Università Roma Tre

Women differently warriors in the epics of chivalry

If in the older tradition of the Carolingian cycle female characters have very little space to the point of being defined as Byzantine mosaic figures, as Rosanna Pettinelli has observed, Boiardo invents Angelica and with her appearance she consigns the women of the canter tradition to the past. In the poems of Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso, there is in fact a composite female universe ranging from wicked women to sorceresses, from women who succumb to the sentiment of love to the heroines of antiquity and of contemporary times themselves, who take on a very special prominence and are characterised as differently warrior women. The course will retrace their features through the anthological selection of parts taken from Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, in the light of contemporary critical debate.

The Department of Humanities' e-learning platform Moodle will feature the anthology of passages from the works of Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso that will be analysed, together with pdfs of recent critical essays.
Reference bibliography:
Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, any edition, also digital, recommended those edited by Lanfranco Caretti, Cesare Segre, Remo Ceserani, Emilio Bigi.
Matteo Maria Boiardo, Orlando Innamorato, any edition, also digital, recommended those edited by Andrea Canova, Milano, Rizzoli, 2018
Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata, any edition, also digital, recommended those edited by Lanfranco Caretti, Marta Savini, Franco Tomasi
Deanna Shemek, Dame erranti. Donne e trasgressione sociale nell'Italia del Rinascimento, Mantova, Tre Lune, 2003