Ariosto and the Prophetic Moment

Abstract

Ludovico Ariosto composed his epic romance Orlando Furioso at a prophetic moment in Italian and European history. The climate of war and upheaval that characterized the Italian peninsula from the French invasion of 1494 to the fall of the Florentine Republic in 1530 encouraged the proliferation of prophetic expectations in all regions and all strata of society.' Many of the prophecies that circulated in those years in print or in manuscript were adapted from Medieval eschatology and political propaganda in order to respond to the urgent expectations evoked by a long succession of portentous events unfolding in Ariosto's lifetime (1474-1533). The discovery of America, the wars in Italy, the Lutheran Reformation, the expansion of the Turks, the rivalry over the imperial succession to Maximilian, the great planetary conjunction of 1524, and the sack of Rome in 1527 all helped to sustain a mood of prophetic tension from the earliest composition of the Furioso until the publication of the much revised third edition in 1532. Some of the most celebrated documents in this