https://orcid.org/0009-0007-3553-698X
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ABSTRACT
In a celebrated episode of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, Ruggiero luxuriates in the garden of the sorceress Alcina. A second sorceress, Melissa, travels to the garden and describes Ruggiero as effeminate, corrupt, and ill. She offers herself as the doctor who will cure the knight and drag him out of softness and into the violence of an epic destiny. She shames the knight into exchanging his soft dress for armour and leaving the garden. This transformation of Ruggiero’s dress has been traditionally seen as a rightful shift from effeminacy to virility, from vice to virtue. My study will show how the Alcina episode is ambivalent about the gender shaming of Melissa. I argue that Ariosto exposes how a discourse of effeminacy fashions even typical courtly male dress and behaviour as corrupt and effeminate. Such effeminophobic rhetoric, Ariosto shows, removes men’s agency and exerts social control over them.
Acknowledgments
This essay has benefitted from the thoughtful and generous input of Marc Schachter and Paola Ugolini.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Orazio Toscanella, Bellezze del Furioso di M. Lodovico Ariosto (Venice: Pietro dei Franceschi & nepoti, 1574), p. 82. On Toscanella reading Ariosto see Dennis Looney, ‘Marvelous Vergil in the Ferrarese Renaissance,’ in A Companion to Vergil’s ‘Aeneid’ and Its Tradition, ed. By Joseph Farrell and Michael C. J. Putnam (Chichester/Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 168–72.
2 Toscanella, p. 82.
3 The correspondence of external aesthetics to interior virtue is debated by Castiglione’s speakers in The Book of the Courtier (I.28) See Gerry Milligan, ‘Aesthetics, Dress, and Militant Masculinity in Castiglione’s Courtier,’ in Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in Renaissance Italy, ed. by Jacqueline Murray and Nicholas Terpstra (London: Routledge, 2019), p. 150. This correspondence is ironically stated in the Orlando furioso where Ariosto’s narrator states that one is able to judge Alcina’s interiority based on her beauty ‘ben si può giudicar che corrisponde/a quel ch’appar di fuor quel che s’asconde’ (OF VII. 14), discussed in Sergio Zatti, Il Furioso fra Epos e Romanzo (Lucca: Paccini Fazzi, 1990), p. 156 and p. 170, n. 67. All Italian transcriptions of the Orlando furioso are taken from Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso, ed. by Lanfranco Caretti, 2 vols (Turin: Einaudi, 1992), i. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.
4 Albert R. Ascoli, Ariosto’s Bitter Harmony: Crisis and Evasion in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987) offers the most complete analysis of the entire Ruggiero-Alcina storyline across five cantos.
5 On the episode as didactic allegory, see Jo Ann Cavallo, The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso: From Public Duty to Private Pleasure (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), pp. 82–98. Ascoli argues that the episode is both didactic allegory as well as displays the limitations of allegory, pp. 201–02.
6 The most extended discussion of Ruggiero as facing the choice of Hercules and Pythagorean Y is in Ascoli; Countering Ascoli’s argument, Robert W. Hanning, Serious Play: Desire and Authority in the Poetry of Ovid, Chaucer, and Ariosto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) states that Ariosto pushes against the Hercules paradigm by taking choice away from Ruggiero, p. 242; Against an allegorical reading altogether see Peter Wiggins, Figures in Ariosto’s Tapestry: Character and Design in the Orlando Furioso (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), which offers an anti-allegorical reading of the episode calling it an ‘elaborate joke played at the expense of allegory itself,’ p. 74.
7 On the poetics of seduction and the seduction of poetics see in particular Ascoli, p. 123, pp. 128–29 and passim.
8 William Kennedy ‘Ariosto’s Ironic Allegory’, MLN 88.1 (1973), 44–67 suggests that there is no moral judgement on Ruggiero as his time with Alcina was destined by Atlante, and for this reason he does not suffer the contrapasso, p. 61.
