Our world has become like Ariosto’s. It is a world where might is right, where warmongers are heroes, where women are objects, where exchanging words means trading insults, where holy war is the purest form of religion, where civilizations clash on the island of Lampedusa, and where literature struggles to find answers. In such a mad world traditional scholarship can often seem quaint and irrelevant. This book, the first of a two-volume undertaking, is nothing if not traditional, despite its novel format. It consists of readings, each by a different scholar, of the first twenty-two cantos of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, preceded by four essays on specific aspects of the poem as a whole, apparently added in order to soothe the misgivings of those, including the editors and many of the contributors, who fear that lecturae Ariosti on the model of lecturae Dantis may not be a feasible proposition. Twelve of the twenty-six essays have been published previously, two of them twice, and indexes are promised for volume 2.

Strikingly, the terms of the debate about Ariosto are almost frozen in time, as critics continue to be exercised by the questions that exercised Ariosto’s earliest detractors and admirers: genre (epic or romance?), the poem’s unity or lack thereof, the intrusion of the narrator, verisimilitude/realism, and, above all, Ariosto’s relation to his sources and models. Quellenforschung is like an obsession, often pursued “narcissistically” (36, to quote one of the best articles in the book, Maria Cristina Cabani on intertextuality), and as a result the positivism of Pio Rajna’s “unrivalled” (102) Le fonti dell’ “Orlando furioso” (1876), referenced and used in almost every essay, comes across as the most enduring contribution to Ariosto scholarship. Equally omnipresent is Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato, which makes it seem at times as though the work was indeed conceived “sub specie Boiardi” (387). On the other hand, there is a very welcome and fruitful interface between Italian and non-Italian scholarship, which contrasts refreshingly with the tendency of Italian academics, until fairly recently, to be isolationist. Less welcome is the new fashion of including English abstracts in Italian works. The idea is of course a good one, but for abstracts to serve a purpose they should not be gnomic and above all they should be in English. What is a “punctual comparison” (158), a “very hermeneutic idea” (213), or a “discrepant mounting of divergent ‘sense systems’” (256)? Google has a lot to answer for.

Still, there is much to commend this book, even though it adds up to less than the sum of its parts. On the assumption that a poem that begins in medias res and is as errant as its protagonists does not necessarily require a linear exegesis, personally, I would have started the volume not with an article that, focusing as it does on a mere fifteen lines of one canto (Luigi Blasucci on Furioso 23, 100–15), reads like an admission of defeat—all we can hope for is a fragmentary understanding of the poem—but with Giuseppe Sangirardi’s essay on canto 17, which opens with a penetrating analysis of what makes Ariosto’s cantos different from those of other poets and which puts forward a compelling methodological proposal for this kind of exercise: that the meaning and singularity of a canto should be gauged in terms of how it combines the two main themes of the poem, arms and love. Then I would have placed Gabriele Bucchi’s essay on canto 14, which is a masterful explication de texte and could have served as a model for many others, with Stefano Jossa’s essay on canto 20, which is a very engaging and useful guide to the many facets of the poem.

I would have ended it with the four articles that deal with the poem as a whole and are, all told, the most stimulating: Blasucci, Daniela Delcorno Branca (on the function of proems), Marco Praloran (on narrative structures), and, above all, Maria Luisa Cabani on intertextuality, with its demonstration that the study of sources can and must have a purpose.