The Novels of Chivalry, 1300–1600

Though politically and socially diverse, all regions of Italy welcomed the courtly culture issuing from northern and southern France. Monferrato and the Venetia were particularly receptive to Occitan poetry. During and after the Albigensian Crusade (1208–1228) several troubadours were attracted to the court of the powerful Marquis Boniface I of Monferrato, and after his death their frequent reproaches to his unworthy successors were an eloquent example of the troubadours' court function of education and moral judgment. The principal area of diffusion of Occitan literature was the Venetia, particularly near Treviso at the court of Ezzelino da Romano's brother Alberico after 1236, and thanks mainly to Uc de Saint-Circ (Faidit). Between 1220 and 1240 Uc authored many of the vidas and razos of Occitan poets and their poems as well as the Donat Proensal, the first grammar of a European vernacular.

It was in that area of northeastern Italy between Trieste and Padua, including the territory of Ferrara, that a Franco-Venetian literature of chivalry flourished in prose and verse from at least the end of the thirteenth century through the beginning of the fifteenth. Its Mischsprache, a hybrid language that, for all its local elements, was basically French, testifies to the vitality of the subject matter, since it was widely enjoyed by illiterate yet diglossic popular audiences in public squares. In that literature a felicitous juxtaposition of the two matières of France and Brittany found its roots, leading to the famous “fusion” (the term goes back to Pio Rajna) or “contamination” of the two rival and somewhat incompatible matters of Charlemagne and King Arthur which has long been credited to Boiardo and Ariosto.

This Franco-Venetian literature, much discussed by Vincenzo Crescini, Adolf Mussafia, Pio Rajna, Giulio Bertoni, and others,^[54] reflected

the presence in that region of a strong contingent of aggressive feudal families that controlled the land and dominated the communes. Rolandino of Padua's thirteenth-century chronicle of the March of Treviso maps out the history of the region, including the Venetian hinterland all the way to Verona, as a history of four great families: the Marquises of Este, the Da Romano, the Camposampiero, and the Da Camino.^[55] The situation was similar in most of northern Italy including the northwest, in the hands of the Savoy, the Marquises of Monferrato, and those of Saluzzo. Their hold on local communes was much like that of the feudal lords of, say, the duchy of Burgundy, the earldom of Lancaster, and the archbishopric of Cologne.^[56]

The successful Entrée d'Espagne of around 1320, the work of a learned and inspired Paduan poet, displayed a mixture of Carolingian warlikeness and Arthurian adventurousness: Roland abandons Charles out of pique and embarks on Oriental wanderings that also entangle him in an erotic situation. Around 1330 the Entrée found its continuation in La prise de Pampelune, dedicated to Nicolò I d'Este (d. 1344) by Nicolò da Verona, a court poet who was probably a doctor of laws at Padua.^[57] The text geographically closest to Boiardo and Ariosto was perhaps La Guerra d'Attila, a vast poem of the second half of the fourteenth century. Niccolò da Casola, a Bolognese notary in exile in the Venetia and then Ferrara, composed it by encouragement from his Ferrarese friend Simone Bisone and left it unfinished after more than 37,000 lines in sixteen cantos, with the intended dedication to Count Bonifacio Ariosti, uncle of the Marquis of Ferrara, Aldobrandino d'Este.^[58] It shared with both Boiardo and Ariosto not only the clear courtly intent of celebrating the Este family by recalling the brave stand against the Huns of their mythical ancestor, Prince Forest, but also the mixing of knightly valor and romantic love in the story of another legendary ancestor of the Este, the handsome Accarino. Thus was the wedding of the two matières handed over to the later Ferrarese poets.^[59]

