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Chapter Three Boiardo's Castle Cruel
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Chapter Three
Boiardo's Castle Cruel

Italian humanism and interpretive anthropology—as well as chivalric romances—alike make an issue of how to respond to local customs, the subject of the episode of Castle Cruel in Matteo Maria Boiardo's romantic epic Orlando Innamorato (Orlando in Love, 1482), a work nearly contemporaneous with Malory's Morte Darthur . Cicero's thought, pervasive in fifteenth-century Italy, grounds moral feeling not in experience or custom but on right reason founded on universal justice. Justice is not tested by the standard of utility, because "if it is a penalty, the fear of punishment, and not the wickedness itself, that is to keep men from a life of wrongdoing and crime, then no one can be called unjust, and wicked men ought rather to be regarded as imprudent."[1] Nor is justice "conformity to written laws and national customs" ("obtemperatio scriptis legibus institutisque populorum"), since any ruler who thinks it profitable might alter the laws:

But the most foolish notion of all is the belief that everything is just which is found in the customs or laws of nations. Would that be true, even if these laws had been enacted by tyrants?[2]

Instead, Nature distinguishes justice and injustice, honor and dishonor.[3] According to Cicero's De Legibus , "virtue" (the proper excel-


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lence of anything) "is reason completely developed, and this is certainly natural; therefore everything honourable is likewise natural" ("est enim virtus perfecta ratio, quod certe in natura est; igitur omnis honestas eodem modo").[4]

Against this Ciceronian background of moral certainty, Boiardo's story of Castle Cruel represents what Clifford Geertz, in an important essay on cultural relativity, calls "the strange construed."[5] Geertz defines humanism as a belief that there are "similarities between ourselves and others removed in place or period." As a result, distant "imaginative products can be put at the service of our moral life."[6] Humanism typically looks to the past "as a source of remedial wisdom, a prosthetic corrective for a damaged spiritual life."[7] According to Geertz, however, traditional humanism fails to comprehend the moral imagination because it does not recognize the unstable nature of moral images and because it pays inadequate attention to the present position of the moral observer. The resulting instability of the moral imagination calls into question the humanist understanding of history. But is the imaginative world of the Innamorato so limited, or does Boiardo's narrative prefigure Geertz's anthropology?

Indeed, the moral imagination may express itself in fiction or ethnography. Both forms may be regarded, in Geertz's phrase, as "groping representations."[8] Boiardo relies on this overlap in his Orlando Innamorato when he uses the custom of the castle topos to make the story of Castle Cruel an allegory of the Other. The story is an episode in the larger, interlaced romance, and the French knight whose adventure brings him to Castle Cruel is Ranaldo. At first Ranaldo's method for eliminating foul customs seems simple enough. Arm yourself, smash the foul local custom, and thank God for putting you on the right side. Yet Boiardo's thick text resists any easy imposition of meaning. The obvious implication that Castle Cruel allegorically mirrors Ranaldo's cruel rejection of Angelica's love, the way Marchino's savagery almost justifies the measures taken by his jealous wife, and the violence of Ranaldo's assault on the local population undercut the success of the hero.[9]


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The story of Caste Cruel occurs quickly in the poem, occupying little more than a canto. Almost every line, however, contributes to a moral maze. We may identify three divisions: the events that bring Ranaldo to Castle Cruel, the origin of the custom there, and Ranaldo's triumph.

The episode occurs early in the Orlando Innamorato when a ship carrying Ranaldo arrives at Castle Cruel. A gray-haired man asks Ranaldo to rescue his daughter from a giant, but when Charlemagne's knight tries to interfere, a second giant emerges from a castle on a hill and lassoes Ranaldo with a grappling hook. Ranaldo shakes off the hook, but when he chases the second giant across a stone bridge, the villain uses his hook to unhinge the slab, sending Ranaldo hurting into an underwater cavern where he is bound in chains and hauled before an old hag who explains the origin of the local custom, which he must endure.[10]

"By rumor, maybe, you have heard,"
The old hag said, "the bloody ways
And customs that this fortress keeps.
Now, in the time you have alive
(Your death will be delayed till dawn—
But don't believe you can survive),
In this time, I'll recount to you
The cause that had this course proclaimed."

