1. See Eliot 1957, "What Is a Classic?" particularly pp. 67-70, where he discusses universality and provincialism.

2. Eliot 1957, "Virgil and the Christian World," 127.

3. For comments on local culture, see Eliot 1988, "Notes toward the Definition of Culture," 123-140.

4. Nagy 1979, 7. See also chap. 6, "Lamentation and the Hero," which closes with the distinction between the local specificity of cult-"The hero of cult must be local because it is a fundamental principle in Greek religion that his power is local" and the timeless universality of the Panhellenic tradition and the Homeric poetry that embraces and articulates it.

5. Nagy 1979,, 116.

6. I quote from Timothy Hampton's translation of the passage from the Apologia (Hampton 1990, 93). Hampton's argument that Tasso fears "the ambiguities of particularity" and therefore seeks the "stability and certainty of the universal" has been an important influence on this essay; see Hampton, pp. 88-94.

7. Eliot 1957, 127.

8. All citations and translations from Virgil's Aeneid and Eclogues are taken from Fairclough 1974.

9. Klossowki 1990, 128.

10. That Virgil's sympathies may well lie with Meliboeus in the dialogue is indicated by a line relevant to the shepherds' participation in local cult. At one point, Meliboeus explicitly calls attention to the fact that the local fountains Tityrus rejected do, in fact, hold Tityrus dear; when Tityrus was "absent" in Rome, Meliboeus claims, the very trees and sacred fountains called for him ("Tityrus hinc aberat. ipsae te, Tityre, pinus, / ipsi te fontes, ipsa haec arbusta vocabant," 38-39).

11. "et iam summa procul villarum culmina fumant/ maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae" ("Even now the house-tops yonder are smoking and longer shadows fall from the mountain-heights," 82-83).

12. I owe this insight to Laura McClure, of the Classics Department at the University of Wisconsin.

13. "iam tum religio pavidos terrebat agrestis/ dira loci, iam tum silvam saxumque tremebant" (8.349-350). Might we not note in the reference to the pavidos agrestis and the dual emphasis on their terror some condescension on Virgil's part when speaking of those rustics who allow themselves to become so frightened by a mysterious landscape?

14. Book 8 is more ironic than I have indicated; the supposedly local religion of the Capitoline Hill turns out, through the vehicle of the Arcadians themselves, to have been a Greek importation.

15. Perhaps one of the most telling lines in Aeneid 4, when Aeneas is building a city in Carthage, is that which for many critics makes Dido a dissembling woman desperate for marriage with Aeneas. After the two have begun their affair, Dido refers to their relationship as a "marriage" ("coniugium vocat; hoc praetexit nomine culpam," "She calls it marriage; with that word she covers her fault," 4.172). But in a city such as Carthage, which worships Juno as its preeminent deity, the ritual that Juno effects around the cave in which Aeneas and Dido first make love enacts for Dido the equivalent of a marriage rite. For Aeneas, it does not. In this clash, one culture is necessarily silenced (''Urbs antiqua fuit. . . Karthago"—"There was an ancient city called Carthage," we learn at the opening of the Aeneid [1.11-12]), and the other necessarily privileged.

16. For suggestive interpretations of the Italian deification of hybrid figures who supposedly led their people from savagery to civilization, see Brelich 1976.

17. See Williams 1989, 215.

18. More specifically, Freud saw in Tasso's version of Virgil's text a manifestation of the universal compulsion to repeat. See Freud 1961, 16, where Freud suggests that Tancredi's wounding of Clorinda for a second time in the enchanted forest is "the most moving poetic picture" of "the compulsion to repeat." For two recent readings of the poem that draw on Freud's insights, see Ferguson 1982 and Bellamy 1994.

19. See Galinsky 1969, 141-190, and Momigliano 1987, 272-274.

20. See Susanne Wofford's observation that Virgil uses "Roman place names as tropes to legitimize Aeneas's claims to the Italian land retrospectively" (1992, 180). Wofford also calls attention to the actual distance of Aeneas and the Trojans from the land; and it is the sacrifice of Palinurus that "indicates the cost not only of creating such an aetiology for the land . . . but also of a certain type of poetic figuration itself-the cost to poet and hero of possessing the land as a poetic or a political conquest" (p. 181).

21. Galinsky 1969, 190.

22. See Hampton 1990, 89: Hampton quotes from the Apologia ("The poet will have brought the truth and particularity of history to verisimilitude and universality, which is proper to his art") and comments: "As epic poetry becomes poetry, 'considering' things in their universality, historical particularity loses its significance. As events and characters are placed into the unity of a plot they lose their essentially historical character and become poetic—that is, in the parlance of both Tasso and Aristotle, philosophical." Quint 1983 also discusses Tasso's avoidance of historical particularity in the Gerusalemme liberata, although in the context of Tasso's reliance on Platonism rather than on Aristotle. Quint 1993 is a more persuasive reading of Tasso's construction of a "universal" epic, as Quint elaborates Tasso's only partially successful suppression of the sectarian and nationalistic boundaries that divided late sixteenth-century Europe.

23. Tasso 1982 (the edition of Fredi Chiappelli). English translations of the Liberata are taken from Tasso 1987 (Ralph Nash's translation); I have made minor revisions throughout.

24. There are admittedly several other moments in the Liberata when it is Christian blood that "flows" in a manner reminiscent of Christ's. When the warrior Sveno is killed in the desert en route to Jerusalem, his blood becomes a river ("di sangue un rio," 8. 19). Somewhat more problematically, in a passage I will address below, when Clorinda is wounded by Tancredi—a Clorinda who is still, technically, a Muslim, although within several lines she will be baptized by Tancredi himself—her blood is also said to flow like a river.

