The World beyond Europe in the Romance Epics of Boiardo and Ariosto by Jo Ann Cavallo (review)

Jo Ann Cavallo’s new study on the romance epics of Boiardo and Ariosto comes on the heels of her previous book, The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso: From Public Duty to Private Pleasures (University of Toronto Press, 2004). The masterpieces of Boiardo and Ariosto, so Professor Cavallo argued at the time, focus on the tension between the endless dislocations of desire and the ethical/political demands of the epic genre. That fundamental tension was shown to shape imaginary worlds that were situated at the intersection of reality and fantasy – worlds that were populated by knights, ladies, ogres, and monsters – and were figured by Boiardo’s wide range of erotic phenomena and Ariosto’s endless sequence of his heroes’ vagaries and his gaze into the inner spaces of Orlando’s mind.

Cavallo’s earlier critical insights have not been disavowed in this new book. Quite to the contrary, they are the basis for a new, fascinating analysis of textual and contextual discoveries in the two works of Boiardo and Ariosto, which were written some twenty years apart from each other. The pivotal idea holding together The World beyond Europe in the Romance Epics of Boiardo and Ariosto is the two poets’ consciousness of geography and the geopolitics of a modern, expanding configuration of the world, and their shared view of the new boundaries of the world came into being, paradoxically, from the narrow, somewhat limited perspective of the city of Ferrara in the fifteenth century.

One of Cavallo’s merits is to provide as her point of departure the intellectual/political history of Ferrara at the time when the city was under the rule of the Este family and sought to challenge the hegemony of the city of Florence. In Florence in 1436 Leon Battista Alberti wrote Della Pittura, a treatise on the theory of art and, more precisely, on the one-point perspective construction that was destined to radically alter the conception of space. Space is no longer, as it was in pre-modern representations, a fixed, immutable entity. It is fluid principle that opens up on an infinite universe. In Ferrara these modern theories arrived indirectly through the Neoplatonists, such as Pico.

Yet events such as the Council of Ferrara (1438), which brought together churchmen from diverse confessions in their respective Eastern and Western churches; the role of university educators, such as Guarino da Verona, who translated classical tracts on geography (Ptolomy and Strabo); the popularity of Franciscan missionaries to faraway lands such as China; travel accounts (Marco Polo’s); the steady flow of merchants between Italy and the Muslim world; and, eventually, the journeys of Columbus and Vespucci, not to speak of medieval literary/visionary texts (i.e., the Chansons de geste) – all these experiences turn into the solid context meant to make plausible and clear why poets such as Boiardo and Ariosto (but the same would be said of Pulci, who unfortunately is given short shrift by Cavallo) managed to cross what can be called an epochal threshold – the very limits of their provincial city – and expand the boundaries of their “original” culture.

The bulk of the study, logically enough, is organized to render the cosmopolitan vision of the two poets, which is to say it becomes the cartography of the cultures (languages, religions, values, etc.) outside of Christian Europe and encompasses the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Readers will enjoy reading about “Angelica of Cathay,” Agricane of Tartary, and Saracen Spain as well as following the route of Astolfo’s flight from the Indian Ocean to Egypt and Jerusalem. Yet the scholarly narrative never turns into a mere (if magnificent) survey of the world “beyond” the familiar confines. We rediscover the deeper layers of two beloved classics.

Understandably, one could have wished that the study’s examination of the trespassing of the boundaries of one’s culture opened up a constellation of other problems, such as the...