"Forse per fama avrai sentito dire,"
Dicea la vecchia, "la crudele usanza
Che questa rocca ha preso a mantenire.
Ora nel tempo che a viver te avanza,
Poi che a diman s'indugia il tuo morire,
(Ché già de vita non aver speranza),
In questo tempo ti voglio contare
Qual cagion fece la usanza ordinare."
        (OI  1.8.27)[11]

Once upon a time Castle Cruel was called Altaripa, the home of a courteous knight named Grifone and his wife, Stella. Marchino, the


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husband of the woman telling the story (she is never named), fell in love with Stella when visiting the castle. He left and then returned with his retainers to murder Grifone, putting everyone in the castle to the sword except for Stella, whom he then seeks to seduce. Stella resists, and with the help of Marchino's jealous wife, she takes vengeance for her dead husband by serving Marchino his children baked in a pie. Infuriated and seeking his own revenge, Marchino ties Stella to Grifone's dead body, then rapes her. When his jealous wife arrives with a rescue party led by the King of Orcagna, Marchino slits Stella's throat and rapes her again. He is captured and tortured to death by King Poliferno, who leaves Marchino's wife in charge of the castle. She has Stella buried beside her husband. Nine months later, her body gives birth to a monster born from Marchino's seed. Marchino's wife rings the monster's tomb with a wall to protect her people and then reverses the hospitality that had brought her husband into contact with Stella as she oversees the local custom of feeding passersby to the monster.

When Ranaldo learns he will be thrown into the pit to die, he asks if he can keep his sword and armor. Marchino's wife agrees to his request because she believes his sword will be useless against the invulnerable monster. In fact Ranaldo effectively uses Fusberta to beat the monster's bones until the ursine beast snatches it from his grasp. The creature cannot wield the sword but threatens Ranaldo with its claws and teeth until Ranaldo manages to climb onto a beam, suspended ten feet off the ground, where he spends the night.

At dawn Angelica arrives to rescue him. Under the influence of the stream of love, she longs for Ranaldo, but he has drunk from the fountain of Tristan and hates her. When he refuses to fly away with her, the enchantress throws a cake of sticky wax into the monster's mouth, the traditional method for overcoming Cerberus, the guardian of Hell in Virgil's Aeneid and Dante's Inferno . She also spreads a noose of knotted rope along the ground and leaves behind a noiseless file ("una gran lima, che segava sorda," OI 1.9.10).[12] As a result of Angelica's intervention, the monster finds its teeth stuck together and, hopping about in rage, it


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trips the noose and is caught fast. Ranaldo descends and recovers his sword, but when he finds Fusberta ineffective, he rides the beast bareback and strangles it with his hands.

Convinced he will starve if he remains in the tomb, Ranaldo seeks a way out and finds Angelica's file, which he mistakenly attributes to God. He uses it to open the grating, but even though a "deaf file" is a tool for thieves,[13] his escape is discovered and he faces six hundred scruffy inhabitants by the time he emerges. At this point his sword becomes effective again and Ranaldo single-handedly slaughters or chases away the local population. Marchino's wife retreats with her closest followers to her castle, but when Ranaldo bursts in, she tumbles to her death from a high window. Ranaldo, like Marchino earlier, leaves no one alive. He returns to the seashore, and another adventure begins.

Is Ranaldo's final violence justified? The question arises in a thick context of past wrongs and vengeance. Jo Ann Cavallo has pointed out that the grisly origins of Castle Cruel hardly justify sacrificing Ranaldo:

No reason is ever offered as to the necessity of feeding the monster with human flesh instead of killing it or leaving it to die in the sepulcher. Indeed, there is no indication that the lives of the townspeople are in any way endangered if they do not nourish the monster, and there exists no agreement between them and it as in traditional tales of this sort.[14]

Cavallo concludes that the townspeople maintain the custom because they are contaminated by violence, which they seek to exorcise by ritual sacrifice. When their sacrifice fails because the intended victim kills their monster, the locals self-destruct from the guilt they now have no way to release. They attack Ranaldo but flee from his force; Marchino's wife throws herself from a window; and in the end the castle is completely deserted. This Girardian interpretation is brilliant but it oversimplifies Ranaldo's violent response.