Both directly and through the intermediary of the Franco-Venetian tradition, the stories of chivalry also filtered into Tuscany by way of the popular jongleurs known as canterini di piazza, or cantimbanchi, the best of whom was Andrea da Barberino (ca. 1370 after 1431). Andrea skillfully used Franco-Venetian as well as Tuscan sources for his several prose romances, including the extremely popular Reali di Francia and Guerino il Meschino. Franco-Venetian and Tuscan traditions came together once again in La Spagna in rima (mid-fifteenth century), where the Tuscan octave was used to clothe the matter of the Entrée d'Espagne

and of the Tuscan Rotta di Roncisvalle in verse. La Spagna also had a shorter Emilian version, surviving in a miniatured codex prepared for Borso d'Este in 1453. Through the Tuscan Orlando and La Spagna in rima the medieval matter transmitted in the Franco-Venetian texts provided a fertile background for the Morgante by Luigi Pulci, a sort of communal court poet who was a member of the salon of Lucrezia Tornabuoni, Lorenzo de' Medici's mother.^[60]

Italians performed the remarkable feat of saving lively medieval traditions in both genres of manners and of chivalry when France and Germany tended to abandon them. Except for the prose Lancelot, Chrétien himself and his other French contemporaries and immediate followers ceased to be read after 1400 even in France: they were in any event linguistically unapproachable. After 1500 the glorious stories of medieval knights continued to be of vital importance in European literature thanks, chiefly, to the new Italian versions.

Distortions and original interpretations contained in popular texts became part of the Italian chivalric tradition. The legend of Tristan in particular was reworked into cyclical compilations, foremost among them the Tristano Riccardiano of around 1300, and the still broader summation of Arthurian matter, the Tavola Ritonda, usually dated between 1320 and 1340; both of these were Tuscan. The Tristano shows that the story had taken roots in Italy in a form that was clearly outside the mainstream of courtly love. The adventure between Tristan and the (married) Dama dell'Agua della Spina (chaps. 41–44) is overtly sexual and entails the consummation of avowed desire at the first private encounter. Starting with King Mark, who aggressively rivaled Tristan but hid his jealousy like a courtly dissimulator, the men at court acted enviously and treacherously, Ghedin openly scheming to destroy Tristan. This way of handling Arthurian lore confirms that Petrarca's decisive contribution to the crystallization of courtesy in the love lyric drew directly from the Provençals through the philosophically-bent Stil Nuovo poets, whereas the cantimbanchi who operated in the mixed climate of northern Italian courts and burghers' communes could hardly appreciate the tense purity of erotic sublimation underlying the ideals of chivalry.^[61]

L'Entrée d'Espagne, La prise de Pampelune, and La Guerra d'Attila, we have seen, acted as precedents for the “fusion” of genres, but the fusion also had such French precedents as the thirteenth-century Huon de Bordeaux. Pulci's Morgante, too, mixed some characteristics of both genres, though somewhat superficially: his main characters, Orlando and Rinaldo, spent most of their time running after personal adven-

ture, in disregard for Charlemagne's needs. In terms of aesthetic value and impact on future reception, however, Boiardo's and Ariosto's “fusion” was indeed a signal achievement that changed the nature of the genre. H.-R. Jauss (“Theory of Genres”: 82) has neatly commented on the phenomenon in a way that combines his “test of commutation,” designed to discriminate genre from genre, with the relevance of reception or reader-response to determine values and meanings within literary forms.

Despite the gradual assimilation of the heroic epic to the knightly romance in the French tradition, heroes like Roland or Yvain, ladies like Alda or Enide, and lords like Charlemagne or Artus [sic in trans.] were not brought from out of the one genre into the other; a reception through another tradition, the Italian one, was first called for, so that through a fusion of the two French genres into a new one, the so-called romance epic, the originally distinct groups of characters could be transposed into a single structure of action.

The fusion involved more than merging the textual characteristics of two French genres in their mature form; it also brought back some early Celtic elements which had been downgraded or brushed aside altogether. The marvelous of Boiardo and Ariosto gave new life to the giants and fairies of the original Celtic lore, which Chrétien and his followers had replaced with tall knights and sensuous maidens. Together with the fairies, numerous and powerful in intrigue—especially Morgan-le-Fay, (very busy in the background of, say, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight )—Merlin and his acolytes also came back in full glory. They had played a major role in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini, but only the thirteenth-century prose romances found room for them within their cyclic treatment of Arthurian matter.