9 On the failure of the Alcina didacticism, see Ascoli, p. 197 as well as Cavallo, p. 90; Riccardo Bruscagli ‘Ruggiero’s Story: The Making of a Dynastic Hero’, in Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period, ed. by John Whitman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 151–67, states that his predatory actions show that he is only a ‘lover in progress,’ p. 165.
10 The coining of ‘effeminophobia’ is often credited to Eve Sedgwick, ‘How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay’, Social Text, 29 (1991), 18–27 (p. 20).
11 Bruscagli, p. 159, p. 161. Boiardo’s Ruggiero asserted himself in confident language (e.g., III. 5. 37; III. 8. 40–41); he actively searched for Bradamante when they were separated; he demonstrated his family knowledge by describing a lengthy genealogical history; and he was, according to Boiardo’s character Agramante, the champion necessary for a Muslim victory. On Ruggiero as a pawn of others see Hanning, pp. 244–45.
12 Pio Rajna Le fonti dell’Orlando furioso (Florence: Sansoni, 1876) claims Melissa is Ariosto’s invention, p. 130; on the topic of her name, Rajna proposes several possibilities (p. 130, n. 1). Kennedy ascribes Melissa an important role in that (according to Kennedy but not quite following the text) she gives Ruggiero the choice between the pleasantries of Alcina and a life of fame and glory in war, p. 61. The concept of not doing ‘gender right’ is from Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution’, Theatre Journal, 40.4 (1988), 519–31 (p. 522).
13 On mollitia in antiquity see Craig A. Williams, ‘The Meanings of Softness: Some Remarks on the Semantics of Mollitia’, EuGeStA, 3 (2013), 240–63.
14 Ascoli compares Ruggiero to Hercules and Omphale and states that the knight has an ‘effeminate collapse,’ p. 55; Kennedy specifically refers to ornament and dress: ‘The narrator’s description of Ruggiero’s silks, bracelets, earrings, curled hair, and perfumes recalls not so much a man who has lost his soul as one who has lost his virility,’ p. 62; Stefano Jossa, Ariosto (Bologna: Mulino, 2009) gives very little attention to Ruggiero’s dress except to say ‘Nell’isola Ruggiero perde la sua virilità e il suo eroismo,’ p. 50.
15 On the defiance of prophecy in the Furioso see Eric MacPhail, ‘Ariosto and the Prophetic Moment’, MLN, 116.1 (2002), 30–53. On the poem’s adoption of epic narratives only to romanticise them, see Daniel Javitch, ‘Reconsidering the Last Part of the Orlando Furioso: Romance to the Bitter End’, Modern Language Quarterly, 71.4 (2010), 385–405.
16 Hanning notes that Ruggiero is essentially under the control of Melissa and Atlante, p. 244. On Melissa more generally, see Martyna Urbaniak, ‘“Quella benigna e saggia incantatrice”: Melissa attraverso i paratesti e le illustrazioni dell’edizione Giolito 1542’, in ‘Tra mille carte vive ancora’: Ricezione del Furioso tra immagini e parole, ed. by Lina Bolzoni, Serena Pezzini, and Giovanna Rizzarelli (Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 2010), pp. 77–98. Giorgio Bárberi Squarotti notes how even Logistilla’s ultimate dominion of the island is dependent on the ‘good’ magician Melissa, Giorgio Bárberi Squarotti and Sergio Zatti, Ludovico Ariosto e Torquato Tasso (Rome: Editalia, 2000), p. 73.
17 Women as a prize for men’s violence is one of the principal forces in the poem and is one that is challenged by the preponderance of strong and clever women.
18 Javitch uses the term to suggest that Melissa interjects in the duel between Ruggiero and Rinaldo out of concern for Bradamante’s feelings, but it is also clear that this duel would jeopardise the prophetic marriage. ‘Reconsidering’, p. 398.
19 Ascoli sees Melissa’s actions of canto XLIII as lowering the ‘boundaries between instruction and corruption, education and seduction,’ p. 216. There is some debate as to whether the sorceress Melissa of canto XLIII is the same sorceress who assists Bradamante.
