable to complete his poem whose final stanza bewails the French invasion. Some more likely reasons that Boiardo left his poem unfinished are that he purposely designed a poem that could be continued indefinitely, that the pressures of office and changing literary tastes distracted him from his masterpiece, and that while occasionally working on his third book, he died.

Ariosto and Tasso gave romances an esteem that lasted into the nineteenth century, but it was Boiardo who brought together the elements of medieval adventure that were their raw material; they were only to refine what he had heated in his forge. The influence of Boiardo’s fantasy on literature outside Italy has naturally been indirect. No English or American translation has existed to help the poem across cultural boundaries. Despite an affinity for Boiardo’s eclectic selection of sources and themes, Edmund Spenser modeled his monument to Queen Elizabeth on the Furioso, not the Innamorato. Yet Spenser and Boiardo inherit the same romance tradition and often elaborate on it in similar ways. Both poets share a nostalgic but unsentimental sympathy for the customs of chivalry, and they create marvels without mocking them. Both ransack medieval and classical texts, particularly Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Medieval romances and mythographic encyclopedias gave Boiardo an allegorical mode that prefigured Spenser’s own combination of romance themes and epic seriousness. Like Boiardo, Spenser creates an extended allegory of Occasion, whom Guyon, like Orlando, must seize by the forelock in the traditional manner; and in both cases the heroes are beaten for failing to do so (FQ 2.4.4-11; OI II viii 43-63, ix 1-20). Subsequently, Guyon descends into Mammon’s cave, a

xxi BOIARDO AND HIS POEM place like the underworld of Boiardo’s Fata Morgana, who is mistress of the world’s precious metals; here, Guyon’s counterpart in the Innamorato is Ranaldo, who participates in an underworld allegory of avarice when a magic wind prevents him from stealing a golden chair (FQ 2.7.1-66; 0I II ix 31-40).14 A few years after Spenser, at the time of Cervantes, Boiardo’s conventions were still accessible. Don Quixote refers to an event in the Innamorato, Brunello’s theft of Sacripante’s horse, although the details correspond to Ariosto’s recapitulation of the episode.15 Cervantes praises ‘’the famous Mateo Boiardo” when a barber and village priest spare a copy of the Innamorato from the flames in which they burn the books responsible for Quixote’s madness. As they do so, they announce the Innamorato’s superiority to stories about “Reynald of Montalban” from which Boiardo drew.16 Milton, too, had a large sympathy for Boiardo’s fantasy. A reference to the In- namorato, similar to one in Don Quixote,17 occurs in Paradise Regained (1672), when Milton compares Satan’s vision of the Parthians at war to Boiardo’s battle of Albraca, where Orlando defends Angelica against Agricane’s hordes:

Such forces met not, nor so wide a camp When with all his Northern powers Besieg’d , as Romances tell, The City ofGallaphrone, from thence to win The fairest of her Sex,Angelica, His daughter, sought by many Prowest Knights, Both Paynim, and the Peers of Charlemagne. Such and so numerous was their Chivalry. (3.337-44) Milton’s use of an invented war in a sacred poem is somewhat troubling, sug- gesting as it might that Milton has not properly gauged the delicacy of Boiardo’s blend of history and fiction. Yet the disparity seems not unintentional, for Milton’s sublime rhetoric often admits a comic impulse. So, for example, in when Sin separates Satan from her latest lover, Death, thus letting Satan proceed to the Garden of Eden, Milton is consciously or not imitating Boiardo, who has Angelica rescue Ranaldo by sending Orlando to Falerina’s Garden (PL 2.726; OI 1 xxviii 28). By the eighteenth century, literary expectations had been so radically altered that readers, though attracted to the Innamorato’s fantasy, were blind to the overall form of the poem. The newly emerging novel offered realistic characters, settings, and chronologies. A few years after his picaresque novel Gil Blas (1715) overwhelmed Paris, Alain René Lesage produced a French version of Boiardo’s story that cuts short xxii BOIARDO AND HIS POEM the opening, blandly beginning: “Le roi Gradasso étoit le plus vaillant Prince de son siècle. Il est dit de lui dans l’Histoire qu’il portoit un coeur de Dragon dans un corps de géant.”18 This translation brings Gradasso all the way to Spain before turning to Charlemagne’s Pentecost feast, straightening out events Boiardo deliberately inter- laced. The alteration seems, at the least, misguided. It is not surprising that the clearest example of Boiardo’s influence on English letters occurs during the Romantic period. Thomas Love Peacock, Shelley’s friend and the executor of his estate, read Italian poetry avidly. The heroine ofGryll Grange, Peacock’s final novel, borrows her name from the Innamorato’s famous figure of For- tune, who lures Orlando through her underworld in the allegorical center of the poem. This persona, a Celtic goddess in her earliest literary appearances, had been discovered by Boiardo in Arthurian romances, particularly the Lancelot or the prose Tristan (thirteenth century), where she sometimes dwells in the forests of North Wales (where Peacock found his own wife) or under a lake, brooding, jealous of Queen Guenevere, nursing her love for Sir Lancelot. In Le Morte Darthur (1485), Thomas Malory calls her . Boiardo used the Italian form, fata Mor- gana. By giving the name Morgana to the heroine whose search for her ideal man forms the action of his novel, Peacock highlighted what has been through the cen- turies Boiardo’s chief claim to fame over Ariosto: that the Innamorato brought love, formerly associated only with stories about King Arthur, to Charlemagne’s court of crusaders. Boiardo emphasizes his own contribution to literary history in a lyric proem to the eighteenth canto of Book II:

