The World Beyond Europe in the Romance Epics of Boiardo and Ariosto

This study offers a sustained examination of the presentation of eastern Asia, the Middle East, and northern Africa in two of the most important chivalric epics of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Matteo Maria Boiardos Orlando Innamorato (1495) and Ludovico Ariostos Orlando Furioso (1516). Comparing the narratological strategies used to depict non-European characters in these stories, Jo Ann Cavallo argues that Boiardos cosmopolitan vision of humankind increasingly became replaced by Ariostos crusading ideology, which emphasized a binary opposition between Christians and Saracens.

Cavallo addresses the poems mixing of imaginary sites and the geographical reality of a rapidly expanding globe, contextualizing them against current events and concerns, as well as ancient, medieval, and Renaissance texts influential at the time. As the prize committee for the Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies noted: This articulate, engaging, and well-documented study represents an important work of scholarship in its cross-cultural considerations of Italian Renaissance epic poetry.