ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides a consideration of crisis and continuity not only from a historical perspective, but especially from a cultural one. It seeks to provide answers to questions such as how we define crisis and continuity, and how these phenomena manifest themselves in particular in the realm of culture. The book examines the political and economic history of Florence at the end of the fifteenth century and to a discussion of currents of intellectual debate and fashionable ideas in the same period. It points out Florentine success in a literary domain perceived as Ferrarese that first prompted Matteo Maria Boiardo to take up his pen on Orlando innamorato. The most significant case is surely that of Boiardo traduced and disfigured by the efforts, more or less well meaning, of continuators, editors, printers, and revisers, as Harris has memorably shown on several occasions.