Cavallo regards Ranaldo as a type of Grail knight who is able to learn from the experience of others and then take appropriate action. She ar-


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gues, correctly I think, that for Boiardo the purpose of reading, or listening to, a novella is to recover a moral lesson and then act on it. "The link between learning through (allegorical) fiction and acting virtuously in the civic arena was a basic tenet of Humanist thought," she explains, and then goes on to show how Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato writes this linkage into its internal fiction on the occasions when the heroes Ranaldo and Orlando must act on the moral of a narrative they have previously heard or seen depicted in art. It is her conclusion I object to, for she argues that Ranaldo correctly interprets the story he hears: "Ranaldo understands that he must act to destroy the evil monster and free the town of such a curse" as human sacrifice entails.

It may be pointed out that Ranaldo hardly needs a story to teach him he must kill the monster to survive, nor is it entirely clear that his ensuing behavior removes the curse of cruel violence. After Ranaldo manages to defeat the monster with Angelica's assistance, he breaks out of the arena and then kills anyone who does not run away. His violent attack drives Marchino's wife to throw herself off a balcony to her death, as the local pattern of cruelty grips Ranaldo too. As he eliminates all the inhabitants of the castle, he succumbs to the ways of Castle Cruel:

Blood has already gilt the chamber,
But still Ranaldo swings his sword.
To write the end of this affair,
He left no living soul in there.

Fatta è la sala già di sangue un smalto:
Sempre mena Ranaldo intorno il brando.
Acciò che tutto il fatto a un ponto scriva,
Non rimase al castello anima viva.
        (OI  1.9.35)

Cavallo cites Boccaccio's distinction between righteous anger and blind wrath to explain Ranaldo's violent solution to Castle Cruel. But is Ranaldo's final outburst really justified by righteous anger? Or is he not swept up in the custom of vengeance that characterizes Castle Cruel?


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The foul deeds of Marchino create a ripple effect through time, first trapping Stella, then Marchino's wife, and then Ranaldo, forcing each character to formulate his or her own violent response to past wrongs. Marchino's wife justifies her present cruelty to strangers by the past pain of jealousy caused by her now dead husband. Yet her personal misfortune cannot excuse the suffering caused by the practice of human sacrifice she oversees. Stella, too, ties herself to the past. Her pathology is harder to see, since her situation is so tragic, but the point is that law must concern itself with the present, not retribution for what cannot be corrected. To do otherwise is to create the kind of escalating violence that characterizes Orgagna, where Caste Cruel is located.

According to the self-justifying story Marchino's wife tells Ranaldo, Marchino no sooner sees Stella than he burns for her. A few days later he ambushes and kills her husband Grifone, murders everyone at Altaripa (Grifone's castle, later renamed Castle Cruel), and then sets his siege before Stella, who refuses his advances. Considering the cruelty Marchino is about to show, it is strange that he seeks to persuade Stella to love him instead of overpowering her. Marchino may be regarded as one who fails completely in what Stephen Greenblatt has called improvisation, the ability to insinuate oneself into another's system of beliefs.[15] Violent as he is, Marchino tries to practice courtly love.[16] Stella, however, turns out to live by a code closer to the primitive violence that Marchino temporarily suspends.

Boiardo wove images of crude violence, drawn from classical literature, into the tale of origins that explains the custom of Castle Cruel. Herodotus (whom Boiardo translated) attributed the Trojan War to an overreaction on the part of the Greeks to the rape of Helen: Boiardo combines this historical account with the curse of the House of Atreus and the stories of Medea and Philomela. According to myth, Atreus invited his brother Thyestes to his home and served him his sons for dinner. The cycle of violence that ensued ceased only with the founding of the Athenian law courts. Ranaldo's sword substitutes for the law courts as a symbol of justice. (The identification is ironic, however, since Or-


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lando calls his Durindana the sword of justice during his duel with Ranaldo).[17] Boiardo further romanticizes his story as Marchino's wife kills her own children. Like Ovid's Medea, she does so because she hates her husband. Boiardo would have been prompted to the parallel by the name of Medeas, a lecherous woman who rules a castle named "Crudele" in the Tavola Ritonda .[18] Medeas makes love to various knights until they are overcome defending her castle, a custom that guarantees her a fresh man for her bed every year or so. Her passion rules her life, just as jealousy deranges Marchino's wife.