There was a time Great Britain was illustrious in arms and love; her name is celebrated still. The glory of King Arthur stems from when the good knights in his realm displayed their worth in many battles and sought adventure with their ladies. Her fame has lasted to our day.

Later, King Charles held court in France; his court was no equivalent, though it was sturdy, confident, and had Ranaldo and the Count. Because it closed its gates to Love and only followed holy wars, it could not boast the worth, the fame the former showed, the first I named. xxiii BOIARDO AND HIS POEM

Ariosto, indeed, only develops what Boiardo’s genius first envisaged, the fun of making Orlando a fool for love. The Italian scholar Pio Rajna gave Boiardo credit for the insight that made him turn the militant Orlando into a timid, credulous, easily embarrassed, quietly bungling lover. Boiardo’s talent, Rajna said, lay in creat- ing situations to throw into comic relief his figures invented or borrowed from other romances. Although in several earlier stories Charlemagne’s knights had pursued princesses through the East, Boiardo was the first to see the potential for humor and humanization in the deep discrepancy between the Arthurian themes of love and magic and the stolid righteousness of traditional Carolingian characters. His French knights thus exercise a new degree of courtesy, based on the examples of Tristan and Lancelot, precisely because Boiardo set out to tell more than a pleasing love story. Boiardo stressed the ethical dimensions of , alternately allowing the themes of friendship, avarice, courtesy, loyalty, boldness, and prudence to surface in the various episodes of a poem that creates a complex tapestry of mean- ing.19 Several political strands run less conspicuously through the poem. In praising Arthur over Charlemagne, as in praising his patron, Duke Ercole d’Este, for follow- ing peace not war (II xxi 59), Boiardo turns a harder eye on military conflict than might be expected of a poet who spends so much time describing sword strokes and the tidal movements of armies on a battlefield. Boiardo here unexpectedly antici- pates the critique of militarism offered by the romances of some English Romantic poets. Peacock’s novel also offers an informed appreciation of Boiardo’s language, the right of pronouncement being given to his amorous heroine, Morgana Gryll. When Morgana’s suitor, a man named Algernon Falconer, ventures to observe to Morgana that he has noticed she reads Boiardo’s old text, not Berni’s version (called the Ri- facimento), he is aware that the original text has disappeared from circulation. In the sixteenth century Boiardo’s language, the dialect of (referred to as the koinè padana by Italian scholars), fell out of literary favor. One important cause for the change in fashion was that Ariosto made his Furioso conform to the usage sanc- tioned by the great fourteenth-century Tuscans—Dante, , and Boccaccio. As a result, a poet of burlesque named , imitating Ariosto’s example, corrected and rewrote almost every line of the Innamorato. Berni turned Boiardo’s Emilian into standard Florentine (Ranaldo becomes Rinaldo, for example). He ex- panded prologues, interspersed stanzas dedicated to his own acquaintances, and eliminated some of Boiardo’s vigorous figures of speech. He did his work around 1530, between the second and final versions of the Furioso, but his version was not published until 1541-42.20 Milton cites Berni in his Commonplace Book; otherwise, this altered Innamorato, not reprinted at all between 1545 and 1725, achieved pop- xxiv BOIARDO AND HIS POEM ularity only in the eighteenth century, when it became the Innamorato of choice.21 , at the urging of Sir , issued an English version.22 Boiardo’s original language at last became generally available when , director of the British Museum, produced a text based on the earliest printed edi- tions. His volumes (1830-35) include a preface and notes in English. The views of Morgana on the comparative merits of the two versions were meant to make her attractive to Falconer, but a sympathetic modern reader of the Innam- orato will find in them grounds of conviction as well. The original is “more simple, and more in earnest” than Berni’s version, Morgana tells her young swain. “Even the greater antiquity of style has its peculiar appropriateness to the subject. And Bojardo seems to have more faith in his narrative than Berni. I go on with him with ready credulity, where Berni’s pleasantry interposes a doubt.”23 Great art is never simple, of course. What Morgana means is that the Innamorato manages to be complex without appearing so. She has seen something we need to see again today, if Boiardo’s achievement is to be recovered for English readers: the poem’s surface is remarkably smooth despite the sheer inventiveness of Boiardo’s story. Ariosto’s example has dazzled our eyes, and the changes in the Italian language that prompted Berni’s work have obscured for half a millennium a poem that was bright enough in its own day. Significantly, Ariosto was not the only author so spellbound by the flowers Boiar- do displayed (“My garden has variety: / I’ve planted it with love and war” [OI III v 2]) that he felt compelled to continue a tale which even after 35,440 lines is left half- told. The year following Boiardo’s death, his widow released Book III—eight cantos and part of a ninth—which shows some structural repetition (a common feature of romance) but no decline in Boiardo’s powers. Within eleven years a Venetian named Nicolò degli Agostini had extended the poem through a fourth book. A little-known fifth book by Raphael da Verona appeared before Agostini added his own fifth book and a sixth.24 Boiardo’s poem was so popular that the presses of repeatedly re- issued the poem in its first fifty years, usually with Agostini’s continuation adding its bulk to the story Ariosto was more successfully to prolong.25 In 1545 a new edition was prepared by Ludovico Domenichi. This text was republished at least fourteen times before 1588, and a copy in the Bancroft Library is marked by the name of Mary Sidney, countess of Pembroke.26 Domenichi altered the opening stanzas and language of canto i but, unlike Berni, made few significant changes in the rest of the poem. His edition was not a rifacimento but a critical work that reflected the edito- rial standards of the day.27 Robert Tofte added to Domenichi’s distorted prologue when he translated the first three cantos into English verse.

