A recepção de Ludovico Ariosto e Torquato Tasso na épica feminina portuguesa: as epopeias de Soror Maria de Mesquita Pimentel

O presente artigo tem como objetivo avaliar a dívida que a poesia épica conventual feminina portuguesa contrai em relação a poesia épica produzida em Itália, nomeadamente com os poemas de Ludovico Ariosto e de Torquato Tasso. Nesse sentido, pretende-se demonstrar como os poemas épico-bíblicos de Soror Maria de Mesquita Pimentel, isto é, o Memorial da Infância de Cristo (1639), o Memorial dos Milagres de Cristo (editado em 2014) e o Memorial da Paixão de Cristo (inédito), reflete e dialoga com o Orlando Furioso e a Gerusalemme Liberata. Conclui-se que os poemas de Soror Mesquita Pimentel estabelecem com estes poemas italianos relações intertextuais que corroboram o quão fecunda foi a fortuna de Ariosto e Tasso em Portugal, a ponto de serem conhecidos entre os muros da clausura feminina.

El entrelazamiento en el Quijote

El entrelazamiento en el Quijote ofrece a Cervantes la oportunidad de desarrollar la figura y las funciones de Cide Hamete, como responsable de la mayor parte de las alternancias narrativas de la historia principal. No es esta la única diferencia en el uso de esta técnica tradicional en la narrativa caballeresca entre el Quijote y los tres interlocutores privilegiados de su diálogo intertextual: el Orlando furioso, el Orlando innamorato y el Amadís de Gaula. El cotejo de las fórmulas y las ocasiones del entrelazamiento, así como de la relación de aquellas con la materia narrativa, revelan una utilización del recurso por parte de Cervantes que si, por un lado, retoma modelos de los libros de caballerías, por el otro, reproduce los tonos y los modos en el tratamiento de la voz narrativa característicos de Ariosto y Boiardo.

Agency and Agnosis in the Orlando furioso

This article foregrounds human epistemological disorientation in the Orlando furioso with a view to theological implications which, if not rigorously followed up by Ariosto’s verse (too supple to endure rigor), are nevertheless made possible by its discourse. Beginning with the recurring fantasy-inducing impotence of will (madness) that unite the narrator with the characters, the article examines the Furioso’s own transition from romance to epic mode, aiming to highlight the survival of romance and its subversion of the epistemological exhaustiveness of the epic. By turning to the theological implications of the human epistemological condition that the Orlando furioso repeatedly evokes, it suggests how a functional agnosticism could begin to operate beneath the surface of theic humanist fictions and thought.

In poetry, if meter has to help memory, it takes its time

To test the idea that poetic meter emerged as a cognitive schema to aid verbal memory, we focused on classical Italian poetry and on three components of meter: rhyme, accent, and verse length. Meaningless poems were generated by introducing prosody-invariant non-words into passages from Dante’s Divina Commedia and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. We then ablated rhymes, modified accent patterns, or altered the number of syllables. The resulting versions of each non-poem were presented to Italian native speakers, who were then asked to retrieve three target non-words. Surprisingly, we found that the integrity of Dante’s meter has no significant effect on memory performance. With Ariosto, instead, removing each component downgrades memory proportionally to its contribution to perceived metric plausibility. Counterintuitively, the fully metric versions required longer reaction times, implying that activating metric schemata involves a cognitive cost. Within schema theories, this finding provides evidence for high-level interactions between procedural and episodic memory.

Popular Rewritings of the Orlando Furioso as Forms of Criticism

Editions, paratextual apparatuses, translations, theoretical treatises, and dialogues influenced the critical debate about Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, and rapidly became the main route to its canonization. However, immediately after its publication, the Furioso also catalysed the production of new literary texts, which aimed to offer rewritings of and critical insights into the poem. This chapter focuses on this specific form of creative reception, thus far neglected in scholarly studies of Ariosto. It aims to highlight some of the critical readings and interpretations of the Furioso that such popular pamphlets offered to a wide readership in early modern Italy. It reveals a strong continuity across critical commentaries and rewritings of the poem. Both interpretations and adaptations of the Furioso reveal a commitment to pursuing contemporary cultural debates, for instance about the nature of women, influenced by Ariosto and his words: there is a dialogue between popular rewritings and erudite readings of the poem.

In Poetry, if Meter has to Help Memory, it Takes its Time

To test the idea that poetic meter emerged as a cognitive schema to aid verbal memory, we have focused on classical Italian poetry and on its three basic components of meter: rhyme, accent and verse length. Meaningless poems were generated by introducing prosody-invariant non-words into passages from Dante's Divina Commedia and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, which were then further manipulated by selectively ablating rhymes, modifying accent patterns or altering the number of syllables. The resulting four versions of each non-poem were presented in a fully balanced design to cohorts of high school educated Italian native speakers, who were then asked to retrieve 3 target non-words. Surprisingly, we found that the integrity of Dante's meter has no significant effect on memory performance. With passages derived from Ariosto, instead, removing each component downgrades memory by an amount proportional to its contribution to perceived metric plausibility, with rhymes having the strongest effects, followed by accents and then by verse length. Counterintuitively, the fully metric versions required longer reaction times, implying that activating metric schemata involves a cognitive cost. Within schema theories, this finding provides evidence for high-level interactions between procedural and episodic memory.

«La sana critica». Pubblicare i classici italiani nella Milano di primo Ottocento

In the early 19th-century, Milan was the most active Italian city in the publishing of books. There, collectors, librarians, scholars of ancient literature and young men of letters were protagonists in an intense activity of publishing classical texts. New editions of Divina Commedia, Petrarch's Rime, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata and of many works by writers of the 18th century were published in Milan, in particular by Società Tipografica de' Classici Italiani (Italian Classical Writers’ Printing Society). In a period rich in cultural and linguistic debates, even discussions on the procedures for publishing texts took on a new importance. By analysing the statements of the editors, investigating their textual choices, following their polemics, Alberto Cadioli, one of the well-known Italian textual bibliography scholars for the modern texts, underlines the importance of the «sana critica», the «sound criticism» – i.e. the philological practice, according to the language of that time - with which classical texts were published in Milan in the first decades of the 19th century. This book, that offers unknown data and a large documentation, reveals theoretical unexpectedly Modern observations and methodological indications, hidden in pages forgotten for many years.