Ariosto’s Dialogue with Authority in the Erbolato

This essay examines how Ariosto used the Erbolato, a work in Italian he probably wrote between 1530 and 1533, to defend his youthful decision to turn away from the philological world of his humanist contemporaries with its focus on scholarship and the composition of verse in Latin in order to pursue a different kind of learning better expressed in the vernacular. In the process of making this defense, he parodies humanism in general, Neoplatonic philosophy in particular, with a nod to the growing interest in some circles of Ferrarese culture to challenge the Church’s authority, doctrinal and political.