Genealogies of Fiction: Women Warriors and the Medieval Imagination in the "Orlando furioso"

Introduction

Introduction Delle idee, non ho paura; bensì, la dove si tratta di scienza, ho paura di ciò che senza essere idea se ne dà l’aria; ho paura delle concezioni subiettive; ho paura di quel fenomeno per cui nelle nubi ci accade di veder draghi, giganti, eserciti, castelli, che, vissuti un momento nella nostra fantasia, bentosto si trasformano e si dissolvono. [Ideas I do not fear; rather, when it comes to science, I fear what pretends to be an idea; I fear subjective conceptions; I fear the phenomenon that makes us see dragons, giants, armies, castles in the clouds—all things that, having lived for a moment in our fantasy, soon change and disappear.] —pio r ajna When Ludovico Ariosto wrote the Orlando furioso, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the northern Italian court of Ferrara was a vital center of humanistic and chivalric culture, and its lords, the Este, were enjoying unprecedented political prestige. In the city that had nurtured learned humanists such as Guarino da Verona and Tito Vespasiano Strozzi, Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Inamoramento de Orlando had established a new point of reference for chivalric poetry. At the same time, three important marriages—that of Ercole d’Este to Eleonora d’Aragona (1473), of Isabella d’Este to the Marquis of Mantua Francesco Gonzaga (1490), and of Alfonso d’Este to Lucrezia Borgia (1501)—were both a symptom and the cause of the rise of this small northern court on the political scene of Italy. These marriages also marked a new trend in the court’s history. For the first time, prestige and power were concentrated in the hands of the wives: women were acquiring a space within the dynastic structure of power. These women relied on narratives of legitimation specifically tied to the culture of Ferrara in order to acquire and maintain Introduction 2 power. On the political front, after centuries of illegitimate Este rule, with Ercole d’Este the family started to focus its attention on legitimacy, and therefore on women’s ability to either preserve or destroy it. The extreme visibility of figures such as Eleonora, Isabella, and Lucrezia both resulted from and perpetuated the Este concentration on female dynastic power. Such power was already present, in the form of chivalric narrations, in the texts that the court (and especially Isabella d’Este) avidly consumed. These readings were not just the lofty poems by Boiardo and Strozzi but also popular narratives of giantesses and battles, and serial adventures of Saracen princesses and their conversions. These were the stories that gave the court—and Ariosto—images of women in power. Still, scholars have not established a connection among chivalric culture, the dynastic system, and gender relations in the analysis of the Renaissance chivalric epic in general and Ariosto’s Orlando furioso in particular. Ariosto’s brilliant adaptation of medieval romance, even if recognized and celebrated , is often difficult to follow, since the chivalric material he refers to is less well known than are his classical sources; with few exceptions, critics still dismiss the dynastic elements in the Furioso as empty praise; finally, the discussion of gender and women’s position in the poem has been in most cases relegated to a specific debate over Ariosto’s real or supposed feminism. The purpose of this book is to demonstrate the intrinsic connections among these three apparently distinct systems— chivalric culture, the dynastic system, and gender relations— and to define them as instances of genealogy. Genealogy does not exist as a single monolithic process, either as a historical phenomenon or as an explanatory tool. Genealogies of Fiction explores the intersection of different yet related genealogical systems: intertextuality, political dynasty, and gender (intended as the construction of gender distinctions). The book addresses genealogy as an interpretive tool, as a dimension of history, and as a defining feature of cultural production, thus Introduction 3 casting new light on a crucial aspect of medieval and early modern studies. Genealogical thinking is deeply embedded in sixteenth-century Ferrarese culture and in Ariosto’s work. Boccaccio’s Genealogie deorum gentilium, a text that was very dear to the Italian Renaissance, expresses this fascination with genealogical trees and their interpretation as forms of writing: In the beginning of each book I decided to have a tree, which would have the father of the dynasty at its root, and in its branches the entire progeny, according to the order of its...