Among the most dynamic and influential literary texts of the European sixteenth century, Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1532) emerged from a world whose horizons were rapidly changing. The poem is a prism through which to examine various links in the chain of interactions that characterized the Mediterranean region from late antiquity through the medieval period into early modernity and beyond. Ariosto and the Arabs takes as its point of departure Jorge Luis Borges's celebrated short poem "Ariosto y los Arabes" (1960), wherein the Furioso acts as the hinge of a past and future literary culture circulating between Europe and the Middle East. The Muslim "Saracen"-protagonist of both historical conflict and cultural exchange-represents the essential "Other" in Ariosto's work, but Orlando Furioso also engages with the wider network of linguistic, political, and faith communities that defined the Mediterranean basin of its time.

The sixteen contributions assembled here, produced by a diverse group of scholars who work on Europe, Africa, and Asia, encompass several intertwined areas of analysis-philology, religious and social history, cartography, material and figurative arts, and performance-to shed new light on the relational systems generated by and illustrative of Ariosto's great poem.

About the Author
Mario Casari is Associate Professor in Persian Language and Literature at the Italian Institute of Oriental Studies, Sapienza University of Rome. His expertise in Arabic and Persian underpins research in the circulation of texts and cultural exchange in the Mediterranean and Middle East from late antiquity to the early modern period. Monica Preti is Head of Academic Programs in the History of Art and Archaeology at the Auditorium du Musee du Louvre and Director of the Fondazione Pistoia Musei. Her research explores the relationship between art and literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the history of taste, and the history of collecting and museums from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. Michael Wyatt is Resident Scholar in the Department of French and Italian and Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. His work is engaged with the premodern intellectual and cultural history of Italy, focused within a European and Mediterranean matrix, and dealing particularly with translation as both textual and sociopolitical practice.


Book Information
ISBN 9780674278790
Author Mario Casari
Format Paperback
Page Count 464
Imprint Harvard University Press
Publisher Harvard University Press