NEMLA Italian Studies: The Renaissance Dialogue

Edited by Roberta Ricci, Professor and Chair of Italian on the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Chair in the Humanities

Although this special volume dedicated to the Renaissance includes only one essay on Ariosto, it aims at joining the many celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the first publication (1516) of his epic masterpiece, Orlando Furioso. Following this modern multi-thematic approach enticing micro-narratives with a mixture of “le donne, i cavallier, l’arme, gli amori, / le cortesie, l’audaci imprese,” declared ab principio by Ariosto as poetic theory in the opening lines of the epic (1.1-2), this project embraces such a vision of a multi plot within interdisciplinarity, now more than ever at the center of the intellectual (and pedagogical/didactic) debate in academia. Keeping in mind Ariosto’s modern epistemological approach to reality and knowledge by interlacing, embracing, connecting, and disconnecting themes, characters, levels of narrations, the goal here is to present the Renaissance as a continuous dialogue among many authors from various cultural milieus that includes the arts, language and literature, philosophy, and the sciences.