1. Cicero, De Legibus , 1.14.40, in De Re Publica; De Legibus , Loeb Classical Library (1928; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952). The Latin text, where cited, is from this edition. [BACK]

2. Ibid., 1.15.42. [BACK]

3. "But in fact we can perceive the difference between good laws and bad by referring them to no other standard than Nature" (ibid., 1.16.44). [BACK]

4. Ibid., 1.16.45. [BACK]

5. Clifford Geertz, "Found in Translation: On the Social History of the Moral Imagination," in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 36-54, 48. [BACK]

6. Ibid., 41. [BACK]

7. Ibid., 44. [BACK]

8. Ibid., 48. [BACK]

9. Georges Duby cites a mid-eleventh-century text by a monk of St. Cybard of Angoulême, which relates how Hugh, lord of Lusignan, captured a castle and had the entire garrison thrown from the top of the keep, "thereby purging the entire area of his enemies." Ransoming them would have been more profitable. Hugh's violence indicated, contradictorily, his lack of power. See France in the Middle Ages , 987-1460, trans. Juliet Vale (1987; Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 71. [BACK]

10. The castle bridge where the giant releases a trap door is an image of fraud, one that Edmund Spenser, for example, will make part of the custom of Pollente's castle in the Book of Justice ( FQ 5.2.12). Falling victim to fraud suggests an ignorance of what others consider acceptable behavior. [BACK]

11. The Italian text is that edited by Aldo Scaglione and reprinted in Matteo Maria Boiardo, Orlando Innamorato , trans. Charles Stanley Ross (Berkeley: Uni-

versity of California Press, 1989). Numbers in the text refer to book, canto, and stanza. [BACK]

12. Angelica performs a function similar to that of a damsel who alleviates Gawain's torment when he is confined to King Caradoc's Dolorous Tower in the prose Lancelot ( L 1:203-213). In that story the damsel brings Gawain a box of ointment for his swelling (he had been flogged), a pole to fight off vermin, and (later) some poison bread that kills the vermin. The pillar that keeps Gawain off the filthy floor recalls Ranaldo's roost. Caradoc's cruel mother perhaps explains why Ranaldo refers to Marchino's wife as "mother," although the epithet may also derive from a similar horror story in The Golden Ass of Apuleius. In both the Lancelot and the Innamorato , the hero does not understand the extent to which a damsel assists him. [BACK]

13. John Florio, A Worlde of Wordes (1598), s.v. "lima." [BACK]

14. Jo Ann Cavallo, Boiardo's "Orlando Innamorato": An Ethics of Desire (Rutherford, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993), 57. [BACK]

15. See "The Improvisation of Power," in Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 222-254. [BACK]

16. Similarly, Ariosto's Rodomonte, like Marchino, unexpectedly uses terms of endearment on Isabel instead of raping her. Like Boiardo, Ariosto shifts attention from the past to present custom, highlighting a clash of cultures. Holed up in a hermitage in France, Rodomonte follows advice Ranaldo gives him in the Innamorato , that when in France he should follow French customs (in that case, by not killing horses, OI 2.14.48). Rodomonte finds barrels of wine and drinks them, "repudiating Saracen custom" ("e ripridendo il rito saracino," OF 29.22). But he gets so drunk that Isabel tricks him into killing her, preserving the chastity she vowed to her dead husband, Zerbino. [BACK]

17. The duel between Orlando and Ranaldo begins when Ranaldo kills Trufaldino, a villain whom Orlando defended because he had been tricked into swearing an oath to save Angelica. Ranaldo's real claim is that Orlando had no business defending the evil king of Baghdad. In fact, Orlando only makes an issue of Ranaldo's vengeance because he jealously fears that Ranaldo loves Angelica. When Orlando, though in the wrong, claims to wield "the sword of justice," Ranaldo uses local law as a shield to protect himself from Orlando's claim ( OI 1.27.15). [BACK]

18. Amorotto maintains the custom of the Castle Crudele on the island of Perfida after killing the son of Sir Gurone the Courteous ( Tristan and the Round Table , trans. Anne Shaver [Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and

Studies, 1983], 185-190). The Italian version of Tristan's story was titled La Tavola Ritonda by its nineteenth-century editor, Luigi Polidori. It seems fairly certain that Boiardo knew the Tavola in some form. Urgano the Hairy, a giant who maintains a castle in the Tavola , reappears early in the Innamorato as one of four giants who escort Angelica from her home in Cathay to Charlemagne's court in Paris ( Tristan and the Round Table , 174). Boiardo assigns Urgano's shaggy pelt to his companion Lampordo ( OI 1.1.75). Moreover Boiardo says that Tristano and Isotta die in each other's arms, a detail provided only by the Tavola Ritonda ( Tristan and the Round Table , 322). See OI 2.26.2 and Cavallo, Boiardo's "Orlando Innamorato ," 66. [BACK]

19. The Metamorphoses of Ovid , trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Harcourt, 1993), lines 6.648-649 and 6.655 in the original. The Latin text is cited from Ovid, Metamorphoses , The Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971). [BACK]

