Ariostan Armory: Feminist Responses to the Orlando Furioso

It comes as no surprise that Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso found an avid readership among sixteenth-century women. Chivalric adventure poems were highly popular among all consumers of vernacular literature, and Ariosto’s text in particular presents a gallery of strong and adventurous female characters, surrounding them with explicit discourse on the question of women’s worth. This essay offers a brief overview of the sixteenth-century feminine reception of the Orlando Furioso along two axes: a readerly axis that is suggested by library inventories and correspondence records as well as by prohibitions against women’s reading of romances; and an authorial axis that illustrates the profound indebtedness of early modern feminist writers to Ariosto’s poem.

We can surmise from the warnings voiced by writers on women’s conduct that humanists and merchants, who were educating their daughters in unprecedented numbers, were perceived by some to have opened a Pandora’s Box of literacy. Juan Luis Vives cautions about the popularity of vernacular fiction and poetry in his 1523 tract on women’s education, Institutione de feminae christianae: “Surely one can only deride the madness of husbands who allow their wives to read these books so that they may be more clever in their depravity” (76). Just before he singles out chivalric romances for their especially corrupting power, Vives offers his view of girls who enjoy literature about love and war:

For such girls, it would have been preferable not only that they had never learned literature but that they had lost their eyes so that they could not read, and their ears so that they could not hear. How much better would it be to have entered into life blind and deaf (. . .) rather than to be cast into the fires of hell with both eyes and both ears

(74).

Abbesses were instructed by the bishop of Verona to scour the cells of nuns and remove all books of chivalry, together with any other entertaining reading, including tales, love poems, and comedies; and brides who read romances were charged with having bad morals (Finucci 18–19). We know from neo-Aristotelians like Filippo Sassetti that a specific concern among conservative critics was the suggestive power these books’ female knights might have for readers.¹ But women did read, and the Orlando Furioso gestures toward its female audience in complex ways that have been widely discussed.

Among his first, and most enthusiastic readers, Ariosto surely counted one woman who was his exact contemporary, Isabella d’Este. The marchesa of Mantua was hardly unique in her love for heroic narratives, but she was likely the best-documented female reader of the form, thanks to the survival of her library inventory and the uniquely voluminous remains of her correspondence. Shortly after her marriage, the seventeen-year-old Isabella placed an order for chivalric adventure tales with her trusted agent in Venice, Giorgio Brognolo. Writing from Mantua on 17 September 1491, she requested a sweep of the bookshops there, asking Brognolo to find:

Tutti li libri che lì sono in vulgare, tanto in rima quanto in prosa, che contengano batalie, historie et fabule, così de moderni come de antiqui, et massimamente de li paladini de Franza, et ogni altro che se troverà et mandarceli quanto più presto potereti.²

The books Isabella received from Brognolo included the anonymous romances Falconetto (1483) and the late-fifteenth-century Dama di Rovenza; Boccaccio’s pastoral romance, the Ninfale d’Ameto (Commedia delle ninfe fiorentine, 1341–1342); and an “historia” di Merlino.³ Requests for adventure literature as well as poetry lace Isabella’s correspondence for years, and her library’s contents, which were catalogued after her death, confirm her interest in this type of reading (Campbell 270–79). She was among the first to read Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato after its first two books were printed in 1486 with a dedication to her father, and her admiration for that poem is discussed at some length in essays on this topic by Alessandro Luzio and Rodolfo Renier (“Isabella d’Este”, “Delle relazioni”). Then came Ariosto.

In 1507 Ariosto famously visited...