Epic and Romance (Renaissance and Reformation)

Introduction

Epic and romance are distinct literary genres that poets combine in some of the most effective narrative poems of the early modern period, such as Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Critics refer to these sorts of poems variously as “romance” or “romantic epics” or “epic romances” or “chivalric epics” or “heroic poems,” with each designation emphasizing a slightly different part of, or way of looking at, the hybrid literary form. To simplify greatly, one might say that the focus of epic is war, whereas that of romance is love. Renaissance rewritings of epic often include catalogues of armies, elaborate battles, extended similes, and funeral games; in addition to love, romance narratives tend to focus on adventure, magic, disguise, and flight. The primary goal of Renaissance humanism, the pedagogical movement that began in Italy in the 14th century and spread out from there over the following centuries, was the revitalization of contemporary culture through the recuperation of antiquity. Classical epic was a genre that humanistically inspired poets were eager to adapt to modern literary culture to establish the value of their own respective vernacular traditions. Canonical models like Homer and Vergil, as well as more adversarial and disputed ones, such as Ovid, Lucan, and Statius, served well. There is a tradition of prose romances in antiquity, and there are many romance-like passages in classical epic, but when critics speak of the romance tradition that a poet like Ariosto used, they generally mean Arthurian romances or the “matter of Britain.”This was a vast body of work codified in literary form by Chrétien de Troyes in the 12th century, which was the inspiration for numerous romance works, prose and poetry, in different vernaculars from the medieval through the early modern period. The combination of epic and romance conventions and themes into a single literary work, then, is a fusion of elements of classical antiquity and literary medieval culture.

General Overviews

Lewis 1936 incorporates into a fundamental study of the literary form of the English and French romance lively readings of Boiardo and Ariosto pointing non-Italian critics to the authors. The canon of authors in Bowra 1972, a mix of writers associated with either romance or epic, becomes the starting place for subsequent studies on the Renaissance recuperation of classical antiquity in literature. Greene 1975 and Giamatti 1989 compartmentalize elements of the romance epic genre in their respective studies of a single theme across many different narratives. Burrow 1993 locates in the Homeric poems the source for the romance epic representation of sympathy, which he sees as a kind of theme. Murrin 1980 begins with Homer for a review of allegorical representation and interpretation in the major narratives of the Renaissance. In the author’s attempt to identify the constituent elements of romance, Parker 1979 expands the study of the romance epic genre to include examples not typically considered (Keats). In the comparatist mode of Greene and Giamatti and recognizing the Vergilian emphasis of Bowra 1972, Quint 1993 interprets the development of the epic genre’s literary form in specific political, social, and religious contexts. In Quint’s interpretation, there are two epic traditions, major and minor, Vergilian and Lucanic, the former focused on winners, the latter on losers. Through a convincing reading of the ecphrasis of Aeneas’s shield in Aeneid 8, he argues that the Vergilian tradition contains the seeds of the Lucanic within it, that is, epic contains romance. Durling 1965 remains fundamental for considerations of authorial voice.

