Il Baldus dalla Paganini alla Toscolanense (passando per il Furioso)

Abstract

This article examines the developments in Folengo’s Baldus from the Paganini edition (1517) to that of Toscolano (1521). Not only did the new edition double the number of hexameters present in the first poem, but it also had other far-reaching ambitions. In fact, Folengo filled his story with polemical and moralizing digressions together with allegorical episodes as a way to admonish his readers and intervene in religious and moral disputes of the time. As a result, Baldus was transformed into a literary world all its own, following in the footsteps of Orlando Furioso, whose first edition had come out in 1516. Folengo can thus be considered the first writer to have grasped the extraordinary nature of Ariosto’s newly published masterpiece and to have taken it as a model for his macaronic poem.