Despite the bold humor of his narrative, critics have attributed to Boiardo (1441–1494) the only true revival of medieval cortesia in a serious vein.^[62] Boiardo did feel that the virtues of true chivalry were still gracing the court of Ferrara:

Se onor di corte e di cavalleria
può dar diletto a l'animo virile,
a voi dilettarà l'istoria mia,
gente legiadra, nobile e gentile
che seguite ardimento e cortesia,
la qual mai non dimora in petto vile.^[63]  

Boiardo's revival of chivalry was made possible by the new climate of refeudalization that was part of the successful Este policy, consciously

pursued, according to recent historical investigation, as an instrument of social and political control.^[64]

Croce's elegant formula, which defined Boiardo's poetic inspiration as “il gusto dell'energico e del primitivo” (a taste for primitive energy), can be reset within the framework of our inquiry by correlating such instincts to the traditional military qualities (militia —the theme of the Germanic sagas, vigorously espoused by the reactionary clerical circles), now freshly felt as knightly vis vitalis. But Boiardo's characters are more than just warriors: they can be courtly and courteous knights. Beyond the enjoyment of the supremely entertaining spectacle of tall tales, the more serious part of Boiardo's attitude includes a perception of chivalric virtù that is internal, made of inner control of the will, relying on force but with the help of more courtierly astuzia, and resulting from an eager quest for self-discovery. It implies subordination of the individual to the rules of the ideal chivalric code, serving others (lord or lady) rather than individual interest, and it includes pietà prevailing over ira, humane compassion above soldierly anger. At the conclusion of a duel the winner will show respect for the dignity of his worthy rival. Both Christians and pagans can possess this virtù, whose perfect hero is Brandimarte (first a pagan, then a Christian): “un Saracin, che un altro sì perfetto / non ha la terra che è dal mar voltata /  . . . / ma sopra tutto la persona umana / era cortese, il suo leggiadro core / fu sempre acceso da gentile amore.”^[65]

One of the most memorable passages of the Orlando Innamorato is the friendly argument between Orlando and Agricane when they are resting for the night before resuming their mortal duel (1.18.41–45). Orlando contrasts Agricane's barbarous version of knighthood as mere rule of force with his own courtly view of it as made of arms and studies—the ancient epic topos of sapientia and fortitudo in a Renaissance setting, but well anticipated by the medieval image of the literate knight at court. In his spirited way of tackling old stories and his own fitting inventions, Boiardo coupled cortesia with allegrezza (e.g., OI 2.1.2), reminding us of the hilaritas the curiales expected in their successful leaders, despite the frowns this caused among ascetic reformers.

Ariosto continued Boiardo's juxtaposition of knightly “manliness” to true courtesy in the form of joining sapientia to fortitudo (see Orlando Furioso 20.1–20.2, extending it to women who have also excelled, some in arms, like Camilla, and some in letters, like Sappho: “Le donne antique hanno mirabil cose / fatto ne l'arme e nelle sacre muse”).^[66] A synthesis of the basic themes of the medieval lyric, epic, and romance, added to the ironic echo of Virgil's and Homer's exclusive references to

their hero's deeds, is programmatically achieved by Ariosto from his very first octave, a lucid index of his power of concentration in a deceptively plain-sounding “median” style. “Le donne e i cavalier, I'arme e gli amori, / le cortesie, I'audaci imprese io canto”: the deeds of prowess performed by knights out of courtois love for their ladies will be the subject of his singing, he says—military valor (militia ), that is, aimed at winning a high lady's love.^[67] The double chiasmus ties together the traditional ingredients.