25. The Conquistata will make this paradox less likely-—the poem ends not with bleeding bodies, but with a lengthy procession and pomp that rivals the "ornamenti barbarici e pompe" stained by the pagans' flowing blood. In fact, in the Conquistata, nature itself crowns Goffredo's victory as he enters the holy city: "E' giá tranquillo il mar, sereno il vento,/ l'aria piú chiara assai ch'ella non suole;/ tanto col vincitore il ciel s'allegra,/ e la natura, dianzi afflitta ed egra" ("The sea is calm, the wind serene, the air more pure than it is wont to be; thus sky and nature alike, once so ill and afflicted, rejoice with the conqueror," 24.132). The fugitives on whom the penultimate stanza of the Liberata had dwelled are relegated to a verse tucked into the middle of the last canto. In lines so altered as to be unrecognizable, they are compared to "belve in fèro ludo/ cinte d'intorno, o 'n sanguinosa caccia" (''wild animals surrounded in fierce struggle, or in bloody hunt," 24.118). Any equation that might have been made between Christ's bleeding body and the fuggitivi can no longer be imagined. Citations are from Tasso 1934 (Bonfigli's edition of the Gerusalemme conquistata ) translations are my own.

26. The "Allegoria del Poema" can be found in Tasso 1875, 1: 301 (Guasti's edition of Tasso's prose works); the translation is from Tasso 1987, 469 (Nash's translation). As Tasso scholars have noted, the "Allegoria" has a singularly complicated relationship to the poem itself; Tasso's letters from the period suggest that it was largely a creation to appease the Roman inquisitor, Silvio Antoniani, who needed to approve the text before it could be published. See, among others, Murrin 1980, 121-128, and Derla 1978. Rhu 1993 provides a translation of the "Allegoria," as well as a splendid introduction to the young Tasso's theoretical works.

27. The phrase is from the later Conquistata, 24.118.

28. Berger 1988 offers a lively discussion of an animism that Protestants such as Spenser associated with Catholicism; see p. 78 in particular: "The Catholic abuses suggested in the early cantos [of Book I of The Faerie Queene] are traced back and reduced to an archaic pagan sensibility which projects anthropomorphic idols as if it never received the Word. The historical failure represented as the Church of the Middle Ages is seen as a betrayal of the original Gospel experience and as a regression to the inherent tendency of the silva vanus, the Flesh, to resist enlightenment." Berger's comments are particularly suggestive as regards the enchanted forest in the Liberata. More generally, see Eire 1986.

29. On the effects of Tridentine doctrine on popular culture in Italy, see Niccoli 1987.

30. There is an interesting parallel with the Inferno, in which Dante's miserable suicide, Piero della Vigna, parodies his own would-be crucifixion: he is trapped like Tasso's Clorinda in a "body or tomb, I know not which to say" (13.43). But Tasso's episode of the bleeding trunk is complicated in ways that Dante's is not. As we know from the formidable announcement posted at the gate of hell, Inferno is God's handiwork, and the fact that hell's inhabitants parody the holiest mysteries of Christianity does not subvert those mysteries but attests to their universality: even in hell, even among pagans, one is forced to acknowledge the truth of Christ's birth, death, and resurrection, and Dante's sinners do so without realizing to what they are attesting. The forest within which Clorinda speaks is the result of horrible charms, "too awful to say," of the Muslim sorcerer who was born a Christian, and unlike the pilgrim Dante, Tancredi has no Virgilian guide to assist him.

31. Barberi-Squarotti 1993, 249, observes rightly that Tancredi can't convince himself that Clorinda is simply a diabolical apparition: "è, anzí, una verità che va oltre il fatto e la vicenda.". The observation is an important one, for it suggests that Tancredi insists on seeing the tree as a material realm inhabited by a transcendent being and thus as a vehicle for incarnation.

32. See the third selection from I Miracoli della Vergine, entitled "D'uno che vendé ciò che egli aveva e dièllo a' poveri" (Of one that sold all he had and gave it to the poor), in de Luca 1977, 4: 730-732.

33. Ugone tells Goffredo: "If high Providence elected you as the chief captain of the venture, he also destined that [Rinaldo] must be the sovereign executor of your commands" (14.13).

34. From the very start of the poem, Tasso depicts Clorinda as adverse to Ismeno's patently un-Islamic practices. In canto 2, the sorcerer is condemned not by the narrator for his confounding of "due leggi," but by Clorinda, when she chastises Jerusalem's king, Aladino, for letting Ismeno persuade him to remove an image of Mary from the Christians' temple and place it in the mosque instead, "so that it will be a fated protection for these gates" (2.6). Clorinda angrily insists that the wizard has little reverence for Muslim law ("Fu de le nostre leggi irriverenza/ quell'opra far che persuase il mago"), and she blames Ismeno for trying to "contaminate'' Islam "con nova / religion" (2.50-51) that believes in the power and efficacy of images. Such an episode shows that Tasso was well aware of some of the central practices of Islam; it also suggests that the demonization of Islam in the text proceeds not from ignorance but from ideology.

35. My thanks to Paul Bucklin, whose senior thesis on Tasso suggestively discusses ways in which the Gerusalemme liberata makes Tasso's predecessors, Dante included, suspicious heretics in light of the "true" Counter-Reformation faith.