Trumpets of Lepanto: Italian narrative poetry (1571–1650) on the war of Cyprus

Abstract

This paper aims to shed light on the corpus of Italian heroic narrative poems, written during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (1571–1650), on the war of Cyprus and the battle of Lepanto. While arguing that the literary significance of the event in this corpus can only be caught through a diachronically, geographically, and textually broadened vision, the article extracts among the discursive characteristics of this corpus four major issues that can guide our interpretation. First, early Lepanto poems are inclined to adopt features (shortness, lyric forms) that blur their adherence to categories by which they are commonly described. Secondly, beyond prevalent and common themes concerning internal discord and demonization of the Ottomans, their content and (critical versus laudatory) rhetoric are strongly determined by the cultural and geographical community in which authors operated, which further contributes to the variety within the corpus. Thirdly, poems written in circles close to Torquato Tasso show a remarkable proximity to his Gerusalemme liberata. Fourthly, an extension of the analysis to later Lepanto poems, where the battle functions as a Mediterranean event in both romanticized and moralizing settings, shows the importance of Tasso’s authority and its interaction with other sources.