Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato: An Ethics of Desire.

Cavallo's provocative title suggests the essence of her argument: the Orlando Innamorato is a didactic poem in which the poet "presents a coherent moral vision of love as well as a program for a humanist use of literature" (10). This vision and program are located in "another level of meaning" beyond the "vitality and interest" of character and incident: "the Innamorato contains overtly allegorical episodes . . . embedded in a framework that can be considered allegorical only in a much broader sense" (6). Ross, Murrin, and others have examined some of the overt allegories; Cavallo defines and explicates the "framework," as well as many specific episodes that reveal Boiardo's vision of love. She founds her explication in the "two Venus tradition" and uses exegetical methods like Robert Hollander's in Boccaccio's Two Venuses to show that Boiardo was aware of traditional moral readings of secular texts about love. Sixteen chapters, some as brief as four pages, argue that the narrator is ironic, explicate the allegories of "key" episodes, and show how particular characters and couples teach about love and about "the perils of reading texts without searching for their allegories" (9).

Cavallo's primary method for uncovering ironies and allegories is to discover an "intertext" and to read Boiardo's character or incident in the light shed on it by the intertext. A fundamental example of this is her discovery of The Consolation of Philosophy behind the narrator's idealistic definitions of love and its actions in the world in II.iv. 1-3. Critics have long noted that these lines do not describe the kind of love shown by Orlando in this canto or elsewhere, but, Cavallo suggests: "If we use Boethius's passage on cosmic love as an interpretive key, we find a coherence in the Innamorato between the above-cited verses and the narrative sequences. . . . The cosmic love of harmony finds its analogue on an individual level through friendship . . . and the love that leads to marriage. . . . The negative love, on the other hand, while experienced by various characters, is most consistently acted out by Orlando" (18).

Much of Boiardo's . . . Ethics of Desire is devoted to explaining this hierarchy of love. Orlando and others exemplify "Venus in malo," Ranaldo "is militantly anti-venereal," and Fiordelisa and Brandimarte, Tisbina and Prasildo, Bradamante and Rugiero, and many others fit the category of "the positive earthly love of the double Venus tradition" (158). This last group interests Cavallo most, and, whether one entirely accepts the Boethian framework or not, her careful demonstration of the positive value of love in their relationships convincingly shows the strong presence of "marriage, friendship, family, and conversion" in the poem (137).

Cavallo has a fine sensitivity to similarities; the passages she pairs with the Innamorato show that Boiardo was indeed working in a serious literary tradition and that a reader versed in that tradition would be likely to find the interaction of the Innamorato with other familiar texts very exciting and enlightening. Yet, she weakens her case by asserting that Boiardo's "intended audience" (159) would have interpreted intertexts ironically, and then offering only rudimentary evidence about the Este audience and about the reception of the text. When Cavallo suggests that "one could perhaps argue that the Cinquecento's greatest critical assessment of Boiardo's allegory is . . . by the Innamorato's most famous continuer" (4), she may well be right; certainly Cavallo sees the Innamorato with eyes trained by the Furioso. Each reader will have to decide whether she sees as developed what Ariosto may have seen as potential, but whatever the decision, Cavallo's book is important because it challenges us to see Boiardo as a very different kind of artist from the kind he has generally been assumed to be.

Pamela Joseph Benson RHODE ISLAND COLLEGE