Title notwithstanding, from the vantage point of the poem's courtly function, namely of winning the favor of the Este patrons, the main character is Ruggiero:

  Ruggier, come in ciascun suo degno gesto,
d'alto valor, di cortesia solea
dimostrar chiaro segno e manifesto,
e sempre più magnanimo apparea.
(OF 41.4.1–4)

The career of this paragon of chivalry makes a true Bildungsroman, a novel of education of the hero who, like Perceval, gradually finds his way. From its beginning Ruggiero's career is mapped on the pattern of the Perceval story. He starts out bumbling, like Perceval/Parzival, then takes, or tries to take Angelica, just as Parzival had symbolically “raped” Jeschute in Wolfram, and finally goes through the perilous experience of Alcina's Garden of Pleasure.^[68] Perceval's mother had kept him in the wilderness in order to avoid his falling victim to the same passion of chivalry that had caused the deaths of both his father and his brothers. Likewise Ruggiero is isolated by his tutor or adoptive father, Atlante, within the impassable walls of a magic castle: this is meant to forestall his destiny, which Atlante knows will lead him to become a Christian in order to marry Bradamante. His life is surrounded by magic, like the mysterious events that studded Perceval's growth into manhood. Ruggiero has to overcome this string of enchantments by going through several wrong moral choices (like his entrapment in Alcina's garden) and recovering from their consequences; he then finds his way painfully by winning many tests of chivalric prowess, and finally attains the necessary degree of wisdom. It is precisely in Alcina's garden that Ruggiero makes a formal profession of courtliness and chivalry (6.80):

  Ruggier rispose: “Non ch'una battaglia,
ma per voi sarò pronto a farne cento:
di mia persona, in tutto quel che vaglia,

fatene voi secondo il vostro intento;
che la cagion ch'io vesto piastra e maglia
non è per guadagnar terre né argento,
ma sol per farne beneficio altrui,
tanto più a belle donne come vui.”^[69]

Even Orlando's madness was not entirely a novel idea, since it had precedents in both Yvain/Iwein and Perceval/Parzival. Yvain went mad when his wife abandoned him for an unintentional infraction of the code (forgetting his appointment with her); Parzival when, out of selfpity for having failed to ask the pertinent question of the ailing Anfortas, he renounced his saintly adviser Gurnemantz and even God, thus entering upon his period of Goteshaz, “hatred of God.” Inner moral substance and sense of purpose constitute true humanity, and they are the consequence of suffering and the realization of error, as again in the cases of Ruggiero and Orlando. Rodomonte himself, a new Starcatherus, brutal hero of pure militia, and in feudal terms the very image of the great lord who recognizes no superior and goes it alone, shares with Ruggiero and Orlando the fate of the warrior who will find out that he needs, above all, love, but that love must be won by loving truly, loyally, and through hard tests.

The French and German poets of romances, especially Chrétien, Hartmann, and Gottfried, had often taken a critical view of Arthur's court as guilty of formality of manners and superficiality of ethic. Mutatis mutandis, this theme surfaces again in the Orlando Furioso. One glaring case is Rinaldo's dogged and ill-humored defense of Gabrina in full awareness of her perfidy (apparently a derivation of the complicated episode of the “demoiselle toute chenue” in the prose Lancelot, the obnoxious hag who obliges Lancelot to abandon the rescue of Guenièvre in order to pursue all sorts of unpalatable services to her).^[70] The reader is struck by this supremely humorous example of empty formalism in the performance of courtly rules, which result not in justice but only in absurd constraints on behavior. In Boiardo and Ariosto, Doristella, Origille, and Gabrina echo the unworthy ladies Perceval and Gauvain served in Chrétien's poem, where one of them was declared to be worse than Satan (“pire que Sathanas,” Perceval v. 7456). Such episodes also easily remind us of Yvain (and Hartmann's Iwein ): Arthur's court was unable to recognize Yvain in the Knight of the Lion and gave aid to the devious Meleaganz and to Lunete's undeserving older sister, while it denied it to the virtuous Lunete as well as to Gauvain's brother-in-law. In the same story the seneschal Kay was typical as a bad and dishonest

judge of right and wrong, although even the most exemplary knights could act quite irresponsibly.

Ariosto's famous irony has seldom been traced further back than to Boiardo or, perhaps, to Pulci, but recent criticism has stressed (perhaps overstressed and overread) Chrétien's irony and that of succeeding poets of Arthurian romances (signally Hartmann and Gottfried) as part of that critical stance they often seemed to share toward the moral irresponsibility of the Arthurian court. In the prose cycles this irresponsibility became a cause of the court's downfall. We cannot tell whether Ariosto could detect such signs of ironic treatment in his French sources, or rather, if he did, he could attribute it to authorial intentions. Yet it is reasonable to assume that, rather than by his personality alone, his own unmistakable mood was induced at least in part by the very nature of his sources as he read them. The genre was ready for full parodic treatment of the kind we find in Teofilo Folengo's (d. 1544) burlesque Baldus, an inspiration to Rabelais for the way it echoed the popular spirit of reversal of roles and subversion of sociocultural hierarchies (in Bakhtin's sense).

