Nur ad-Din to Norandino: The Middle East in Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato. (original) (raw)
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Renaissance Society of America, 2024
The theme of the Crusades has always fascinated many European writers of the late Middle Ages. Even on the Italian peninsula, this grand historical and religious event ignited the passions of numerous authors and sparked their imagination. Elements linked to the world of the Crusades can be found in works such as the Novellino, the Conti di Antichi Cavalieri, the chivalric romances in verse and prose, and the cantari. They can also be found in the works of famous authors like Francesco Petrarca, Antonio Pucci, Fazio degli Uberti, and many others in early Italian literature. Among all these authors, Giovanni Boccaccio and his prose masterpiece, the Decameron, are not exempt from these influences. Within his collection of short stories, numerous characters associated with the Crusades (such as Saladin, Frederick Barbarossa, Messer Torello, Charles of Anjou) as well as many locations (such as Alexandria in Egypt, Cyprus, and Armenia) can be found. The aim of this paper is to isolate all these elements and analyze them in the context of historical events and texts that predate the Decameron, in order to reconstruct Boccaccio’s knowledge of the Crusades and, above all, to understand how he incorporated this knowledge into his collection.
Saracens and Turks in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso: Sheer Imagination or Allusions to Reality?
Nordic Journal of Renaissance Studies, 2019
Ariosto critics usually underscored a positive and respectful rendition of the Muslim enemy, interpreting Orlando Furioso as representing an openminded and modern attitude towards Islam and Muslims in general, yet the presentation in the poem of the conflicts between Christians and Muslims does articulate a critical, albeit nuanced attitude towards Muslims. Interpretations should take the context into account: Italy’s geo-political situation vis-à-vis the Ottoman expansion – particularly in the Balkans, historical events and the huge amount of humanistic and historiographical writings from the first decades of the 16th century in which we find a similar complexity in the attitude towards the Turks.
ARIOSTO AND THE ARABS, Contents and Introduction
Ariosto and the Arabs: Contexts for the Orlando Furioso, 2022
Among the most dynamic and influential literary texts of the European sixteenth century, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1532) emerged from a world whose horizons were rapidly changing, and the poem presents itself as a prism through which to examine various links in the chain of interactions that characterized the Mediterranean region from late antiquity, through the medieval period, into early modernity, and beyond. The idea for this volume—and of the project from which it originated—takes its point of departure in Jorge Luis Borges’s celebrated short poem “Ariosto y los Arabes” (1960), which sees the Furioso as the hinge of a past and future literary culture that circulates between Europe and the Middle East. Protagonist of both historical conflict and cultural exchange, the Muslim “Saracen” represents the essential “Other” in Ariosto’s work, but the Orlando furioso also engages with the wider network of linguistic, political, and faith communities that defined the Mediterranean basin of its time. The sixteen contributions assembled here, produced by a diverse group of scholars who work on Europe, Africa, and Asia, consequently encompass several intertwined areas of analysis—philology, religious and social history, cartography, material and figurative arts, and performance—in order to shed new light on the relational systems generated by and illustrative of Ariosto’s great poem.
Mediterranean Studies Association 26 th Annual International Congress, 2024
Military propaganda–if any–haunts war narratives of the crusades in the Mediterranean basin, starting with medieval Christian recovery treatises, like Marino Sanudo’s Liber secretorum fidelium crucis de Marino Sanudo (Venice, 1321), produced to fuel the western rulers’ appetite to launch new crusade projects to recover the Holy Land, celebrating war narratives as a prelude to action. Lebanese novelist and jurist Nabil Saleh, on the contrary, plays with the literary codes of today’s counterfactual history in his novel Outremer (1998)–set in Acre in the thirteenth century–to denounce any form of propaganda, whatever shore of the Mediterranean it comes from. After his The Qadi and the Fortune Teller (1996) set in nineteenth-century Ottoman Beirut and before his The Curse of Ezechiel (2009) set in Phoenician Tyre besieged by Alexandre, he depicts the Mediterranean crusading heritage as the theatre of varied political agendas, hardline fanaticism, heresies and persecutions of all kinds./La propagande - militaire s’il en est - hante les textes se rapportant aux croisades dans le bassin Méditerranéen, à commencer par les traités de recouvrement chrétiens de la fin du Moyen Âge, tel le Liber secretorum fidelium crucis du Vénitien Marino Sanudo (1321), destinés à relancer l’effort des souverains occidentaux dans de nouveaux projets de croisades pour reconquérir la Terre sainte par l’exaltation du récit de guerre comme prélude à l’action. Jouant avec les codes des fictions contrefactuelles d’aujourd’hui, le roman Outremer du libanais Nabil Saleh - par ailleurs juriste - situé à Acre au XIIIe siècle, dénonce au contraire toute forme de propagande, de quelque rive de la Méditerranée qu’elle vienne. Après The Qadi and the Fortune Teller (1996) situé dans la Beyrouth du XIXe siècle sous le joug ottoman, et avant The Curse of Ezechiel (2009) situé dans la cité phénicienne de Tyr assiégée par Alexandre, il décrit l’héritage de la Méditerranée au temps de croisades comme le théâtre d’agendas politiques variés, de fanatisme pur et dur, d’hérésies et de persécutions en tous genres.
"Introduction" in The Mediterranean Corso Wars in Narratives. Fields, Collections, Series.
ANR_CORSO, 2010
A. Duprat, ‘Introduction’ in The Mediterranean Corso wars in Narratives. Fields, collections and series. Online publication of the CORSO project, November 2010. URL http://www.oroc-crlc.paris- sorbonne.fr/index.php/visiteur/Projet-CORSO/Ressources/La-guerre-de-course-en-recits. Abstract: "On the morrow of the defeat of the Ottomans at the hands of the temporarily-unified forces of the Catholic powers of Europe under the Holy League (1571), the open warfare between the Ottoman Empire and the Christian nations of Europe gave way to the golden age of the Corso, or state-sponsored privateering, as well as different forms of public or private maritime violence made possible by the instability of the diplomatic and military relations between the regencies and kingdoms of North Africa, which became the Barbary states, and the fleets of the different nations of Europe. This dossier, composed of 17 studies by specialists of 16th and 17th narratives, edited and introduced by Anne Duprat, examines this history from the point of view of the narratives produced by the captives, those eyewitnesses thrust by force into the adventure of the Corsair wars.