xxv BOIARDO AND HIS POEM

Since the Renaissance the difficulties posed by Boiardo’s style and his deploy- ment of romance conventions have reduced the Innamorato to near invisibility for readers of English. Translators and readers have found the Innamorato’s text not so much corrupt as puzzling, the main reason doubtless being that readers whose liter- ary tastes have been formed not by Homer but by modern novels find its episodic structure uncongenial and are blind to the artistry of its battles. Translations that try to straighten out Boiardo’s interlaced story, like that of Lesage or a rendering of the first seven cantos called The Expedition of Gradasso,28 indicate a failure to respond to the intricacies of Boiardo’s literary conception. Jacob Burckhardt reflected on what is today called the alterity, the fundamental strangeness and unreadability, of the Italian romances, warning that ‘’without the power of entering to some degree into Italian sentiment, it is impossible to appreciate the characteristic excellence of these poems, and many distinguished men declare they can make nothing of them.’’29 While Pio Rajna declared that Boiardo’s humor is as obvious as the sun at noon. A. Bartlett Giamatti speaks of the essential seriousness of Boiardo’s poetry. The contra- diction is typical of the poem.30 And here we encounter another reason for Boiardo’s modern invisibility: To un- derstand the Innamorato involves being acquainted with a body of romance that, if not altogether lost, has at least been under attack since the Reformation, when, for example, William Tyndale railed against “fables of love and wantonness, and of ribaldry,” and Roger Ascham condemned “papist” Italian books and books of chiv- alry, including Malory’s Morte Darthur, ‘’the whole pleasure of which book standeth in two special points, in open manslaughter and bold bawdry.’’31 Not only does Boiardo’s work represent an extinct genre dependent on battles and tournaments, but many of Boiardo’s sources belong to a Continental tradition that has no Eng- lish equivalent. Someone who has read Malory will notice Arthurian elements in the Innamorato—the Round Table, Morgana’s golden hind—but many Carolingian themes and characters that derive from La Chanson de Roland, the medieval French epic that tells the story of the death of Roland (Orlando) at , are less familiar to English readers than they were to Cervantes’s village priest and barber. Boiardo created his poem out of a dense intertextuality. He was a wide reader of romances, much more so than Ariosto or Spenser. Boiardo wrote before the French invasion by Charles VIII in 1494, the entrance of foreign armies into Italy that in part helps to explain the modern realism of the Furioso’s depiction of warfare. Yet the great themes of the Innamorato—nobility, worth, and courtesy—and its almost archaic duels on horseback do not merely incorporate the doomed aristocratic code of the Este court (a court often assumed, wrongly, to be less worthy of admiration than the society of republican Florence), xxvi BOIARDO AND HIS POEM but create intentional thematic counterpoints within a romance that is intermit- tently allegorical. The poem’s allegory has been as inaccessible as the poem itself not only because Ariosto, living in a new era, did little to carry on that element of Boiardo’s meaning but also because the Innamorato’s allegorical episodes (most of which involve the poem’s enchantresses) are surrounded, if not obscured, by many cantos of tournament and war. A barrage of strange names, familiar to Boiardo’s audience, threatens to keep modern readers fit and few. This, especially, is the dif- ficulty I should like to resolve in the remaining pages of this introductory essay. The metrical road from Arden Wood to Albraca is long and runs through a landscape of unfamiliar spellings and spells, allegoric and allegria. What follows immediately is a biographical sketch of Boiardo; thereafter, by treating the opening cantos in some detail, particularly the tournament in canto ii that modern readers find most dif- ficult to appreciate, I shall attempt to clear a path to the depths of the poem. Notes 1 The Allegory of Love(London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 298. 2 Henry L. Snuggs, ed. and trans., Giraldi Cinthio on Romances: Being a Translation of the “Discorso intorno al comporre dei romanzi,” with Introduction and Notes (Lexington, University of Kentucky Press, 1968), xiv. Boiardo has traditionally received praised for his invention: “Count Matheo Maria Boiardo and our Ariosto were very prudent and farsee- ing. The former was a very pleasing and noble inventor. . . . Although those who wrote before them may have shown some talent and dealt with many similar matters, as can be seen by anyone who has the leisure to read them, nevertheless all of them have written inat- tentively of their materials. . . . In the writing of Romances, the poet’s first consideration, then, is the subject, which is to be drawn from his invention. Because heroic poetry is none other than imitation of illustrious actions, the subject of such compositions will be one or more illustrious actions of one or more noble and excellent men” (Snuggs, 10; cf. Giovambattista Giraldi Cintio, De’ romanzi, delle comedie e delle tragedie [Milan: G. Daelli, 1864], 14-15). 3 Allegory of Love, 304 4 C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). First he refers to Boiardo’s Morgana (“Morgan le Fay in Malory has been humanised; her Italian equivalent Fata Morgana is a full fairy . . . vital, energetic, wilful, passionate” [130, 132]); then he remembers Febosilla (“the fata in Boiardo who explains that she, like all her kind, cannot die till Doomsday comes” [134]). 5 Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 178. 6 From Sorrento, near the house where Tasso was born, Mary Shelley wrote, “Call to mind those stanzas of Tasso, those passages of Berni arid Ariosto, which have most vividly transported you into gardens of delight, and in them you will find the best description of

