Triumphant and Chastened Love: from Boiardo to Berni

Abstract

In its first section, the essay takes into account some erotic episodes of the Inamoramento de Orlando and tries to define Boiardo’s idea of eros; in the second, it confronts the erotic views expressed in the Inamoramento with those of Ludovico Ariosto’s Furioso and Berni’s Rifacimento. Views and conceptions about sex changed a lot between the last phase of Ferrarese Humanism and the start of the Counter-Reformation era: as the essay suggests, these changes in morals and taste lead to differences in the way erotical contents were expressed by poets.