Although Marchino's wife kills her children, it is Stella who serves them to their victim. Boiardo draws details for this part of his story from Ovid's account of Tereus, Philomela, and Procne. When Procne discovers that her husband Tereus has raped and mutilated her sister Philomela, she kills their son Itys and serves him to Tereus for dinner. Procne is aware of the power of tradition, which she uses to create a pretense for a ritual meal: "the false pretext that she invents / is this—only a husband may partake / of such a sacred feast, an ancient rite / still celebrated in her own birthplace." During dinner Tereus calls out for his son, and Procne answers from the next room, "The one you want is with you now—inside" ("intus habes, quem poscis," Metamorphoses 6.655), using words that Stella echoes when she serves Marchino:[19]

The woman's hair was wild, her face
Was haughty, her mind confident,
As she informed him, "Both those heads
Belong to your sons: Bury them!
Do not concern yourself about
The rest—you ate it; you're the tomb!"

La damisella aveva il crin disciolto,
La faccia altiera e la mente sicura,
Ed a lui disse: "L'uno e l'altro volto
Son de' toi figli: dàgli sepoltura.
Il resto hai tu nel tuo ventre sepolto:
Tu il divorasti: no aver più cura."
        (OI  1.8.44)


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It would seem that Boiardo alters the story by letting the rape victim speak (in Ovid's story, Philomela's tongue has been cut out, so that her sister must speak for her), but in fact Stella has not yet been raped, only propositioned. This change in the pattern of Ovid's myth suggests why Stella is just as much an object of hatred as Marchino. Herodotus said that the Persians believed the Greeks were excessive in the vengeance they sought for raped Helen since men believe no woman is raped against her will. In Orcagna, which Boiardo locates within the boundaries of ancient Persia, Marchino's wife seems to share this sentiment. She bakes the pie with her children in it, but she lets Stella serve it. In this way Marchino's wife directs her "zelosia" at Stella as well as her wayward husband.[20] (Ovid has Procne, the wife, and Philomela, the victim, cook together; Procne serves Tereus dinner, then Philomela flings his son's head at him).

When Stella (perhaps duped by Marchino's wife) serves Marchino his children, she reveals her tragic inability to shed the past. She does her cruel deed to avenge her dead husband, not herself, for she has not yet been violated. She proudly but naively tells Marchino what she has done, as if her vengeance were a point of honor. Marchino catches on to her motivation and seeks to match it when devising a suitable punishment for her ("But what revenge could placate him, / Considering her crime?").[21] His solution supports the theme of Castle Cruel, which presents the tragic influence of the past in subtle ways. Widowhood is a social status defined by a woman's past. The widow Stella remains steadfastly bound to her dead husband emotionally, so Marchino binds her to him physically. We usually locate this gesture in the practice of Virgil's Mezentius, who would "link the living with / dead bodies, fitting hand to hand and face / to face" ("componens manibusque manus atque oribus ora").[22] But Boiardo adds a final detail that reinforces the central theme of Castle Cruel. He remembered from Ovid that Tereus rapes Philomela repeatedly after her tongue is cut out, and Marchino does the same thing. Knowing he is being observed by the rescue party of the King of Orgagna, Marchino does not try to get away but instead slits Stella's throat and "used her, used her though she's dead" ("Ma usava


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con lei morta tutta fiata," OI 1.8.47). Marchino's violence against the prone body of Stella, tied to her dead husband, stresses one final time the necessity to repeat the past imaged by mindless violence, while also drawing on demonic folklore to account for the birth of a monster.

Stella, Marchino's wife, Marchino, and Ranaldo—even, at some remove, the spurned Angelica and Malagise, whose magic brought Ranaldo to Castle Cruel because Ranaldo would not release him from his debt to Angelica[23] —permit the past to justify their acts of cruelty. The moral imagination, in Geertz's analysis, does not simplify uncertainties, but multiplies them. Moral images like Castle Cruel are generally confused because they are mediated, seen through someone else's eyes. As an example Geertz draws on a description of suttee, the burning of widows, given by a nineteenth-century Danish traveler to the South Pacific. The collision of beauty and cruelty, when women are sacrificed in the lush island world of Bali, produces an unstable aesthetic experience that confuses "high artistry" with "high cruelty."[24] This unstable imaginative construction forces the traveler to question the morality of what he observes and readers to question the adequacy of their own moral analysis.