xxvii BOIARDO AND HIS POEM the charms of this spot,” in Rambles in and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843, vol. 2 (London: Edward Moxon, 1844), 262. She had in mind Berni’s version of Boiardo’s Innamorato. Leigh Hunt summarized Boiardo’s poem in Stories from the Italian Poets: with Lives of the Writers (London: Chapman and Hall, 1846), also published as The Italian Poets Translated into English Prose: Containing a Summary in Prose of the Poems of Dante, Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso (New York: Derby, 1861), 231-95. Violet Paget, who published under the name Vernon Lee, surveyed the literary history of romance in the chapter ‘’The School of Boiardo,” in Euphorion, vol. 2 (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884), 49-119. John Addington Symonds wrote a lively appreciation of Boiardo in , vol. 1 of The Renaissance in Italy (1881, rpt., New York: Scribner’s, 1904), 399-431. 7 Benedetto Croce, Ariosto. Shakespeare, and Corneille (New York: Holt, 1920), 106. 8 A line-for-line Spanish translation (with some additions of moralizing stanzas at the beginnings of cantos) was made by Francisco Garrido de Villena, Los Tres Libros de Mattheo Maria Boyardo, Conde de Scandiano, Ilamados Orlando Enamorado, traduzidos en castellano (Valencis, 1555; rpt., Alcalá, 1577, and Toledo, 1581). Cervantes preferred the original (Don Quixote, I. 6). 9 “Orlando Innamorato”: The three first Bookes of that famous Noble Gentleman and learned Poet, Mathew Maria Boiardo Earle of Scandiano in Lombardie. Done into English Heroicall Verse, By R. T. Gentleman (London: Valentine Sims, 1598). 10 Allen Mandelbaum, trans., The Aeneid of Virgil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 172 (7.36). 11 Italian Literature, 413. 12 Non cosi strettamente edera preme pianta over intorno abbarbicata s’abbia, come si strigon li dui amanti insieme, cogliendo de lo spirto in su le labbia suave fior, qual non produce seme indo o sabeo ne l’odorata sabbia. Del gran placer ch’avean, lor dicer tocca che spesso avean più d’una lingua in bocca. (0F 7.29) Never did ivy press or cling so close, / Rooted beside the plant which it embraced, / As now in love each to the other does; / And on their lips a sweeter flower they taste / Than Ind or Araby e’er knew, or those / Which on the desert air their perfume waste. / To speak of all their bliss to them belongs, / Who more than once in one mouth had two tongues. (Barbara Reynolds, trans., 2 vols. [Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975], I:249)

Cf. “artius atque hedera procera adstringitur ilex / lentis adhaerens bracchiis” (Epode 15.5-6, in Horatius , ed. F. Klinger [Leipzig: Teubner, 1970], 154). xxviii BOIARDO AND HIS POEM