Bowra, C. M. From Virgil to Milton. London: Macmillan, 1972.
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On the recuperation of literary epic in the Renaissance with a focus on Vergil’s Aeneid as literary model, which takes into account Camôes’s Os Lusíadas, Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, with substantial discussions of the narrative poems of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Spenser. Originally published in 1945.
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Burrow, Colin. Epic Romance: Homer to Milton. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993.
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A survey of how the poets from Homer to Milton, including Vergil, Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser, represent the characteristics of the epic hero, with attention to how the supreme pagan virtues of imperial duty and honor eventually transform into Christian pity. Emotions in Homeric epic are the sources for literary depictions to come.
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Durling, Robert M. The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965.
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A still-fundamental starting place for study of the role of the authorial voice in Renaissance romance epic narratives, including sections on Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser, with a glance back at Chaucer and Petrarch.
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Giamatti, A. Bartlett. The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.
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A study of the theme of the terrestrial garden, the locus amoenus, focusing on its development in Ariosto, Camôes, Spenser, and Milton, with attention to other poets including Dante, Petrarch, Poliziano, and Trissino. The delights of the garden can be portrayed as temptation (romance) or as a reward for the hero (epic). Originally published in 1966.
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Greene, Thomas M. The Descent from Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975.
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A study of the motif of the messenger descending from heaven, whether pagan or Christian, to communicate with mortals, which privileges the Vergilian source from Aeneid 4 and its models in the Homeric poems. In addition to examining (following Bowra) the canonical authors of epic romance (Homer, Vergil, Ariosto, Tasso, Camôes, Spenser, Milton), Greene considers Sannazaro, Hojeda, Marino, d’Aubigné, Saint-Amant, and Vondel. Originally published in 1963.
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Lewis, C. S. The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon, 1936.
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The author considers courtly love in Troubadour poetry and its influence on Chrétien de Troyes. He then considers the theme in English medieval and Renaissance authors up to Spenser. Assessing Spenser’s dependence on Boiardo and Ariosto, Lewis spends much time discussing the depictions of love in their respective poems.
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Murrin, Michael. The Allegorical Epic: Essays in Its Rise and Decline. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
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A complement to his earlier The Veil of Allegory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), here Murrin offers readings in practical criticism that consider allegorical interpretations of Homer, Vergil (as read through Renaissance Neoplatonists), Boiardo, Tasso, Spenser, and Milton.
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Parker, Patricia. Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979.
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A study of the essential characteristic of romance narrative in which the hero is unable to complete the quest because of endless digressions off the main course. In Ariosto, Spenser, and Milton, wandering astray and the narrative deferral to describe it assume a moral valence, whether in reference to protagonist, poet, or reader.
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Quint, David. Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton. Literature in History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
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Argues that Vergilian narrative (symbolized in the ecphrasis of Aeneas’s shield in Aeneid 8) offers a model of the epic of conquest containing within it a critique of imperial ideology. While some subsequent narrative poets (Camôes, Tasso) value the Vergilian epic lesson, others prefer a model based on Lucan’s Pharsalia that emphasizes republican defeat (Ercilla, d’Aubigné).
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Reference Works

Several of the pertinent reference works listed below are specific to given authors in which one finds detailed discussions of aspects of romance epic appropriate to the given writer. Della Corte 1984–1991 is the fundamental starting place for studies of any aspect of Vergilian criticism. Farrell and Putnam 2010 provides a counterpoint to Della Corte showing how criticism evolved in the subsequent two decades. Similarly, Lacy and Ashe 1988, a reference volume to Arthurian studies, is the fundamental starting place for any study of romance in that specific tradition. Grendler 1999 is the definitive work in English for general questions about the Renaissance, including of a literary nature, for which see Rhu 1999. Hamilton 1990 provides a more specialized source for questions connected with Spenserian studies.

Della Corte, Francesco, ed. Enciclopedia Virgiliana. 5 vols. Rome: Istituto dell’ Enciclopedia Italiana, 1984–1991.
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Definitive encyclopedia on Vergilian topics in any language. Entries on Boiardo, Ariosto, Camôes, Ercilla, Ronsard, Tasso, Spenser, and Milton.
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Grendler, Paul F, ed. Encyclopedia of the Renaissance. 6 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1999.
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Useful for entries on Ariosto, Spenser, and Milton, and also good for the treatment of the Renaissance reception of major classical authors such as Vergil and Ovid. Includes a statement by Rhu on “Epic” (Rhu 1999).
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Farrell, Joseph, and Michael C. J. Putnam, eds. A Companion to Vergil’s Aeneid and Its Tradition. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
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Includes essays by Looney, Hardie, and Power, which consider the interconnections between Vergilian epic and the writings of Boiardo/Ariosto, Spenser, and Milton, respectively. This massive tome, comprising thirty-two essays, holds much more on the reception of Vergil for the eager reader.
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Hamilton, A. C., ed. The Spenser Encylopedia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990.
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Includes articles on Ariosto, Boiardo, Italy, romance before and after Spenser, and heroic poems before and after Spenser.
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Lacy, Norris J., and Geoffrey Ashe, eds. The Arthurian Handbook. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities 765. New York: Garland, 1988.
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Includes a chronology of Arthuriana, chapters on origins, early Arthurian literature, modern Arthurian literature, Arthur in the arts, and an extensive glossary. Helpful for much of the romance background.
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Rhu, Lawrence F. “Epic.” In Encyclopedia of the Renaissance. Vol. 2. Edited by Paul F. Grendler, 280–283. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1999.
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Essay that considers the literary interconnections among Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, and Milton, with brief mention of Camôes, Ercilla, and d’Aubigné.
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Anthologies of Critical Essays

