ABSTRACT
From one perspective, Linda L. Carroll’s exploration of Italian Renaissance epic looks at the portrayal of the Turks as a fairly conventional “monstrous other,” the “ultimate enemy,” whose military prowess, religious affiliation, and alien culture combined to form a terrifying specter in the European imagination. Carroll’s study, however, also carefully situates each Renaissance epic within its distinct local social and political contexts. She shows that differing portrayals and interpretations of Turkish “monsters” responded both to the ebb and flow of the Ottoman threat, and to the endless shifts of the Italian geopolitical scene. She demonstrates, for example, how the interplay between fears of Turkish invasion, fears of French hegemony, and a courtier’s quite practical desire to validate the legitimacy of Este rule determined the representations of monsters and protagonists in Matteo Maria Boiardo’s epic, Orlando innamorato. Similarly, the quest for patronage led poets to modulate the monstrousness of imagined Turks according to the geographical, political, and economic proximity of their patrons to the reality of Ottoman power.
