Un estudio preliminar sobre las fuentes del episodio de la locura de Orlando en el marco de la poética ariostesca y de la cultura humanista y renacentista

Abstract

Assessing and analyzing the use that authors make of their textual sources is a complex matter. If this is generally true regarding any European writer, especially those prior to the Romantic movement —which changed once and for all the relationship between authors and their textual sources by substituting the classical-humanist notions of imitation and emulation with the notion of originality as an aesthetic criterion—, this is particularly important in a discussion of Renaissance authors. The new, critical-philological approach to the classical world promoted by the Humanist movement constituted the basis of education during the
Renaissance, in strong opposition to the medieval interpretation of the classical
inheritance as maintaining continuity with the Christian world. This is why Renaissance
authors have a peculiar way of treating the classical sources, using them to revitalize medieval genres, in particular the chivalric poem. It is from this point of view that I present the results of a preliminary study on the sources of the central episode of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso: Orlando’s Frenzy.