Candelaria and Strange 1965 is a good starting place for a quick review of where the scholarship stood around the turn of the 20th century. Parker and Quint 1986 and Brownlee and Brownlee 1985 are anthologies that represent attempts to bring together collections of essays on familiar canonical texts, rereading them in the light of the new theory that was shaping literary criticism in the 1970s and 1980s, much of it structuralist and deconstructivist. Finucci 1999, which does not reflect a specific theoretical agenda, is arguably the single most impressive collection of essays in recent decades that deals with genre and romance-epic in Italian. The Cambridge Companions to epic and to medieval romance—Bates 2010, and Krueger 2000, respectively—represent developments after 2000.

Bates, Catherine, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Epic. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
DOI: 10.1017/CCOL9780521880947Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Fourteen essays offer sweeping treatment of the epic genre from Gilgamesh to Derek Walcott, with essays by Giuseppe Mazzotta, “Italian Renaissance Epic”; George Monteiro, “Camôes’s Os Lusíadas: the First Modern Epic”; Catherine Bates, “The Faerie Queene: Britain’s National Monument”; and David Loewenstein, “The Seventeenth-Century Protestant English Epic.”
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Brownlee, Kevin, and Marina Scordilis Brownlee, eds. Romance: Generic Transformation from Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes. Proceedings of the Second Dartmouth Colloquium on Medieval and Early Modern Romance Literatures, held in Hanover, NH, in September 1982. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1985.
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Collection of thirteen essays, approximately half of which deal with French medieval romance (Nichols, Kelly, Freeman-Regalado, Uitti, K. Brownlee). Includes several essays that deal directly with definitions and functions of genre in the early modern period: David Quint, “The Boat of Romance and Renaissance Epic”; Marina Scordilis Brownlee, “Cervantes as Reader of Ariosto”; and Ruth S. El Saffar, “The Truth of the Matter: The Place of Romance in the Works of Cervantes.”
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Candelaria, Frederick H., and William C. Strange, eds. Perspectives on Epic. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1965.
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Includes excerpts from important essays (oldies but goodies) by Spingarn, Bowra, Tillyard, Frye, Wimsatt and Brooks, and Abrams, among others. Graham Hough on “The Romance Epic,” from A Preface to The Faerie Queene, reviews the background material, much of it Italian, that Spenser uses (pp. 54–61).
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Finucci, Valeria, ed. Renaissance Transactions: Ariosto and Tasso. Duke Monographs In Medieval And Renaissance Studies 17. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
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A collection of superb essays that deal with generic questions in the narrative poems of Ariosto and Tasso (Martinez, Javitich, Cavallo); dissimulation and representation (Zatti, Stephens, Hoffman); and questions of gender and interpretation (Finucci, Nicholson, Yavneh, Jordan).
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Krueger, Roberta L., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
DOI: 10.1017/CCOL0521553423Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Substantial treatment of the French and English foundations of the chivalric tradition by fifteen of the leading scholars in the fields, including an essay on Italian romance, F. Regina Psaki, “Chivalry and Medieval Italian Romance” (pp. 203–217).
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Parker, Patricia A. and David Quint, eds. Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.
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Readings of canonical texts following new (for the 1970s and 1980s) poststructural critical approaches, including Donato on generic implications of narrative structure in Ariosto, Cave on Rabelais, Langer on Ronsard, and Montrose on Spenser, introduced with a helpful statement by Quint on how the new theory can be the source of fruitful interpretations of canonical texts.
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History of Italian Interpretations

This history begins with Torquato Tasso’s father, Bernardo, whose correspondence with Giraldi (Giraldi 1999) and essay on romance (Giraldi 1968) amply explore generic questions, on which see Looney 1996 (cited under Italian Renaissance Narrative Poems), pp. 31–54. As Rhu 1993 documents, Torquato is obsessed with issues of genre in his letters and theoretical writings; see also Tasso 1973 and Tasso 1977 for the appropriate theoretical texts from Tasso’s writings. Weinberg 1961 is by the first modern scholar to provide a context for many of the texts in Italian Renaissance literary criticism that address genre. Javitch 1991 ably updates the discussion in Weinberg 1961. Zatti 2006 (a selection of essays originally published between 1983 and 1996) and Jossa 2002 focus on narrative experiments between Ariosto and Tasso that are essential in the development of genre theory in the 16th century.