20 Timothy McCall, Brilliant Bodies: Fashioning Courtly Men in Early Renaissance Italy (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2022) states that Borso d’Este was known to frequently dress in gold brocade as well as jewelled necklaces, p. 40.
21 Allyson Burgess Williams, ‘Power and Painting in Sixteenth-Century Ferrara: Titian’s Portraits of Alfonso I d’Este’, Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation, 28.1 (2012), 80–102; McCall, Brilliant Bodies, p. 152
22 Allyson Burgess Williams, p. 86.
23 On the modern imposition of effeminacy onto early modern subjects see Timothy McCall, ‘Towards a History of Seignorial Sexuality: Borso d’Este and the Gesture of Courtly Masculinity’, in The Male Body and Social Masculinity in Premodern Europe, ed. by Jacqueline Murray (Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2022), pp. 159–92 (p. 173).
24 On imitation of Virgil and other sources in the Alcina/Ruggiero episode see Daniel Javitch ‘The Imitation of Imitations in Orlando Furioso’, Renaissance Quarterly, 38.2 (1985), 215–39; Cavallo; David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Zatti; MacPhail; Hanning; Ita Mac Carthy, ‘Alcina’s Island: From Imitation to Innovation in the Orlando furioso’, Italica, 81.3 (2004), 325–50.
25 Aeneas’s purple cloak may have been considered both royal as well as effeminate. Kelly Olson, ‘Masculinity, Appearance, and Sexuality: Dandies in Roman Antiquity’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 23.2 (2014), 182–205 describes how purple is at times considered effeminate, p. 192. See also Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 165.
26 In a clever turn of phrase, Melinda Jane Gough calls Ruggiero’s masculinity ‘enslaved by ornament.’ This is indicative of criticism but it points to a causality that is not made explicit by Ariosto, ‘Daughters of Circe: Effeminacy and Poetic Efficacy in Renaissance Epic and Theatre’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Yale University, 1999), p. 112.
27 Sumptuary laws and didactic texts at times argued that clothing was both sign of and cause of effeminacy, see Milligan, ‘Aesthetics’, 144–46. Savonarola, for example, saw a reciprocal relationship between clothing and social identity, see Diane Owen Hughes, ‘Distinguishing Signs: Ear-rings, Jews and Franciscan Rhetoric in the Italian Renaissance City’, Past & Present, 112 (1986), 3–59 (p. 54).
28 Diane Owen Hughes, p. 54 shows that the hoop earring was associated with Jews, gypsies, and Moors. McCall, Brilliant Bodies, p. 62 notes that in the Quattrocento, earrings may have been worn by seignorial men as well.
29 Hughes, p. 42; for the lawbooks of 1567 see Hughes p. 39 n. 110.
30 Hughes, p. 23.
31 Hughes, p. 39 references Titian’s portraits of Laura Dianti (c. 1520–25). Jane Fair Bestor dates the portrait to 1529 and argues that the name of the sitter is Laura Eustochia. On Eustochia’s earrings see ‘Titian’s Portrait of Laura Eustochia: The Decorum of Female Beauty and the Motif of the Black Page’, Renaissance Studies, 17.4 (2003), 628–73 (pp. 644–45).
32 On the tradition of Moorish fashion at the court see McCall, Brilliant Bodies, pp. 125–30.
33 On gender confusion in the Fiordispina story see Valeria Finucci, The Lady Vanishes: Subjectivity and Representation in Castiglione and Ariosto (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 199–226.