On a more general level bordering on the metaphysical, this way of burlesquing the knight (an inherent aspect of the representation of the hero from the earliest romances) marks an artistic distancing from an idealized self-image which ostensibly does not coincide with a given social reality. The chivalrous and courtly knight is not simply a warrior or an aristocrat: his nobility is more ideal than social.^[71] Ariosto was the supreme master of this expression of ironic detachment, but it was characteristic of the genre to encourage the knight to look at himself critically. In a sense, all literature holds up an ideal dream of beauty and perfection at the same time that it contains the artistic consciousness of it as a fictional, though powerfully functional, dream. Lancelot, Gawain, Yvain, and Tristan are monumental embodiments of the divergence between ideal and reality: their sublime troubles are those of the inner incoherence of that very dream.

Ariosto's relationship to his society was one of both acceptance and resistance: he accepted the chivalric interests of the refeudalized Ferrara but he also knew that he had not been born to be a knight. In his humorous reference to Ippolito turning him from a poet into a knight (“di poeta cavallar mi feo,” Satire 6: 238) the choice of the deprecatory form cavallaro, “horseman,” betrays his protest at being forced to forego the sublime pleasures of his poetic vocation for the unwanted burdens of courtierly activities. Laying to rest De Sanctis's and Croce's image of a

poet willfully unconcerned with social realities, recent Ariosto criticism has brought forth the image of a man who brilliantly expressed his complex Weltanschauung by bending the received literary forms to his advantage. His “cosmic harmony” is a controlled form for a bitter view of the human condition.^[72]

The reception of Ariosto's masterpiece includes the invidious comparison with Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata and vice versa, in a farflung controversy that unfolded largely at the Este court of Ferrara. One aspect of the classicistic reaction to the Furioso is particularly relevant here. After Giraldi Cinthio's (1504–1573) and Nicolucci Pigna's (1530–1575) defenses of Ariosto's narrative format in 1554, the influence of the growing Aristotelianism persuaded many a critic, from Sperone Speroni (1501–1588) to the young Torquato Tasso (1562 preface to the Rinaldo ), Antonio Minturno (1563), Ludovico Castelvetro, Alessandro Piccolomini, and Filippo Sassetti (1575/1576), to voice a lively string of demurrers against elements of Ariosto's narrative method that contradicted basic Aristotelian norms. The polemic surrounding the Furioso had to do with the classicistic notion of regular genre, namely a literary form based on rational rules authorized and exemplified (possibly, also theorized) by ancient models and authors. This definition of genres and attendant rules was, as modern scholarship has increasingly emphasized, nothing but an invention of the Italian Cinquecento critics. Giraldi Cinthio, for one, first labeled the Furioso as a romanzo cavalleresco, a new, modern type of work with its own privileges.^[73] The ensuing classic-minded critics insisted on classifying the romances as a form of epic (as Tasso continued to do until his Discorsi of 1594), hence subject to the typical strictures of that genre, with the resulting exclusion of some of the most salient features of such works as the Furioso —and just about all of the most valid works of imagination, including, first and foremost, the Divina Commedia.