Giraldi, Giovambattista Cinzio. Giraldi Cinthio on Romances: Being a Translation of the Discorso intorno al comporre dei Romanzi. Translated by Henry L. Snuggs. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968.
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The only translation of Giraldi’s theoretical work; correct for the most part, with a very helpful critical apparatus.
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Giraldi, Giovambattista Cinzio. Discorso dei romanzi. Edited by Laura Benedetti, Giuseppe Monorchio, and Enrico Musacchio. Bologna, Italy: Millennium, 1999.
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Most accessible edition of this early Renaissance statement on genre (1554), in which Giraldi makes a case for the value of romance as a new Italian genre in the vernacular with Ariosto as the prime example. Sets the stage for the later academic debates over the relative values of Ariosto and Torquato Tasso, romance, and epic. With helpful introduction by the editors.
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Javitch, Daniel. Proclaiming a Classic: The Canonization of Orlando Furioso. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.
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A fundamental study that considers the strategies of legitimation that readers brought to bear on their interpretations of the Orlando Furioso in the 16th century. Influenced by the desire to have a vernacular poem on a par with those of Homer, Vergil, and Ovid, critics developed a genealogy that positioned Ariosto’s narrative and its status as genre ever more closely to the classical tradition.
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Jossa, Stefano. La fondazione di un genere: Il poema eroico tra Ariosto e Tasso. Lingue e Letterature Carocci 15. Rome: Carocci, 2002.
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On the many narrative experiments that were undertaken in the wake of Ariosto’s poem that would culminate in Torquato Tasso’s Liberata. The poets discussed include Trissino, Alamanni, Giraldi, Bolognetti, Bernardo Tasso, and Pigna. The debate over the genres of romance and epic was conducted not only in literary critical writings but also in the practice of these and other poets.
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Rhu, Lawrence F. The Genesis of Tasso’s Narrative Theory: English Translations of the Early Poetics and a Comparative Study of Their Significance. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993.
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The only translation in English of Tasso’s youthful theoretical work Discorsi dell’arte poetica, which the poet intended to serve as a kind of preface to his Gerusalemme Liberata. Complete with interpretive essays that weigh Tasso’s developing thoughts on genre against the example of Ariosto’s poem, as well as those of Spenser and Milton.
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Tasso, Torquato. Discourses on the Heroic Poem. Translated by Mariella Cavalchini and Irene Samuel. Oxford: Clarendon, 1973.
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Good translation with notes on Tasso’s later theoretical work, meant to be a reflection on issues the poet was taking up in his revised epic, Gerusalemme Conquistata, in the wake of the burgeoning Aristotelianism in literary circles of Padua and northern Italy.
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Tasso, Torquato. Scritti sull’arte poetica. 2 vols. Edited by Ettore Mazzali.Classici Ricciardi 59. Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 1977.
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Standard edition of Tasso’s writings, both early (1560s) and late (1590s), on literary theoretical questions wherein he discusses genre, and romance versus epic, at great length. Includes the major works translated in Tasso 1973 and Rhu 1993. First published in 1959 (Milan: Ricciardi).
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Weinberg, Bernard. A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance. 2 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
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A classic of literary history, these volumes represent a life’s work on the reception of the literary theoretical works of Aristotle and Horace in 16th-century Italy. Divided into two sections, Poetic Theory and Practical Criticism, there is much focus on genre and the role it played in the literary debates of the century. Special attention is paid to the quarrel over Ariosto and Tasso.
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Zatti, Sergio. The Quest for Epic: From Ariosto to Tasso. Edited by Dennis Looney; translated by Sally Hill with Dennis Looney. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.
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A selection of essays taken from three fundamental studies of romance and epic in the Italian Renaissance by one of the major critics of the period, who uses structuralist, thematic, and psychoanalytic critical approaches in reading the poems.
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Italian Renaissance Narrative Poems