13 Merlin Cocai [Teofilo Folengo], Le Maccheronee, ed. Alessandro Luzio (Bari: Laterza, 1927), 200: “Ed invero meritevolmente poteva intitolare il suo Furioso e chiamarlo La Fine de l’Orlando innamorato del gran Boiardo, composto pel suo discepolo messer Lodovico Ariosto.” 14 I discuss Ranaldo’s theft in “Angelica and the Fata Morgana: Boiardo’s Allegory of Love,” Modern Language Notes 96 (1981): 12-22, which is also appended to the introduc- tion in this Parlor Press edition. 15 0I II v 40; OF 27.84: DQ 2.4. 16 DQ 1.6. Quotations from The Adventures of Don Quixote, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1950),59. 17 “‘You are wrong about that,’ said Don Quixote, for we shall not be two hours at these cross-roads before we see more armed men than came to the siege of Albraca to carry off the fair Angelica’” (DQ I.10; trans. Cohen, 82). Both authors were impressed by the size of Agricane’s armies. 18 Nouvelle Traduction de Roland l’amoureux Matheo Maria Boyardo, conte di Scandiano (Paris: Ribou, 1717); reprinted several times. Jacques Vincent published a French transla- tion of all three books in the sixteenth century, Le premier livre de Roland l’amoureux, mis en italien par le seigneur Mathieu Marie , comte de Scandian, et traduit en françoys, par Maistre Jaques Vincent Du Crest Arnaud en Dauphiné, secrétaire de Monsieur l’évêque du Puy (Paris: Vivant Gaultherot, 1549-50). It was reissued in the early seventeenth century; see Catalogue general des livres imprimés de la Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1903), 14:1143-44. Lesage’s attacks, in his preface, on a translation by François de Rosset, Roland l’amoureux . . . traduit fidèlement de nouveau (Paris: R. Fouet, 1619), did not prevent new editions of this earlier version from appearing in 1747, 1769, and 1793. 19 Pio Rajna, Le fonti dell’ “Orlando furioso,” rev. ed. (Florence: Sansoni, 1900), 22- 37. 20 For the problems of dating the publication of Berni’s work, see Elissa Weaver, “The Spurious Text of Francesco Berni’s Rifacimento of Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato,” Modern Philology 75 (1977): 111-31. 21 An interesting exception to contemporary preference for Berni is the subscription for and subsequent printing, in Dublin, of “Orlando Innamorato” del S. Matteo Maria Boiardo, Conte di Scandiano. Riformato da M. Lodovico Domenichi, 3 vols. (Dublin: Gioseppe Hill, 1784). A copy of the 30 March 1776 proposal for printing the poem of “the celebrated Matteo Maria Bojardo, Count of Scandiano,” is in the library of Trinity College, Dublin (R. K. 56. No. 2): The Provost of the “University of Dublin,” warmed by “the taste for Italian Literature which now prevails,” convinced that Berni’s rifacimento is “not worthy to supersede Bojardo,” and distressed by the difficulty of finding copies of a work out of print for “these two hundred Years,” offers an additional patriotic motive, “that this is the first Attempt that ever has been made in the Kingdom to publish an Author in the Italian Language.”