Geertz identifies three literary frames in his example. The first, the factual basis of a story, corresponds in Boiardo's story to Marchino's sudden passion and murder of Grifone, the revenge, the rape, the resulting monster. The narrator's account forms the second frame. But the ability of a young Dane, or of Marchino's wife, to perceive events is inevitably limited by a third frame, the literary categories at their disposal. How could a northern Protestant conceptualize Bali? Similarly, Geertz explains, a literary England based on "playing fields, sunsets, nightingales, Country Life, dulce et decorum est , and Shropsbire Lad eroticism" could not adequately respond to the Western Front.[25] At Castle Cruel this inadequacy characterizes the tale told by Marchino's wife, who misperceives Stella as a widow who threatens her own marriage.[26]

On two occasions the imaginative categories of Marchino's wife prove insufficient to record the horror of what went on. The first failure


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occurs when she tries to explain why Marchino raped Stella, slit her throat, and raped her again instead of fleeing at the approach of the King of Orgagna. "At last Orgagna's king arrived," relates Marchino's wife, "with me and a large company," and she gropes to find a motive for her husband.

And when he saw us in the field,
Marchino slit fair Stella's throat.
He did not spare her yet for this,
But used her, used her though she's dead.
I think he did it just to claim
He was the lewdest man who'd lived .

In questo tempo venne il re de Orgagna,
Ed io con esso, con molta brigata;
Ma come fumo visti alla campagna,
Marchin la bella Stella ebbe scanata.
Né ancor per questo dapoi la sparagna,
Ma usava con lei morta tutta fiata.
Credo io che il fece sol per darse vanto
Che altro om non fusse scelerato tanto .
        (OI  1.8.47; my emphasis)

Her "groping representation" depends on a certain way of viewing the world. E. M. W. Tillyard, a critic much derided recently for seeming to idealize the social order of the Renaissance, nonetheless knew Boiardo, and it is hard not to think of Marchino when he writes, "It was far easier to be very wicked and think yourself so than to be a little wicked and without a sense of sin."[27] Violence "could afford to indulge itself," wrote Tillyard, "just because those standards were so powerful."[28] For Tillyard and for Marchino's wife, Marchino's behavior illustrates a point a trained humanist like Boiardo would have found in Cicero, that the admission of a villain as to the atrocity of his crime proves the existence of a universal standard of morality:


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But if it were a penalty and not Nature that ought to keep men from injustice, what anxiety would there be to trouble the wicked when the danger of punishment was removed? But in fact there has never been a villain so brazen as not to deny that he had committed a crime, or else invent some story of just anger to excuse its commission, and seek justification for his crime in some natural principle of right.[29]

Marchino's wife can only account for Marchino's insane behavior on the theory that Marchino knew what he was doing. That theory depends on a concept of natural law that, as Cicero describes it, traces rape as a violation of divine will back to the origins of the universe. No statute is necessary, for rape, according to Cicero, is wrong whether a law against it exists or not:

For the divine mind cannot exist without reason, and divine reason cannot but have this power to establish right and wrong. . . . Even if there was no written law against rape at Rome in the reign of Lucius Tarquinius, we cannot say on that account that Sextus Tarquinius did not break that eternal Law by violating Lucretia, the daughter of Tricipitinus! For reason did exist, derived from the Nature of the universe, urging men to right conduct and diverting them from wrongdoing, and this reason did not first become Law when it was written down, but when it first came into existence, and it came into existence simultaneously with the divine mind.[30]

Marchino's wife believes her husband found it easy, in Tillyard's formula, "to be very wicked . . . just because those standards [of natural law] were so powerful." Yet her theory is inadequate to account for Marchino's slow and persuasive wooing of Stella, his unexpected if unsuccessful refusal to use force when he has Stella in his complete power. His love siege of Stella, not his success, causes the jealousy of his wife. Nor is Marchino the only monster his wife fails adequately to describe. She also lacks words or passes up the chance to portray the beast she nurtures. Although she gives Ranaldo a reason for her silence on the


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subject, it only reinforces her inability fully to face her situation: "I won't describe its awful shape, / Because you will be killed by it" ("La orribil forma sua non te descrivo, / Perché sarai da lui di vita privo," OI 1.8.51).

