The Afterlives of Ariosto’s Characters: Rewriting the Episode of Fiordispina in Early Modern Ovidian Epistles

Epic poems and romances have provided literature and the arts with a tradition of male and female characters who have been a constant presence in Italian culture. In this paper I explore the rewriting of Ariosto’s characters in three epistolary collections based on the model of Ovid’s Heroides and published between the 1580s and the 1630s. The Orlando Furioso, which has inspired numerous rewritings and adaptations, features also as a main source in the genre of elegiac epistles modelled on the Heroides. After Marino, who theorised the genre but wrote only the Lettera di Rodomonte a Doralice (1619), other poets took on the project of a collection of Ovidian epistles, the first ones being Francesco della Valle and Antonio Bruni. Yet, more than three decades before the publication of Marino’s epistle, a collection of Ovidian epistles solely inspired by Ariosto’s poem was published, the Lettere sopra il Furioso dell’Ariosto by Marco Filippi (1584). Notably, the Orlando Furioso features as a source in all these authors. This paper analyses the Ovidian rewriting of Ariosto’s characters by focussing especially on the episode of Fiordispina, which addresses issues of sexuality, cross-dressing, and sexual change. While considering the literary and cultural outlook informing the works of Filippi, Della Valle and Bruni, this paper tackles the (re)definition of Ariosto’s characters and discusses how retelling a well-known story from a new perspective contributed to renewing Italian literary culture while upholding an established critical tradition.