Elegantly taking its title from a poem by Borges, this volume explores the representation of the Arab Other in Ariosto's Orlando furioso and digs into the possible relationships between the tradition of European chivalric romance and the non-Christian Mediterranean world. While analyzing how Ariosto recasts the image of the so-called Saracens that comes down to him from the chanson de geste tradition, the contributions of this volume also set themselves the objective to locate the Furioso in a much wider network of intercultural relationships that extends—on real as well as on imaginary maps—from India and China via Northern Africa to Italy and even to the Netherlands.
The volume begins with a section on the presence of Arabic language and culture inside the Furioso. After a careful inquiry, Mario Casari reaches the conclusion that Ariosto took little (if any) notice of the interest in Arabic among Italian humanists. Jacopo Gesiot's article takes up the question of language and argues that the voice of the Other becomes lexically much more prominent in the Furioso. The articles by Maria Pavlova and Stefano Jossa then tackle the issue of how Saracens and Islam are represented in Ariosto. As Pavlova demonstrates, Ariosto endows Saracen characters with a dignity unknown to earlier romances. Jossa points out that there are references to Islamic religious practices in the Furioso, but that they subliminally refer to Christian controversies of the early Reformation period.
The second section shifts the focus away from the Furioso to the intercultural contacts that may have impacted its production and reception. The scope of the enquiry now becomes very wide and often includes synchronous developments or contemporary contexts, for instance, the history of Arabic literature in Mamluk Egypt and Syria in Thomas Bauer's article or the presence of Jewish culture in Renaissance Ferrara, discussed by Fabrizio Lelli. Claudia Ott proposes a new hypothesis as to how stories of female infidelity could have made their way from the Arabic-speaking world into the Furioso, while Vincent Barletta analyses how non-European figures such Angelica and Medoro are transformed in the poetry of Camões.
Rather than engaging with certain themes and contexts, the following two sections put an emphasis on different media, namely on the visual arts and on oral as well as theatrical performance. Giovanni Ricci's article, which introduces the third section, joins Casari in arguing that Ariosto's actual knowledge of Arabic culture was limited. The contributions by Massimo Rossi, Anna Contadini, Vincenzo Farinella, and Monica Preti, also assembled in the third section, treat such subjects as early modern cartography, the presence of Middle Eastern art objects in Italy, the visual reception of the Saracen character Rodomonte, and the intercultural background of illustrations to the Furioso. The fourth section, dedicated to performance practices, includes two articles on contexts relatively remote from Ariosto: the history of Arabic heroic narrative outlined by Dwight F. Reynolds, and the genre of Medieval Greek romance, which is at the center of an article by Adam J. Goldwyn and Przemysław T. Marciniak. The volume then concludes with Michael Wyatt's panorama on oral performance from troubadour poetry to modern Sicilian puppet shows.
All the articles of the volume are beautifully researched, demonstrate great expertise in their respective fields, and add up to an impressive landscape of European Arab relationships in Ariosto's time. The ties between the contexts that come into play and the Furioso remain relatively thin, however. This fact is openly acknowledged by the editors, who claim to provide a “wider relational perspective” (13), as well as by various contributors, who speak of unaccomplished contiguities (25) or tangential reflections (216). These reservations are warranted. Despite the number of sources taken into account, it turns out that the impact of Arabic culture on the Furioso is relatively limited—and the same holds true vice versa. This becomes even more evident when one compares the findings of this volume to a similar shift in perspective that has taken place in Cervantes scholarship in the last two decades. The reconsideration of Morisco culture was able to renew the interpretation of the Quixote substantially, whereas something similar seems impossible to achieve with regard to the Furioso, given the two authors’ different cultural biographies.
The volume constructs a rich but somewhat loose context around Ariosto's activity as a Ferrarese poet, thus indirectly suggesting that other contemporary concerns, such as the Italian wars, are much more important to the analysis of his work.