34 See Baldassarre Castiglione, La seconda redazione del Cortegiano di Baldassarre Castiglione, ed. by Ghino Ghinassi (Florence: Sansone, 1968), p. 280; Girolamo Mengozzi, Discorsi del signor Hieronimo Mengozzi, etc (Venice: Herede di Damian Zenaro, 1614) states that perfumed hair denotes in a man ‘mollitie’, p. 265. Teofilo Folengo, Baldus XXIII. 538–62 (cited and translated in Paola Ugolini, The Court and its Critics: Anti-Court Sentiments in Early Modern Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), p. 60); Arcangela Tarabotti, ‘Antisatira’, in Francesco Buoninsegni and Suor Arcangela Tarabotti, Satira e antisatira, ed. by Elissa Weaver (Rome: Salerno, 1998), p. 44; Ludovico Ariosto, La Cassaria in versi, ed. by Valentina Gritti (Florence: Franco Cesati, 2005), (V. iii), pp. 258–62. See also Pietro Aretino’s ‘Lamento de un cortigiano’, in Marco Faini, ‘Un’opera dimenticata di Pietro Aretino: Il lamento de uno cortigiano,’ Filologia & Critica, 32 (2007), 75–93 (p. 84).
35 Translation is in Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality, p. 162. ‘Da sternere corpus/ loricamque manu valida lacerare revulsam/ semiviri Phrygis et foedare in pulvere crinis/ vibratos calido ferro murraque madentis’ (Aeneid, XII. 97–100)
36 See Aeneid IV. 215–17; IX. 600; IX. 614–20.
37 Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality, pp. 125–58. See also, Kelly Olson, Masculinity and Dress in Roman Antiquity (New York: Routledge, 2017).
38 On Rodomonte as characterised as representing outdated masculinity, see Gerry Milligan, Moral Combat: Women, Gender and War in Italian Renaissance Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), p. 56.
39 On Valencia’s reputation see Oreste Macri, ‘L’Ariosto e la letteratura spagnola’, Letterature Moderne, 3.5 (1952), 514–53 (p. 520); Antonello Gerbi, Nature in the New World: From Christopher Columbus to Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, trans. by Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), p. 150, n. 18.
40 Melinda Gough states that the primary danger of Ulysses in the company of Circe was to be unmanned, p. 16. See also Leonora Leet Brodwin, ‘Milton and the Renaissance Circe’, Milton Studies, 6 (1975), 21–83 (p. 24).
41 The word ‘frutto’ has several occurrences in this episode, all of which seem to be similarly linked. On the fruit imagery and its relation to Dante as well as the deception of poetics see Ascoli, p. 239.
42 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Abingdon: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966; repr. London and New York: Routledge, 1984), p. 3.
43 Ibid., p. 36.
44 On the way that epic poetry frames the choice between war and fame as one of ambivalent loss, see Susanne Lindgren Wofford, The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).
45 Ascoli notes that Melissa raises the question of ‘salutary fraud and fraudulent teaching’ that Ulysses was condemned for by Dante, p. 150. Ascoli then concentrates on the difference of poetry and fraud in bono and in malo, but here the protagonists are Alcina vs. Logistilla, Melissa’s fraud remains ambivalent, p. 167.
46 Ascoli instead perceives Ruggiero’s lost sense of self on Alcina’s island as a sort of death: ‘In the pastoral world, Adamic deathlessness fulfilment of identity by and through the accessible Other (not only the beloved, but all of the objective landscape beyond the self, even unto the Creator) always give way to inevitable death and the self’s sense of self-absence which fuels the pursuits of desire,’ p. 191.
47 See Ascoli, pp. 139–50 who likens Alcina to the siren and particularly to the siren of Dante, the ‘femina balba.’
48 Ascoli briefly mentions the possibility of Melissa as a Siren, but he instead focuses on Alcina as Siren, p. 211. On the siren song and its seductive promise of glory as well as its mode of dragging Odysseus from romance to epic see Pietro Pucci, ‘The Song of the Sirens’, Arethusa, 12.2 (1979), 121–32.
49 MacPhail, p. 49.
50 Ugolini states that Ruggiero is awakened to ‘his true identity,’ p. 62; Cavallo states that while with Alcina, he ‘forgets his past identity,’ p. 86.
