I

Although Pio Rajna long ago traced the custom of the castle topos to episodes in thirteenth-century prose romances such as the Lancelot, Tristan , and Palamedès ,^[6] book-length studies of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso do not dwell on Bradamante's confrontation with the custom of the castle convention.^[7] Recent critics have assumed that when Ariosto added Bradamante's adventure at the Tower of Tristan to the third edition of his poem, he was continuing his existing theme of the oppression of women. Bradamante, after all, has been not only confined to her parents' home at Montalbano, but forced into the passive role of waiting for Ruggiero, whose Saracen affiliations keep him away from her as he serves King Agramante. After she receives false information that Ruggiero loves someone else, Bradamante decides to sneak away from her watchful parents and seek her betrothed. Before setting out she laments at length because Ruggiero has not come home to her, establishing the mood for her ensuing adventure (OF 32.10-49) at the Tower of Tristan.

The custom of that place follows gendered guidelines, imitating what is probably its main source, Tristan's adventure at Chastel Plor (the Weeping Castle): males joust, females enter a brief beauty contest to determine victory. Peter DeSa Wiggins, as a result, finds that Bradamante's clever solution to the custom that threatens to thrust an innocent woman outside the castle walls "exposes the vulgarity of all such recourse to gender for self-definition."^[8] Another critic calls the custom of Tristan's cas-

tle "misogynous" and declares that Bradamante "overthrows" the custom.^[9] These summations are somewhat misleading and, like previous commentary, overly restrictive of a complex and important episode.^[10] In what follows I hope to show that Bradamante's victory is tactical, not strategic. The Christian heroine does not overcome local custom, she outmaneuvers it. The distinction is important because the episode is about more than the limitations of gender. It illustrates a challenge to the justice of custom itself, which has hardened into a social order.

The Tower of Tristan also corroborates the historical circumstances of its late composition. By the end of the sixteenth century critics of legal thought were arguing that social customs, not statutes, were the basis of national law. Pocock suggests that "we may never know how much of our sense of history is due to the presence in Europe of systems of customary law, and to the idealization of the concept of custom which took place towards the end of the sixteenth century. To it our awareness of process in history is largely owing."^[11] Ariosto lived in a civil law society, but he was sensitive to the competing power of custom. Simone Fornari tells us that Ariosto never opened a law book during his attendance at Ferrara's Studio—he read romances instead.^[12] In the Tower of Tristan episode, Ariosto redeployed a medieval French convention to mediate the cultural strains felt in Italy during the transitional years that saw the rise of Protestantism, the sack of Rome, and the end of what we call the Italian Renaissance.^[13]