In contrast to her silence, the poem's narrator describes the monster, and he does so in a way that stresses the inadequate discourse of Marchino's wife. For the tone of the story shifts as soon as the narrator's words extol the monster's exterior:

But I believe you all would like
To know the monster's outer form.
Let me first tell you of its birth:
The devil made it, that's for sure,
Using the seed Marchino left
Within the woman whom he'd murdered.

Ma credo io che a voi tutti sia in talento
Di quel mostro saper la forma aperta.
Acciò che abbiati il suo cominciamento,
Fiè11o il demonio, questa è cosa certa,
Del seme de Marchin, che 'n corpo porta
Quella donzella che da lui fu morta.
        (OI  1.8.56)

The narrator makes the monster amusing, rather than demonic. The poet's voice is civil and cultured as he observes the animal's snout, wide mouth, impressive teeth, revolving horns, and fearful voice. In part this shift occurs because Boiardo here gives prominence to the love allegory that never completely disappears from Castle Cruel. For Boiardo's story humorously reverses a pattern originally established in the vulgate prose Lancelot . In that story Lancelot overcomes the strange customs of Dolorous Guard coincident with the beginning of his intrigue with Queen Guenevere.[31] He then changes the name of the castle to reflect his love affair, calling it Joyous Guard. Since Ranaldo refuses a love affair, the naming pattern moves the other way in the Innamorato . Ranaldo goes


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first to Palazo Zoioso, which sounds like Gioiosa Guardia, the name of Joyous Guard in the Tavola Ritonda . Fortified by the fountain of Tristan, he resists the lush, Bali-like greenery of a sumptuous love nest arranged by Angelica (OI 1.8.1-7). As a result, he is then ferried to Castle Cruel.

Castle Cruel, like Dolorous Guard, symbolizes unconsummated love: the cruelty of Ranaldo. The narrator points out that the monster of Castle Cruel runs on two feet. He compares it to a bear in one passage and in another notes that it has claws that resemble a bear's, although they are larger (OI 1.8.58). It does not seem a coincidence that Malagise tells Angelica that Ranaldo is more cruel than any bear (OI 1.9.9). The monster of Castle Cruel in fact wittily mirrors Ranaldo's beastly behavior toward Angelica.

The narrator's smooth description of the dreadful, deformed monster thereby illustrates a process that Geertz calls "translation." Purporting to offer a detailed look at the features of this beast of foul custom, Boiardo domesticates evil and empties it of terror. As he shifts from Marchino's murderous ways to Ranaldo's strange predicament, the narrator replays the story in a different literary key. It is as if to say, the solution to the monster of evil custom is . . . the right attitude. But the shift in tone does more than show the poet's cleverness. It also stresses the instability of the moral imagination.

Boiardo's urbane tone seems to hamper but in fact serves the humanist impulse to put otherwise distant, imaginative products "at the service of our moral life."[32] The tone of the story changes because moral images are not simple. This complexity is also illustrated by the sticky wax, knotted rope, and soundless file that Angelica gives to Ranaldo to overcome the otherwise invulnerable monster of custom.

Angelica's sticky wax is a traditional means for calming a guardian of hell. The Sibyl drugs Cerberus with a mouthful of honeycake as Aeneas descends to the underworld, and Dante slips by another Cerberus when Virgil flings mud into the three throats of the monster who guards gluttons.[33] But Ranaldo's situation requires a rope and a file as well. The knotted rope is a version of the chains of love, well illustrated in love


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lyrics such as Boiardo's Amorum Libri and the Schifanoia frescoes. Angelica suffers from denial, and her gnawing torment explains the symbolism of the silent file she gives Ranaldo, an image Boiardo may have borrowed from Dante: "O painful and pitiless file / that silently wears away my life" ("Ahi angoscioso e dispietata lima / che sordamente la mia vita scemi").[34]

Ranaldo must rely on these devices because his sword Fusberta—the sign of justice wielded by an outsider—proves ineffective against the monster of local custom. The rope and file reflect the allegorical nature of the beast Ranaldo faces, a monster who shadows Ranaldo's missing desire for Angelica and who also serves as an instrument of human sacrifice. These two functions, the libidinal and the anthropological, were traditionally combined by the figure of Antaeus.