20. The hatred of Marchino's wife echoes what Agamemnon, thinking of how he was murdered by his wife Clytemnestra, tells Odysseus in book 11 of the Odyssey , that there is no protection from a jealous woman. Marchino's wife makes a similar claim when she tells Ranaldo that "No creature is more terrifying, / Crueler and more incendiary, / Than is the wife in love when she / Is scorned and falls to jealousy" ("Lo animal che è più crudo e spaventevole, / Ed è più ardente che foco che sia, / É la moglie che un tempo fu amorevole, / Che, disprezata, cade in zelosia," OI 1.8.37). Agamemnon's concubine was the unmarried Cassandra, who could read the future though no one believed her. Marchino makes love to Stella who, after he murders her husband, is technically a widow. Boiardo alters Homer to catch the disruptive effect a beautiful widow has on the wife of another man. [BACK]

21. "Ma qual vendetta lo potria far sazio / Ché pensando al suo oltraggo in veritade / Non v'era pena di tal crudeltade" ( OI 1.8.45). The original lacks punctuation, allowing the reading I give, whereas Scaglione's edition puts the phrase "considering her crime" with what follows, making the text read: "considering her crime, there is no punishment too cruel for her.'' This reading fits Marchino's desire to be the lewdest man who ever lived, but we need not rely on the lectio facilior . Marchino seems an even crueler man if he analyzes his victim's psychology, as he does, I have suggested, when he woos Stella by wiles, not force. [BACK]

22. Virgil's Aeneid , trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam, 1981), 8.486. The Latin text is that of R. A. B. Mynors, P. Vergili Maronis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). Boiardo follows Virgil closely: "And to the corpse

[Marchino] had Stella bound / Hand to hand, and face tight to face" ("Fece la dama a quel corpo legate, / Viso con viso stretto, e mano a mano," OI 1.8.46). [BACK]

23. Spurned by Ranaldo, Angelica flies home to the East and seeks help from the magician Malagise, Ranaldo's cousin, to help her seduce Ranaldo. She offers Malagise his release from the prison where she had confined him (following an earlier attempt outside of Paris to rape her), plus the restoration of his magic manual if he will act as a go-between for her.

Malagise flies to Spain, where Ranaldo is commanding the army of Charlemagne, and informs his cousin of Angelica's offer to release Malagise if only Ranaldo will sleep with Angelica. When Ranaldo still refuses, Malagise devises a plan to lure Ranaldo to a more enticing location by means of a pilotless ship that ferries Ranaldo beyond the Straits of Gibraltar to an island named after its principal building, Palazo Zoioso (the Pleasure Palace). Although a damsel tells Ranaldo that he is a prisoner of the island of the Pleasure Palace and cannot leave, Ranaldo has only to walk away and board ship to depart. This inconsistency makes the allegory of love clear enough: Ranaldo is a prisoner insofar as the damsel finds it inconceivable that he will reject Angelica's offer of love—"You can't refuse" ("Non pôi disdire," OI 1.8.12). So strong is the effect of Merlin's Fountain, however, that Ranaldo disdains the offer of love. Furious at Ranaldo's refusal, Malagise once again transports him, this time to Castle Cruel. [BACK]

24. Geertz, Local Knowledge , 43. [BACK]

25. Ibid., 46. [BACK]

26. The silent file that Angelica leaves for Ranaldo suggests a similar inadequacy of narrative terms to represent Ranaldo's final reaction to Castle Cruel. It functions as a sign of Angelica's sharp anguish, but it also permits Ranaldo to escape and use his sword. Boiardo had no precedent for using the file that makes no sound to suggest the social or bureaucratic structure that enables justice to operate. [BACK]

27. E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 18. Recent critics have complained that Tillyard, in his Elizabethan World Picture , projects a static, conservative society as a Renaissance ideal. Catherine Belsey, for example, accuses him of fostering a "lost Elizabethan Utopia" and promoting "in the principle of order the necessity of submission to the proper authorities, social and divine" ("Literature, History, Politics," in Modern Criticism and Theory , ed. David Lodge [New York: Longman, 1988], 400-410, 400). Cf. Patricia Parker ( Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender; Property [New York: Methuen, 1987], 115, 125) and Jonathan Dollimore, who attacks

Tillyard's representation of a static social system ("Introduction: Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism, and the New Historicism," in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism , ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985], 2-17, especially 5-7). These critics generally regard Tillyard as a representative of British colonial thought, someone who cites with admiration Ulysses' speech on degree, from Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida , a passage that has been reprinted for years in the Norton Anthology of English Literature , vol. 1, but was dropped from the sixth edition (New York: Norton, 1993). The example from Boiardo suggests that Tillyard's purpose was not so much to defend a new social order or promote a proper disposition as it was to read the romance images that inform Elizabethan literature. The Innamorato 's double perspective—as when Marchino first tries his role as a courtly persuader and then falls back on the extremes of violence—fits what Tillyard calls "a habit of mind most difficult for a modern to grasp, being at once fantastic and closely allied to action" ( Elizabethan World Picture , 45). [BACK]

