8 - An Undying Tradition: the Afterlife of Charlemagne in Italy

Summary

In the wake of the overwhelming success of Orlando furioso, which spread from the 1520s onwards, dozens of poems were published in Italy in the middle and late sixteenth century which featured the same Carolingian cast that starred in Ariosto's tale, and which in most cases were expressly conceived and publicised as a continuation of Ariosto's story. The size of these texts is varied, ranging from two or three cantos, that last a few dozen stanzas, to half a hundred cantos, each one hundreds of stanzas long; equally varied is their inventive, sty¬listic and ideological quality, depending not only on the talent of the authors, but also on their socio-cultural profile, the geographical area of production, their chosen audience, and their ambitions. In many cases such author-figures are rather difficult to delineate, so much so that although there is no shortage of famous writers among them, there are also quite a few bare names, individuals of whom nothing else is known except that they appear on the pages of a book about Carolingian knights.

In these texts, therefore, attitudes towards chivalric matter and values in general, and in particular the treatment of Carolingian characters, are also varied. A rough distinction of convenience can be made between the ‘popular’ and fantastic works on the one hand, in which Carlo Magno and his knights are portrayed according to the paradigms of the late medieval and fifteenth-century romance tradition (which in Italy allowed both the serious register and the playful, and often mixed them together), and on the other hand the ‘learned’ and heroic works, which aim to redefine the chivalric tradition in forms elaborated in a more literary style and modelled on the epic paradigms of antiquity, in line with the classicism which became hegemonic in the mature and late Renaissance.

Quarrels at the Royal Palace: A Connotative Commonplace

In the Italian romance tradition before the Furioso, the Emperor and his court were subject not only to serious and celebratory treatments but also to ironic and critical, or frankly comical and mocking ones. A litmus test that is quite useful to assess the attitude of the various works towards the figure of Charlemagne is offered by the different interpretations of the cliché of the palace quarrel, which recurs in numerous texts of the mid-sixteenth century.