51 Zatti, p. 100. Zatti also states that Ariosto alluded to his preference of not choosing an identity, as seen in Satire 2 where he states the dilemma of choosing to marry verses becoming a priest. It is choice itself that is the end of freedom, p. 109, n. 15.
52 Ascoli, p. 139, p. 184, p. 213.
53 The sources for the Ruggiero/Alcina episode were extensively studied by Rajna and later by Ascoli. The comparison of Ruggiero to the Hercules and Omphale tale, however, overlooks the important detail that Ruggiero does not wear women’s clothing. Ovid’s presentation of Hercules in the clothes of a woman yet with muscles and rough skin bears no resemblance to the ornately dressed Ruggiero. On Hercules and Omphale see Monica Silveira Cyrino, ‘Heroes in D(u)ress: Transvestism and Power in the Myths of Herakles and Achilles’, Arethusa, 31.2 (1998), 207–41.
54 Ascoli, p. 152.
55 Margaret R. Somers, ‘The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach’, Theory and Society, 23.5 (1994), 605–49 (p. 614).
56 For an example of how ‘incanto’ was used by a contemporary poet to signify overwhelming desire, see sonnet 30 of Marco Rosiglia di Foligno, ‘Son dardi o sguardi questi razzi ardenti’, in Fioretto de cose nove nobilissime & degni de diversi auctori (Pesaro: Nicolo Zopino 1516). On men’s accusations that women bewitched them through sexual desire see Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
57 La liberazione di Ruggiero (1625) was composed by Francesca Caccini with a libretto by Ferdinando Sarcinelli.
58 The narrator’s request that the reader pardon Ruggiero functions to place the narrator and Melissa in cahoots to drive the epic trajectory.
59 That Alcina aligns with the sorceress of Homeric epic (including Virgil’s Dido) is the premise of the conventional interpretation as found in the overwhelming majority of critics.
60 Cavallo, p. 90.
61 Hanning, p. 244.
62 Ugolini, p. 61.
63 Regarding Ariosto’s texts that feature anti-court sentiment see Ugolini, p. 193 and passim.
64 On the ambivalence of anti-court literature (including Ariosto’s Satire) see Ugolini, pp. 88–100. On courtiers’ dependency on the court despite their complaints, see her analysis of Enea Silvio Piccolomini’s writing, p. 91.
65 Ariosto warns of the distraction of courts in the two other times Atlante seeks to protect Ruggiero. On Atlante’s palaces see David Quint, ‘Palaces of Enchantment: the 1516 Orlando Furioso’, MLN, 133.1 (2018), 9–31; Hanning also notes that Atlante’s enchanted palace is a commentary on the sacrifice of freedom at court, pp. 245–46. Bradamante worries that Ruggiero might become a Ganymede IV. 47, and in the poem the term is explicitly linked to an ornate young courtier, working for the favours of a prince (XXXIV. 78). For a differing point of view on the word Ganymede, see Ascoli, p. 136, pp. 170–72.
66 The status of a court as reflected by appearance of courtiers is discussed by McCall, Brilliant Bodies, passim who provides documentary evidence of princes purchasing hundreds of pieces of clothing in order to outfit the court to reflect splendour.
67 Ascoli argues that there are in fact three teachers in the episode: Astolfo (teaches through failure of lesson), Melissa (teaches about fraud) and Logistilla (teaches virtue through an awareness of the self), p. 157.
68 On dissimulation and its relationship to court culture see Ugolini, p. 122 and Jon R. Snyder, Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
69 Ascoli makes a convincing argument that Logistilla offers an education of a reconciled ethical humanism and neo-Platonism, but he misses the anti-court aspect of her teachings, p. 179.
70 Hanning demonstrates how Melissa and Atlante control Ruggiero and prevent him from making the choice of Hercules, pp. 242–46.
71 See Ugolini for a review of the d’Este anti-court sentiment of Ariosto’s Satires and particularly the idea that the satirist/poet suggests that courtliness is ‘a distortion of the self,’ Ugolini, p. 98.