Like the monster of Castle Cruel, Antaeus could only be killed in a certain way. When Hercules discovered that Antaeus regained his strength every time he fell to earth, the hero killed him by holding him over his head and squeezing him. The cycle of renewal led Colluccio Salutati, following Fulgentius, to interpret the battle of Hercules and Antaeus as a battle between the spirit and the flesh: Hercules' killing Antaeus represents his overcoming desire.[35] The Antaeus myth thus associates air with spirituality and identifies sexuality with the earth. To rescue Ranaldo, Angelica spreads her knotted rope on the ground, but the monster seems to trip it like a snare, suggesting the monster is hung up in the air. Does Angelica intend for Ranaldo to kill a suspended version of himself, thereby fignring the way she saw him, as a Hercules of the spirit, opposed to the flesh? Or does Ranaldo kill the monster on the ground? When Angelica asks Ranaldo to mount her and fly away from Castle Cruel—a proposal Cavallo reads as indecent—sex is associated with flying. The sexual allegory is confused, because one's reading depends on uncertain literary categories.

Boiardo hides how Angelica's noose works, and he only hints that sex is in the air. But Antaeus also represents the alien Other. Like the monster of Castle Cruel, Antaeus in Lucan's Civil War terrorizes the coun-


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tryside and murders any strangers who reach his shores.[36] He lives in Libya, and Boiardo glances at the myth later, when Brandimarte lands in the same region of North Africa: a decree commands that all Christians who arrive there be killed (OI 2.27.46). But the Antaeus figure also gave epics a way to sympathize with defeated peoples, who were otherwise demonized by their conquerors. David Quint argues that Antaeus is a "stock epic figure—deriving ultimately from the Pharsalia — for a native resistance that refuses to accept defeat and rises up again and again to oppose its would-be conquerors."[37] Such a figure supports the sense that Castle Cruel cannot be reduced to favoring or condemning violence. Ranaldo kills the monster that keeps the custom of killing travelers at Castle Cruel, but some inhabitants run away and Ranaldo's ensuing massacre was the kind of event conquered peoples used to stoke their resistance, which might break out months or years later. No one in the Innamorato explicitly carries a torch for Castle Cruel, but when, elsewhere in Orcagna, Ranaldo kills a fat blusterer named Rubicone (the type of person who would have served at Castle Cruel and escaped), his deed is not forgotten by other inhabitants.[38]

Our perception of Boiardo's values, particularly his aristocratic attitude to the use of force, is colored by the autocratic rule of the Este family of Ferrara.[39] We need to revise our view of the poet in light of the romance mode of the Innamorato , whose interlaced stories allow past wrongs or insults suddenly to confront a character from an unexpected direction.[40] Too often humanists of Boiardo's strain are thought to stand in stark contrast to that "civic humanism" which Hans Baron defined as the great contribution of fifteenth-century Florence to modern thought.[41] Baron identified three republican virtues: social engagement, an increasingly vernacular humanism, and historical awareness. It can be argued that Boiardo, even though he lived in the shadow of the autocratic Este family, nonetheless gave these virtues an honored place in his thought. First, Boiardo's position as captain of Modena and then Reggio during the last thirteen years of his life counters any notion that the poet was in danger of dropping out of the world of affairs and lapsing into the


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contemplative state that Baron found too strongly promoted by earlier humanists. Second, Boiardo's decision to compose the Innamorato in Italian and his career as a translator speak for his commitment to vernacular learning (in contrast, for example, to his uncle Tito Vespasiano Strozzi, who composed an epic to Borso d'Este in Latin).

The issue thus becomes what history meant for Boiardo. The test case Baron proposes is the way the Florentine humanists reassessed ancient Roman politics. Unlike Dante, who placed Brutus and Cassius in the lowest depths of hell for murdering Caesar, later Florentine writers like Leonardo Bruni praised the last defenders of Republican Rome.[42] Bruni went so far as to extoll the veterans of Sulla as the original settlers of his city.[43] This Roman debate was carried on in courts throughout northern Italy and countered by humanists who owed their positions to princes. Lorenzo Valla (whose Latin translation of Herodotus Boiardo translated into Italian) refuted the Florentine position by arguing that Sulla had been Rome's first tyrant. The great works of literature, ran the counterargument, were produced during the period of peace established by the Caesars. It may be as an ironic comment on this debate that Boiardo gives Caesar's falcon eyes (the image Dante bestowed on the first emperor) to Feraguto, an unattractive pagan (OI 1.1.10). In practice, Boiardo composed whenever the peace was maintained by Ercole d'Este, one of those northern Italian tyrants whom Machiavelli, a generation later, yet praised for establishing a balance of power. If so, Boiardo would not fit the mold of a blind imperial supporter, but one who weighed the costs of exchanging peace for submission to a strong central authority.

