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

Chapter Five Externi Thalami: The Orlando furioso as a Nuptial Epic

c h a p t e r f i v e Externi Thalami The Orlando furioso as a Nuptial Epic Weddings between members of the ruling classes were crucial events in the life of a Renaissance city. Carefully planned and lavishly funded processions, festive rituals, and celebrations stretched over months in palaces, churches, and streets. Every aspect of the marriage, from the bride’s abandonment of the paternal house to the encounter of the newlyweds in the nuptial chamber, was represented and ritualized.1 The centrality of these events is clear in the artistic productions that accompanied them: hundreds of epithalamia , orations, and celebratory poems took their place alongside the paintings, frescoes, and objects manufactured specifically for these occasions.2 Along with the display of wealth and power, the weddings were often occasions for (more or less staged) acts of violence and subversion. Often ritualized, these acts provided a controlled unleashing of social tensions, in the framework of the dichotomy of violence and stability characteristic of what Bakhtin has termed the carnivalesque. In February 1491, when the young Anna Sforza entered Ferrara as the bride of Alfonso d’Este, the populace destroyed the bridal canopy as soon as she left it and started climbing the stairs of the palace.3 Externi Thalami 150 In all their glory and tension, weddings, both real and fictitious , populate the Italian literature of the Renaissance—high and low, courtly and humanistic, in Latin and in the vernacular. The wedding is a central feature of popular chivalric literature, as we have seen in chapters 1 and 2; Maffeo Vegio’s addition to the Aeneid completed the Virgilian poem with the wedding of Aeneas and Lavinia; Leon Battista Alberti’s Books of the Family discussed the institution of marriage; Francesco Barbaro praised it in his De re uxoria; and most humanists wrote epithalamia and nuptial orations. Ariosto himself, whose views on marriage are famously the topic of Satira V, wrote an epithalamium for Lucrezia Borgia’s wedding to Alfonso d’Este. In this context, it is surprising that the element of the wedding in the Orlando furioso has so far received little critical attention. The marriage of Bradamante to Ruggiero, one of the few plot lines that runs through the fabric of the poem from beginning to end, is among the least studied episodes of the Furioso, for a variety of reasons.4 Traditional studies of the sources have neglected the dynastic theme altogether, because of its supposed dependence on the Este patronage, and thus its ostensible insincerity .5 More recent studies, focused on gender, have marginalized or disregarded the marriage episodes, considering them as the “closure” of private roles imposed on the female character, Bradamante.6 Both approaches identify the dynastic theme with the linear epic plot, and the wanderings of romance with a progressive narrative force, be it an open destiny for women or the creative fantasy of the poet (as opposed to the shackles of patronage ). Textual evidence suggests, instead, that the wedding at the core of the dynastic narrative may be a site of tension in the poem. Very much like the historical narrations of weddings in Renaissance Ferrara, this narrative theme in the poem occasions both celebrations of and challenges to political power. The Furioso ’s wedding attempts to represent the foundational moment of marriage as both the pacification and the renewal of tensions. Set in the context of the Este marriage politics and of Ariosto’s own poetic strategy, the institution of marriage is a site of tension Externi Thalami 151 (both in society and in literature), a “strategy of containment” that is always showing the signs of the containment itself.7 In the preceding chapters, I have examined a series of strategies that Ariosto deploys in the construction of his poem, and that demonstrate a particular tension in the treatment of gender as a component of the genealogical moment. The woman warrior that Ariosto invents bears the traces of a literary genealogy of gender, and enters the dynastic narrative as a political actor precisely because of this past, at once displaced and displayed. The violence of the dynastic marriage as a political strategy is the central theme of the infernal episode examined in chapter three. The bestowing of the dynastic prophecy in female hands, as I showed in chapter four, seems to offer a temporary way out of the economy of exchange imposed on both art and...