Genealogies of Fiction: Women Warriors and the Dynastic Imagination in the Orlando Furioso by Eleonora Stoppino (review)

Genealogies of Fiction is an elegantly argued and meticulously researched study. Enabling its many insights are two features of the author’s orientation: as a scholar of both medieval and Renaissance literature, she recognizes neither period as superior to the other; and she ardently embraces the richness of popular culture, both medieval and early modern. These attitudes fuel a fresh and insightful reading of the book’s primary focus, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1532). Illustrating how tightly chivalric culture, the early modern dynastic system, and gender relations were intertwined in the court of Ariosto’s patrons, the Este of Ferrara, Genealogies revises both literary and dynastic histories, employing the concept of genealogy as “an interpretive tool, a dimension of history, and a defining feature of cultural production” (2).

The Furioso’s classicism is well known, but it constitutes only a fraction of the poem’s literary heritage. Genealogies addresses what has been missed in the critical emphasis on Ariosto’s humanism and the disavowal of his enormous debt to medieval, often popular and anonymous sources. Chapter one establishes the book’s methodology by surveying a range of earlier texts that, like Ariosto’s, feature a woman warrior who will marry only a man who can defeat her in a duel. Stoppino observes that this figure recurs in dozens of medieval chivalric tales that were unquestionably familiar to Ariosto’s contemporaries. Comparing their exploits, she identifies these characters as generic sites of anxiety about exogamic marriage. Marriage outside the local group was a practical necessity in medieval societies but also a risk. The fact that, in Bradamante, Ariosto posits one of these dueling women as not only an ancestor but the conscious and chosen founder of his patrons’ dynasty is one of the most intriguing features of the Furioso and a topic of Stoppino’s sustained attention.

Chapter two relates the chivalric women warriors to the classical Amazons, arguing that the revival of Amazonian imagery in Ercole d’Este’s Ferrara marked a society obsessed with fears of illegitimacy (59). As single-sex communities where men served only instrumentally, the Amazons asserted total control over reproduction and patent disregard for paternal lineage. Stoppino argues that in dynastic families like the Este, female warrior characters were objects of a fascination fed by both fear and hope, for just as the Este were moving to expunge illegitimate offspring from the hereditary axis (4), they were also affording greater power and prestige to foreign wives who could guarantee (or threaten) the legitimate familial line.

Chapter three, on the “paradox of Helen,” examines moments in epic texts when women are torn between loyalty to homeland and to their new communities. Here Stoppino considers Ariosto’s Lidia (OF XXXIV), who is damned to hell for ingratitude to a prospective husband. Only by referring to his medieval sources, she argues, may we see how through Lidia’s story Ariosto questions the possibility of female agency in the contemporary political system. Acknowledging Dante, Boccaccio, and Ovid as influences, Stoppino explores another close relation, the Cantare di Febus, which revolves around apprehensions regarding the actions of a foreign bride. She then loops back to connect Lidia to Vergil’s Lavinia, stressing the “superimposed memories of [these] different textual models” (106). Lidia thus stands as an especially complex literary creation: the product of Ariosto’s “‘medieval’ reading” of classical sources (89) and an argument for “horizontal” genealogies rather than vertical lines of textual descent for the Orlando furioso itself (90).

Chapter four turns to four episodes in the Furioso where Bradamante receives prophetic revelations about her progeny and sees the Estes’ future depicted in frescoes and tapestries. This knowledge is delivered in the first two instances not by the magician Merlin but by his associate, the sorceress Melissa; in the fourth case it comes via Melissa from the ancient Cassandra, speaker of prophecies no one believes. Thus for the first time in...