Despite his affiliation with the Este, Boiardo shared with the Florentines a love affair with the past. The past was not just a source of propaganda or a distant parallel to the present that encouraged a modern to rival antiquity in the vernacular. It was both a moral lesson and an immediate problem. In his sixth Latin eclogue, Boiardo hails the reign of Borso d'Este as the return of "the manners of the olden times and the golden ease of eternal spring" ("et prisci rursum . . . mores / Aureaque


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aeterni redierunt otia veris").[44] Boiardo here uses the golden age as a trope for nonviolence, but it also expresses his view of history, which constantly impinges on the present.

Like the chain of violence at Castle Cruel, a pattern of historical pressure recurs throughout Boiardo's poem. An example occurs a few cantos after Castle Cruel, when Ranaldo, in a cave, finds a bloody book, locked to a chain as if in a Renaissance library, and reads of the horrible deeds of Trufaldino, king of Baghdad. Ranaldo then spends his time tracking down and destroying the villain, for Trufaldino turns out to be a character in the main story. Similarly, two knights named Prasildo and Iroldo are first met in a long story told by Fiordelisa; they turn out to be "real" people, who join the battle of Albraca, fought on account of Angelica. Again, demons whom Malagise conjures from his magic manual say that Angelica was first sent to Paris by her father; later King Galafrone also shows up at Albraca. The strangest example of this process that makes travel to the East a journey into history is the encounter with Oberto dal Leone, a legendary knight, but one who also joins the action. Oberto or Uberto dal Leone is the subject of a famous book ("as / The record of his deeds can show"; "Come se vede nel suo libro aperto," OI 1.14.41), who appears in Dragontina's garden.[45]

In short, Boiardo used the past just as Geertz uses the instabilities that inhere in events and perceptions of events, to give value to the moral imagination. Images may have multiple meaning in Boiardo's poem, where the characters' lives are often at cross-purposes. Angelica leaves Ranaldo a silent file that signifies her embarrassment at having to speak for herself in pursuing Ranaldo. Ranaldo, however, takes it for a gift of God that establishes him once again as a deliverer of justice, able to wield his sword.

We might regard Ranaldo as a crusader or conquistador, killing those whom he does not understand. The narrative texture of the Innamorato , however, develops a more complex position. It both respects and questions Cicero's teaching that "Justice is one; it binds all human society and is based on one Law, which is right reason applied to command and


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prohibition" ("Est enim unum ius, quo devincta est humana societas, et quod lex constituta una; quae lex est recta ratio imperandi atque prohibendi").[46] The foundation of justice is "our natural inclination to love our fellow men" ("quia natura propensi sumus ad diligendos homines"),[47] an appropriate stance for the Innamorato , a long, often humorous poem about the effects of love. The story asks us, when facing a set of objectionable practices, to recognize a difference between violence and cruelty, not by a bright line test, but by admitting the possibility, if not probability, of something higher, a concept of natural justice, which the humanist tradition once represented, symbolized by the eloquence that Boiardo's poem both mimics and exemplifies.

Critics continue to debate whether Ariosto, whose debt to Boiardo's plot is common knowledge, accepted, ignored, or rejected Boiardo's allegorical mode.[48] It is arguable that, even more than Boiardo, Ariosto made the instability of the moral imagination a theme of his overtly more polished poem. In a late addition to the Furioso (1532), in a scene not dissimilar to Castle Cruel (both are versions of sacrificing outsiders to a local deity), Orlando rescues Olympia from the crude inhabitants of the island of Ebuda. At the same time as he drives an anchor down the gullet of an orc (a sea monster, to which these people feed damsels as penitence to Proteus), an expedition arrives from Ireland and mercilessly slaughters every single Ebudan. Orlando lets the expedition do its work, but he is unsure whether he is witnessing justice or cruelty.[49] Even the Ebudans had a reason for their practice of human sacrifice: they were constrained to it by Proteus.


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