These critical essays deal with the interconnections between romance and epic in Italian Renaissance narrative poems. Baldassarri 1982b, Pavlock 1990, and Looney 1996 focus on the adaptation of different elements of classical literature into new forms of vernacular writing that combine epic and romance. Baldassarri 1982a emphasizes the reception of Homer; Pavlock 1990 focuses on Vergil and Statius; Looney 1996 considers how Herodotus and Ovid provide Renaissance imitators with canonical epics of a sort that are themselves in many ways blends of epic and romance. Sherberg 1993 reminds us of the medieval underpinning of the literary combination of romance and epic. Beer 1987 considers the readership of these poems by examining the printing history of many examples. Cabani 1995 and Cavallo 2004 study the continuity of the tradition of romance epic narrative in the Italian Renaissance, which can easily be traced from 1450 to around 1600. Everson 2001 considers texts ignored by the other critics, which are useful for understanding fully the historical development of romance epic.

Baldassarri, Guido. Il sonno di Zeus: Sperimentazione narrativa del poema rinascimentale e tradizione omerica. Biblioteca del Cinquecento/Centro Studi Europa delle Corti 19. Rome: Bulzoni, 1982a.
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A wide-ranging examination of how Iliad comes to supplant the Odyssey as the preferred Homeric model over the course of the 16th century and what role Vergil’s Aeneid plays in this transaction, moving from Ariosto to Tasso and touching on Trissino and Bernardo Tasso, among others.
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Baldassarri, Guido, ed. Quasi un picciolo mondo: Tentativi di codificazione del genere epico nel Cinquecento. Quaderni dell’ Istituto di Filologia e Letteratura Italiana 1. Padua, Italy: Unicopi, 1982b.
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Applying Tasso’s critical theory to poems in the second half of the 1500s.
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Beer, Marina. Romanzi di cavalleria: Il Furioso e il romanzo italiano del primo Cinquecento. Biblioteca del Cinquecento 34. Rome: Bulzoni, 1987.
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This study is actually two in one: a reading of the Furioso that considers many new sources, including medical texts that shed light on Orlando’s madness (pp. 1–140); and the fortune of the Furioso and similar poems in the 16th century in the larger context of the printing of romance works between 1470 and 1600 (pp. 141–392).
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Cabani, Maria Cristina. Gli amici amanti: Coppie eroiche e sortite notturne nell’epica italiana. Teorie e Oggetti della Letteratura 19. Naples, Italy: Liguori, 1995.
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On Ariosto’s extensive rewriting of the episode of Nisus and Euryalus from Vergil’s Aeneid in his episode of Cloridano and Medoro in Furioso 18–19, and on Tasso’s allusions to the same.
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Cavallo, Jo Ann. The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso: From Public Duty to Private Pleasure. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.
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Cavallo examines the ethics of duty in the works of the three crowns of the Ferrarese Renaissance and sheds light on Cieco da Ferrara, a neglected minor figure between Boiardo and Ariosto, whose Mambriano alludes extensively to Aeneid 4.
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Everson, Jane. The Italian Romance Epic in the Age of Humanism: The Matter of Italy and the World of Rome. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
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The author examines the simultaneous development of the medievalizing genre of chivalric epic and classically inspired humanistic culture with its different set of cultural references that look beyond the Middle Ages back to antiquity for inspiration. Considers Boccaccio’s Teseida, Pulci’s Morgante, Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato, and Cieco da Ferrara’s Mambriano to understand the success of Ariosto.
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Looney, Dennis. Compromising the Classics: Romance Epic Narrative in the Italian Renaissance. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996.
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An examination of narrative strategies employed by the three poets of the Ferrarese Renaissance—Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso—and how they renovated the popular genre of romance through their imitation of classical epic. Their respective poetics emphasize the interdependent generic modes of romance and epic narrative.
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Pavlock, Barbara. Eros, Imitation, and the Epic Tradition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.
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A classicist, Pavlock highlights some of the complexities of Ariosto’s intertextuality by showing how the Renaissance poet blends his imitation of Vergil’s Aeneid with that of the episode of Hopleus and Dymas in Statius’s Thebaid. Also treats Milton’s classicism.
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Sherberg, Michael. Rinaldo: Character and Intertext in Ariosto and Tasso. Stanford French and Italian Studies 75. Saratoga, CA: ANMA Libri, 1993.
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The author’s focus on the permutations of the paladin Rinaldo from Boiardo (and the “cantari”) through Ariosto to Tasso becomes an occasion to consider how a literary and cultural tradition (the Carolingian heritage of the Ferrarese Renaissance) accommodates change. The Matter of France proves supple, especially when combined with the Arthurian Matter of Britain. Sherberg draws attention to problems of characterization in a literary tradition that would eventually contribute to the development of the novel.
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England