xxix BOIARDO AND HIS POEM

22 The Orlando Innamorato. Translated into prose from the Italian by F. Berni, and in- terspersed with extracts in the same stanza as the original by William Stewart Rose (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1823). 23 Peacock, Gryll Grange (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 205-6. 24 Nicolò degli Agostini, El fine de tutti gli libri de lo innamoramento de Orlando (Venice: Giorgio de’ Rusconi, 1505); Il Quinto Libro dello inamoramento de Orlando (Venice Giorgio de’ Rusconi, 1514); Ultimo e fine de tutti li libri de orlando innamorato (Venice: Nicolò Zoppino e Vincenzo di Paolo, 1520-21). Raffaele Valcieco, El Quinto libro e Fine de tutti li libri de lo Innamoramento de Orlando (Venice: Giorgio de’ Rusconi per Nicolò Zoppino e Vincenzo di Paolo, 1514). Dates and publishers have been checked against Neil Harris, “L’avventura edi- toriale dell’Orlando Innamorato,” in I libri di “Orlando innamorato” (Ferrara: Panini, 1987), 35-103. Harris identifies Raphael de Verona as “Raffaele Valcieco” and has brought to light yet another continuation, Pierfrancesco de’ Conti’s El sexton libro del innamoramento d’Orlando . . . intitulato il Rugino (Perugia: Bianchino dal Leone, 1514-18?) reprinted in 1518 and 1525. 25 Agostini’s work is thus fairly common; for example, Matteo Maria Boiardo, Orlando Innamorato (Venice: Aurelio Pincio, 1532) or another edition (Venice: Girolamo Scotto, 1548). 26 Orlando Innamorato . . . nuovamente riformato per M. Lodovico Domenichi (Venice: Girolamo Scotto, 1545). 27 Carlo Dionisotti, “Fortuna e sfortuna del Boiardo nel Cinquecento,” in Giuseppe Anceschi, ed., Il Boiardo e la critica contemporanea: Atti del convegno di studi su Matteo Maria Boiardo, Scandiano—Reggio Emilia, 25-27 Aprile 1969 (Florence: Olschki, 1970): 221-41. 28 The Expedition of Gradasso; a metrical romance. Selected from the Orlando Innamorato . . . Translated by the author of “Charles Townley” (Dublin: Graisberry & Campbell, 1812). 29 The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1929; rpt., New York: Harper, 1975), 318. 30 Giamatti, introduction to Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, ed. Stewart A. Baker and A. Bartlett Giamatti (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), xxx. Rajna, Fonti 27. Peter V. Marinelli, Ariosto and Boiardo (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), catches the comic element of “the jesting, endearingly chaotic Innamorato” (5) as well as the poem’s bal- ance: “Boiardo hovers constantly between the popular and the aristocratic, the grotesque and the idealistic, the comic-satiric and the abundantly lyrical, between knockabout Carolingian and magical Arthurian” (17-18). 31 Ascham, The Schoolmaster (1570), excerpted in The Renaissance in England, ed. Hyder Rollins and Herschel Baker (Lexington: Heath, 1954), 833. For Tyndale, see The Obedience of a Christian Man in William Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of The Holy Scriptures, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1848), 263, cited by Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 112. 

