A worthy recipient of the Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award, Cavallo’s monograph is one of the more significant studies in decades on the literary relationship between Boiardo and Ariosto. Additionally, her charting of this relationship along the axes of Asian, Middle Eastern, and African characters and locales productively advances the literature on the representation of the foreign in the romance epic.

Perhaps no book has more thoroughly documented this foreign world in Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. The five parts are organized by geography and then further subdivided into chapters on specific characters, with some chapters on a region or theme. While there is some attempt to connect the chapters, they mostly read as independent essays, which makes for useful mining for scholars seeking information on a character, like Noradino, or a locale, like Jerusalem.

This approach yields some important insights, such as contextualizing Agricane’s conversion in the Orlando Innamorato with European accounts of the Mongol Empire. It soon becomes clear, however, that the main focus of this study, and its lasting importance, is the relationship between the two poets, a topic Cavallo has been exploring for over a decade. The world beyond Europe in the book’s title serves as a fulcrum for Cavallo to elevate Boiardo from the weight of Ariosto-centric criticism.

Boiardo emerges as a poet seeking to “elicit our interest in and respect for the foreign other, using the freedom afforded by fiction to imagine a universal chivalry crossing religious and regional boundaries” (151). In doing so, Boiardo abandons the crusader mentality of his chivalric precursors, such as the Spagna narratives, instead adopting a unifying, cosmopolitan outlook more consonant with the intellectual climate of Ferrara and the Este court. This climate shifts, Cavallo argues, after the French invasion of Italy in 1494, marked by the abrupt end of Boiardo’s poem. Thus begins a generation of conflict brought on by occupiers from outside the Italian Peninsula and by aggressors within. This more pessimistic world shrouds Ariosto’s rewriting of Boiardo, prompting Ariosto’s return to the crusading rhetoric.

Cavallo methodically demonstrates, in character after character, in region after region, how Boiardo’s optimism and inclusiveness are systematically diminished by Ariosto. Boiardo’s foreign characters, such as Gradasso and Mandricardo, prove as capable of chivalry and courteousness as their European counterparts, while in Ariosto they become trivialized (Gradasso) or ignoble (Mandricardo). In Cyprus and Syria, Boiardo limns a “sophisticated Saracen courtly society completely uninvolved with the affairs of western Europe” (139), an exemplary place that has no analog in Ariosto. Boiardo embraces Rugiero’s and Bradamante’s mixed heritage, which includes East and West, Saracen and Christian, while Ariosto “emphasizes their sameness while erasing signs of their diversity” (111). In her masterful finale, Cavallo’s comparison of Brandimarte from Boiardo and Rinaldo from Ariosto reveals how Boiardo encourages openness to what the foreign can offer, while Ariosto advocates purity through isolationism.

Another important trend that Cavallo traces in Ariosto is his tendency to reintroduce religion and ethnicity as a motivating source of conflict. Boiardo connects Agramante’s lust for global conquest to familiar models of aviditas dominationis: Alexander, Xerxes, and Hannibal. Ariosto, however, transmutes Agramante into a monomaniacal enemy of the Christian faith. Rodamonte, who scoffs at all religions equally in Boiardo, now seeks to scourge Christianity in particular in Ariosto. The remarkably “independent donna guerriera” of Boiardo’s Marfisa becomes just another “fanatical miles Christi” in Ariosto (82). As Cavallo repeatedly shows, Boiardo’s emphasis on the potential cross-cultural unifying force of chivalry, which “transcends national and religious boundaries” (105), splinters into ethnic and religious tribalism in Ariosto.

One suspects at times that Cavallo oversimplifies Ariosto and dulls his sharply nuanced humor and irony. The Ariosto in this book is not the one of lightness that readers are familiar with in orthodox romance-epic criticism. But that change of perspective is welcome. Boiardo gets to take center stage for once. As a result, most readers will have their perceptions of the two authors at least challenged, and possibly — as is the case of this reviewer — irrevocably altered.