ABSTRACT
Antonio Panizzi arrived in England in May 1823 'with not quite a sovereign in his pocket, knowing no one, nor a word of the language', as he was later to write. At this point the author should give some explanation of the title of his essay and what the author propose to discuss in it. His title may seem a little puzzling, and so too the relationship between a nineteenth-century scholar of Boiardo and questions of cultural crisis in Italy in the 1490s. To the Boiardo specialist, the inclusion of Panizzi is not at all puzzling because his contribution to Boiardo scholarship is not inconsiderable; indeed it is of fundamental importance. Panizzi began his political exile by crossing the Italian border into Switzerland. He stayed in Lugano long enough to write and see his celebrated Dei processi e delle sentenze contro gli imputati di lesa maesta e di aderenza alle sette proscritte negli Stati di Modena in print.