W. P. Ker is very much an old-school medieval literary historian, vast in his erudition, able to make an incisive comment on romance in a later period like the Renaissance in very few words (Ker 2007). Tuve 1966 and Vinaver 1971 focus on questions of genre, with attention to the links between France and England in the medieval period. Rosalie Colie, whose work (Colie 1973) Norhnberg 1976 extends with attention to Spenser and Lewalski 1985 to Milton, is the most overtly theoretical of these critics. Wofford 1992 examines tropes and figural poetics as vehicles for ideological values in the epic tradition, whereas Porter 1993 embraces what one might call a neo-New Critical approach to Milton and his classical sources. Murrin 1994 tracks themes across the tradition and is interested in seeing how they change near the tradition’s end in Milton.

Colie, Rosalie L. The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance. Edited by Barbara K. Lewalski. Una’s Lectures 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.
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Based on public lectures and lacking careful revision due to the author’s death, this is a study of genre theory in general that considers the classifications of Aristotelian criticism. Emphasis on the British literary tradition and on a variety of genres but with provocative readings of Don Quixote and Paradise Lost as narratives that subsume a multiplicity of genres.
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Ker, W. P. Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature. Gloucester, U.K.: Dodo Press, 2007.
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A description of forms and examples of early medieval narrative literature that considers Teutonic (including Beowulf), Icelandic, French, and Romance traditions up to Boccaccio and Chaucer. The fullness of this fundamental commentary, however, often moves farther ahead to refer to Renaissance authors from various European traditions. Originally published in 1908 (New York: Dover).
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Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.
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A study of the wide spectrum of genres and literary forms that Milton includes in his epic, analyzing why he chooses them and how he transforms them, with attention to early modern genre theory.
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Murrin, Michael. History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
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A sweeping study of the theme of war and its representation moving from romance to epic in a familiar trajectory of Renaissance narratives, including Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, Camôes, and Milton, with some unexpected English texts as well: Sidney, Drayton, and Daniel, as well as Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá on war in the new world.
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Nohrnberg, James. The Analogy of the Faerie Queene. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976.
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An erudite study of Spenser’s poem that considers its thematic treatment of private and public moral virtues, with an opening section on the literary forms of epic and romance. Crucial for an understanding of the relation between Spenser and Ariosto.
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Porter, William M. Reading the Classics and Paradise Lost. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993.
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A controversial study of Milton’s use of classical sources, especially Hesiod, Horace, and Vergil, which emphasizes the poet’s ironic juxtaposition of the classical against the biblical, taking to task those critics in the majority who accept Milton’s claims to have won out over the classics.
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Tuve, Rosemond. Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and Their Posterity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966.
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A study of the allegorical tradition, especially in the French Middle Ages but also including Ariosto and others, to understand how allegory works in literature, all of which Tuve applies to a reading of Spenser. Tuve reads through the filter of the late 16th century examining how Elizabethans read medieval romance.
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Vinaver, Eugène. The Rise of Romance. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971.
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This sweeping study of the romance form is focused primarily on medieval literature beginning with the Song of Roland and ending with Malory, but the author makes illuminating comments on genre in Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, and Cervantes, not to mention the novel, in the course of the analysis.
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Wofford, Susanne Lindgren. The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992.
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A study of how poetic figures function by disrupting the narrative poetics of the Iliad, the Aeneid, and the Fairie Queene, with a concluding consideration of Milton and Cervantes. The epic simile in particular often introduces a vision of a peaceful pastoral world whose values are at odds with the reality of heroic warfare it is called on to gloss.
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France, Germany, Iberia, and the New World