29. Cicero, De Legibus , 1.14.40. [BACK]

30. Ibid., 2.4.10. [BACK]

31. In the vulgate Lancelot Dolorous Guard presents a variable set of strange customs that Lancelot must overcome to win the love of Queen Guenevere. When he does and their affair seems assured, Lancelot changes the name of the castle to Joyous Guard. Inside of Dolorous Guard are found, among other things, the statue of a woman holding keys, a copper pillar which the big key opens, a coffer which the little key unlocks, thirty pipes, and a demonic organ from which devilish voices emerge to enchant the castle. These objects are a "bricolage mythologique," part of a figurative space that relies on the allegorical imagination of the audience (Daniel Poirion, "La Douloureuse Garde," in Approches du Lancelot en prose , ed. Jean Dufournet [Paris: Champion, 1984]: 25-48, 40). Its features change each time Lancelot encounters it, and his adventures there have several dénouements. Its customs are not explained. Rather, the customs "are alleged as the justification for many acts performed during the Conquest. They are arbitrary phenomena, announced from time to time when a need for justification of behavior arises. . . . They are the rules of the game, apparently created by the author as the game progressed" (J. Neale Carman, "The Conquests of the Grail Castle and Dolorous Guard,'' PMLA 85 [1970]: 433-443, 442). [BACK]

32. Geertz, Local Knowledge , 41. [BACK]

33. Aeneid 6.421; Inferno 6.27. [BACK]

34. Rime 103.22 ( Enciclopedia Dantesca [Rome: Trecanni, 1971], 6:665; my translation). Dante found the image of internal suffering in the poems of Guiraut de Calanso ( Enciclopedia Dantesca , 3:651, s.v. "lima"). [BACK]

35. See James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of "The Faerie Queene " (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 368 n. 154. [BACK]

36. "Pereunt quos appulit aequor" ("He slew the strangers whom the sea brought to shore") (Lucan, The Civil War ( Pharsalia ), trans. J. D. Duff, Loeb Classical Library [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969], 4.606 [218-219]). [BACK]

37. David Quint, Epic and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 165. [BACK]

38. See OI 1.17.24-29 and 2.3.57. Rubicone brings out Ranaldo's violent side just as Lucan's Caesar reveals his true, antirepublican character by crossing the Rubicon river. [BACK]

39. Boiardo's poem shares the general Renaissance disdain for the lower classes, Antonio Franceschetti argues in "Eroi, soldati, e popoli nel mondo dell' Innamorato e del Furioso, " in Humanitas e poesia: Studi in onore di Gioacchino Paparelli (Salerno: Pietro Laveglia, 1988-1990), 117-142. Nonetheless, as Stephen Greenblatt shows in a well-known essay, the ways in which an artist depicts even the murdering of peasants tell us something about his deeper social values ("Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion," Representations 1 [1983]: 1-29). Boiardo, as an aristocrat, depended on the past for his identity, but Castle Cruel indicates a poet who worried deeply about the loss of natural law and the power of experience and the recent past to motivate human behavior. [BACK]

40. Quint argues that Virgil associated the wanderings of romance with history's losers ( Epic and Emphre , 9). I would argue that Boiardo regarded errancy as a temporary truancy for the privileged. [BACK]

41. See Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). It is Baron's civic humanism, traveling through the centuries, sometimes in the open, sometimes hidden, that J. G. A. Pocock in The Machiavellian Moment (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975) traces through the seventeenth century to show how it developed into an ideology of republicanism that supported the American revolution. [BACK]

42. Ibid., 49. [BACK]

43. Ibid., 71. [BACK]

44. Translated by Edmund G. Gardner, Dukes and Poets of Ferrara (1904; New York: Haskell House, 1968), 70 n. 1. [BACK]

45. The index to my translation of the Orlando Innamorato (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) traces how these characters appear first in stories and then in the story . [BACK]

46. Cicero, De Legibus , 1.15.42. [BACK]

47. Ibid., 1.15.42-43. [BACK]

48. Cavallo, Boiardo's "Orlando Innamorato, " 113. For other recent assessments, see Peter Marinelli, Ariosto and Boiardo: The Origins of "Orlando Furioso " (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), and Antonio Franceschetti, ''II Boiardo e l'avvio del Furioso, " in Da Dante al Manzoni , ed. Bianca Maria Da Rif and Claudio Griffio (Florence: Olschki, 1991), 111-130, 123 (arguing that Ariosto's heroes reason and make decisions, in contrast to Boiardo's knights). [BACK]

49. "fosse iustizia, o fosse crudeltade" ( OF 11.52). Like the custom of Castle Cruel, the custom of the Ebudans emerges from the pathos of a victimized victim. Proteus invades the island to punish a father who has punished his daughter for being raped by Proteus: "As the story makes clear, woman is punished for sins she did not commit and punished again for being the victim of sins she was unable to avoid" (Valeria Finucci, The Lady, Vanishes: Subjectivity and Representation in Castiglione and Ariosto [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992], 138). [BACK]