Specifically at issue were, first, the frequent authorial interventions in the form of (ironic) moral judgments on action and characters, especially in the exordia to the cantos; second, the constant interruptions of the action in order to shift from one to another of the plot's numerous threads. Chapter 24 of Aristotle's Poetics was the authority the classicists repeatedly invoked against authorial comments and infractions of narrative continuity, stigmatized as violations of verisimilitude and unity, respectively. In our own time Wayne Booth (The Rhetoric of Fiction, 1961) first pointed out the modern narratological bias against authorial presence, tracing it back to Flaubert and Henry

James, but it must be further historicized as a neoclassic Aristotelian norm, not shared by medieval narrators, who, qua narrators, were surely no less “credible” for breaking that norm.^[74] As noted, such medieval epics as the Nibelungenlied also shared the medieval habit of ironic intervention.^[75]

Ariosto clearly knew some of his medieval antecedents, at least through the Franco-Venetian versions, but the intentional obliteration of medieval lore that characterized the Renaissance induced the Cinquecento critics to ignore all that matter. Thus, typically, Sperone Speroni (probably shortly after 1560) rejected Giraldi Cinthio's claim that Ariosto's addresses to the reader carried on the oral minstrels' need to address their audiences at the beginning of each new episode in the course of their recitations. For Speroni such exordia were inventions of Boiardo and it was madness, “una pazzia,” to assume that they were a function of the recitation, just as Dante's or Petrarca's addresses to the reader at the beginning of cantos (in the Commedia and the Trionfi ) had nothing to do with such compositions being sung.^[76] Being part of the argument against the romanzi, this discourse invested the whole of that glorious episode of medieval literature.

As to the second critique, directed to the structural interruptions, Giraldi and Pigna felt that these much discussed incidents of “interlacing” enhanced the general suspense and held the reader's attention, whereas the more classic-minded critics considered them nothing but violations of the hallowed Aristotelian principle of unity, frustrating to the reader and unredeemable on any ground.^[77] Jacques Peletier du Mans (1517–1582), however, sagaciously defended the technique as early as 1555 in his Art poétique, specifically mentioning the French romans and their imitator Ariosto, and adducing the argument that the interruptions both provided a welcome suspense and heightened the readers' interest.^[78]

We remember that ironic authorial comments as well as the interlacing technique that is characteristic of Boiardo's narrative and, more spectacularly still, Ariosto's, had a well-tested antecedent in Chrétien, Gottfried, Wolfram, and, especially for the practice of interlacing, the authors of the anonymous prose romances of the Vulgate Lancelot/Grail cycle. Both features also distinguished the romance from the classical epic. Eugène Vinaver has masterfully analyzed the precedents of interlacing, with particular regard to their landmark outcome in Sir Thomas Malory's (d. 1471) Le Morte Darthur.^[79] The matter is related to the structural and formal character of the romance which, starting

with Chrétien, involved a basic bipolarity—a much debated subject ever since the pioneering study of Wilhelm Kellermann.^[80] Chrétien's romances are built on a dual set of adventures involving two heroes or two couples: Alexandre/Soredamors and Cligès/Fenice in Cligès, Gauvain and Lancelot in Le chevalier de la charrete, Gauvain and Yvain in Yvain, and Gauvain and Perceval in Perceval (in Erec the division consists in the two phases of the hero's career). In some instances the two heroes occupy the two parts of a poem, in others their adventures intertwine. This structural duality further developed into a constitutive multiplicity of juxtaposed and integrated stories of individual knights which extended into their full genealogies—a narrative schema that became characteristic of the thirteenth-century prose cycles. The individual found his place in society by discovering his identity in a series of adventures outside society, specifically, outside Arthur's court. In the early romances the hero could learn to live without, above, or against Arthurian society, but this produced either an uncourtly opposition that the society could not abide (this was Tristan's case) or the discovery of a transcendental, mystical salvation higher than the ways of ordinary society (as in Perceval).

More generally, the Aristotelian critics blamed the romances still available to them, namely the cyclic compilations in prose and then Boiardo's and Ariosto's poems, for lack of unity in the plot and unconcern for the reader's ability to keep track of the plot as a whole.^[81] This remained Tasso's main objection in his Discorsi del poema eroico (1594).^[82] Nevertheless, in both Innamorato and Furioso the specific feature of interlacing, although carried to extreme consequences, contained a basic finality and order. The heroes find their goal at last by overcoming the dispersive obstacles interposed by moral and military enemies. In so doing they either return to their point of origin, like Orlando and Rinaldo returning to the war after the pursuit of Angelica, or they find their true goal, like Ruggiero and Bradamante achieving their fateful union.