Chevalier 1966 and Cioranescu 1939 are essentially holdovers from positivist criticism that document the impressive afterlife of Ariosto’s narrative poem in different traditions and remind us of the impact of the Furioso on the understanding of narrative genres in France and Spain. Various essays in Cascardi 2002 and Hart 1989 emphasize the modernity of Don Quixote and the innovations that Cervantes brought to modern literature. Junod 2008 and Hampton 2009 address questions of genre in political literature, Junod limited to one French text of the Renaissance, Hampton beginning in the Renaissance and branching out widely. Scaglione 1991, a literary history of the idea of courtliness and chivalry, begins in Germany and moves to France and then on to Italy. Davis 2000 and Nicolopulos 2000, following and extending Quint 1993 (cited under General Overviews), examine the complicated cultural politics for writers who use Old World literary models to represent imperial relations with new peoples in newly discovered lands.

Cascardi, Anthony, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
DOI: 10.1017/CCOL0521663210Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Contains a general essay by De Armas on Cervantes’s response to the Italian Renaissance with a look at his sources from literature and the visual arts. Also contains an essay by Cascardi that addresses questions of genre, “Don Quixote and the Invention of the Novel.”
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Chevalier, Maxime. L’Arioste en Espagne (1530–1650): Recherches sur l’influence du “Roland Furieux.” Bordeaux, France: Institut d’ Études Iberiques et Ibéro-Américaines de l’Université de Bordeaux, 1966.
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Study of Ariosto’s influence on Spanish literature, especially the epic and theater.
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Cioranescu, Alexandre. L’Arioste en France; Des origines á la fin du XVIII siècle. 2 vols. Paris: Editions des Presses Modernes, 1939.
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On the fortune of Ariosto in France with attention to neoclassical critical readings of the poem’s classicism.
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Davis, Elizabeth B. Myth and Identity in the Epic of Imperial Spain. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000.
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Makes a strong case for the epics of imperial Spain, Ercilla’s La Araucana first among them, as a legitimate field of inquiry in assessing Golden Age cultural politics and early Spanish nationalism.
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Hampton, Timothy. Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009.
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Beginning with an analysis of the literariness of Italian manuals on diplomatic behavior with much attention to the genres of romance and epic, Hampton examines the courtly diplomat as a cultural figure in the Renaissance, considering how the diplomat is represented in important literary statements by, among others, Tasso, Camôes, Corneille, Racine, and Shakespeare, on up to Stendhal.
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Hart, Thomas R. Cervantes and Ariosto: Renewing Fiction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.
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A reading of Cervantes’s reading of Ariosto inspired by Auerbach’s classic account of Cervantes in Mimesis. Hart argues that Ariosto’s ironic parody of romance was grist for the Spanish author’s mill.
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Junod, Samuel. Agrippa d’Aubigné ou les misères du prophète. Cahiers d’Humanisme et Renaissance 83. Geneva, Switzerland: Droz, 2008.
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A monographic study of Les Tragiques from the perspective of reader-response theory emphasizing the prophetic enunciations of characters in the poem.
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Nicolopulos, James. The Poetics of Empire in the Indies: Prophecy and Imitation in La Araucana and Os Lusíadades. Penn State Studies in Romance Literatures. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000.
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A study of the narratives of Ercilla and Camôes, their respective sources, especially classical and Italian, and the relations between the two poems.
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Scaglione, Aldo. Knights at Court: Courtliness, Chivalry, and Courtesy from Ottonian Germany to the Italian Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
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A study of the development of courtly and chivalric codes from the Middle Ages to the 17th century, the origins of which the author locates in the Ottonian court of late-medieval Germany. The Troubadour poets and various authors in French help to convert the medieval knight, originally an epic Christian warrior, into a creature of romance.