The Italian Love Poetry of Ludovico Ariosto: Court Culture and Classicism - Paperback

by Lina Bolzoni (Author), Giada Guassardo (Author)

Throughout his life and in parallel with his better-known works, Ludovico Ariosto composed a number of love poems in Italian. These, however, he never authorised to be printed; instead, he jealously kept them private, and tried, but eventually failed, to organise them into a lyric collection. This multifaceted and diversified production bespeaks both Ariosto's engagement with the more contemporary strands of lyric poetry and his effort, prompted by the debates of court Humanism, to revivify the classics. This book offers the first updated comprehensive reading of Ariosto's lyric poetry, touching on matters of self-fashioning, on his ideology and ethics of love, and on his verse portrayals of women. By adopting a predominantly intertextual perspective and availing itself of the most recent philological breakthroughs in the field, it aims to contextualise this output against its historical and intellectual background, while at the same time exploring its links with Ariosto's other works, in order to understand the role played by the lyric genre in the system of his oeuvre.