The I Tatti Renaissance Library 84
Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533), one of Italy’s greatest poets, was a leading figure of sixteenth-century Italian humanism. After some years working in the household of Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, to whom he dedicated his dazzling romance epic Orlando Furioso (1516), Ariosto settled in Ferrara under the patronage of Ippolito’s brother Alfonso. He continued to write throughout his life, publishing 214 letters, five plays, seven satires in verse, and dozens of lyric poems in Italian and Latin. Ariosto’s Latin poems, translated into English for the first time in this volume, are remarkable for their erudition, technical virtuosity, and playfulness. This edition provides a new Latin text, the first to be based on a collation of the autograph manuscript and editio princeps, and offers a unique insight into the Latin formation of one of the Renaissance’s foremost vernacular writers.
Dennis Looney is Director of Programs and Director of the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages at the Modern Language Association after many years as Professor of French and Italian at the University of Pittsburgh.
D. Mark Possanza is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Classics at the University of Pittsburgh.
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Life of Ludovico Ariosto
Ariosto the Humanist
Ariosto the Vernacular Humanist
The Carmina of Ludovico Ariosto in the Sixteenth Century
Acknowledgments
Notes
Latin Poetry
Poems of Ludovico Ariosto
Poems of Uncertain Attribution
Apocryphal Poems
Appendix
Note on the Text and Its Textual History
Abbreviations
Notes to the Text
Notes to the Translation
Bibliography
Index of First Lines
General Index