xxx CHRONOLOGY OF MATTEO MARIA BOIARDO

1441 Born, probably in May, in the castle of Scandiano, the grandson of Feltrino Boiardo and first son of Giovanni Boiardo and Lucia Strozzi (sister of the poet ); the family moves to Ferrara. 1450 (October) Leonello d’Este dies and is succeeded by his brother Borso. 1451 Giovanni Boiardo dies in July, and his widow and son return to live with the ageing Feltrino in Scandiano. 1453 Feltrino Boiardo hosts Duke Borso d’Este and the Duke’s brothers, Sigismondo and Ercole, at the castle of Scandiano. 1456 Feltrino dies, leaving as heirs his son Giulio Ascanio and Matteo Maria. 1460 Giulio Ascanio dies; the poet and his cousin share their patrimony until 1474. 1461 (October) Boiardo moves to Ferrara to live. 1462 (February) Boiardo returns to Scandiano, where he resides with his Aunt Taddeo de’ Pii (of Carpi) and her sons, Giovanni and Giulio. (December) Borso appoints Sigismondo governor of Reggio and Ercole governor of . 1463–4 Boiardo composes the Carmina de laudibus Estensium (Poems in Praise of the Este) and the Pastoralia (Pastoral Songs). 1465 Court documents indicate Boiardo’s presence in Reggio with eight horses for the festivities in honor of Duke Borso. 1467 Probably in this year, but before 1471, Boiardo translates, under the title of Vite degli eccellenti capitani, portions of De viris illustribus of and ’s Ciropedia (The Education of Cyrus) for Ercole d’Este, who is recovering from a bullet wound received at the Battle of Molinella in June. 1469 (January) Boiardo spends a week in Ferrara as the guest of Duke Borso during an entertainment for the Emperor Frederick III. Probably in April, Boiardo meets Antonia Caprara at Sigismondo’s court in Reggio and later dedicates to her his

xxxi CHRONOLOGY

sequence of 180 lyrics in three books titled Amorum libri, first published as Sonnetti e Canzone (Songs and Sonnets) in 1499 1471 (March) Borso dies and is succeeded by his brother Ercole. 1473 (April) Boiardo joins a procession that travels to Naples to accompany Eleanora of Aragon back to Ferrara to marry Duke Ercole. 1474 Boiardo survives an attempted poisoning, probably instigated by his Aunt Taddea. He and his cousin Giovanni divide their inheritance; Giovanni chooses Arceto, Casalgrande, Dinazzano with Salvaterra, and Montebabbio; the poet’s half contains Scandiano, Gesso, and Torricella. 1476 (January) Boiardo keeps a room in the ducal palace in Ferrara. In September he composes his Epigrammata celebrating Ercole’s victory over his nephew Nicolò, Leonello’s son, during an attempted coup. 1478 While Ercole leads the league of Florence, Venice, and Milan against Pope Sixtus IV and the king of Naples, Boiardo returns to Scandiano but maintains his court stipend. 1479 Boiardo marries Taddea dei Gonzaga and works on his Orlando Innamorato in Scandiano. 1480 (July) Ercole names Boiardo captain and then governor of Modena. 1482 (November) Boiardo composes the fourth of his Ecloghi volgari after Nicolò da Correggio is captured by the Venetians during the war of Ferrara against Rome and Venice. 1483 (January) Boiardo leaves Modena; by February the Orlando Innamorato has been printed by Pietro Giovanni da San Lorenzo, a citizen of Modena. 1485 Boiardo accompanies Ercole to Venice. 1487 (January) Boiardo is named captain of Reggio, the office he holds until his death. TheOrlando Innamorato is reprinted in Venice. 1491 Boiardo composes Il Timone (Timon of Athens), based ultimately on Lucian’s story, for the marriage of Alfonso, Ercole’s eldest son, and Anna Sforza. The play is published in 1500. 1494 (9 September) Charles VIII, K ing of France, invades Italy. (19 December) Boiardo dies in Reggio and is buried the following evening in Scandiano.

xxxii THE MAIN CITIES OF NORTHERN AND CENTRAL ITALY

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