Weaving the Crusades: Bodies of Interlace in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata

This essay attempts to complicate our understanding of Tasso’s Ariostan inheritance by advocating that interlace (the privileged structuring principle of romance, which reaches its apogee in Orlando furioso) informs Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. Through an examination of Erminia and her appropriation of the narrator’s power in cantos 6 and 7, I contend that, while the Liberata’s narrator dissociates himself from the Ariostan poet-figure, this figure is recuperated by the bodies and thoughts of the Liberata’s characters. Thus Tasso both embraces and radically transforms Ariosto’s model by representing interlace as an immanent textual force, as his characters are tasked with interlacing themselves.