Abstract
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.
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