World Beyond Europe Romance Epics Boiar
Jo Ann Cavallo
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 Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (1495) and Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516). Comparing the narratological strategies used to depict non-European characters in these stories, Jo Ann Cavallo argues that Boiardo’s cosmopolitan vision of humankind increasingly became replaced by Ariosto’s 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.”
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About Jo Ann Cavallo
Reviews for World Beyond Europe Romance Epics Boiar
Andrea Rizzi
Parergon vol 32:01:2015
‘This is an excellent study with well-crafted narratives, replete with insights and detailed analysis… This book should appeal not only to Italianists but also to scholars interested in the debate on late medieval and early modern cultural encounters.’
Giorgos Plakotos
Sixteenth Century Journal vol 46:03:2015
‘The World beyond Europe invites scholars of Italian literature to expand our spatial and cultural horizons by offering a model of original thinking and syncretic knowledge.’
Maria Galli Stampino
Italica vol 92:04:2015
‘Cavallo provides a detailed and fascinating account of how a non-Christian space was represented both in the romance epic tradition and more generally in early modern Italian culture.’
Juliann Vitullo
Annali D’Italianistica vol 35:2016
‘This engagingly written book is indispensable not only for Italianists but for students and scholars of romance and epic and any other literature of the European West.’
Goran Stanivukovic
Renaissance & Reformation, vol 40:01:2017