This study investigates the representation of Saracens in Boiardo's Inamoramento de Orlando and Ariosto's Orlando furioso, a subject that has attracted growing scholarly interest in recent years. Chapter I assesses the degree of realism in Boiardo's and Ariosto's portrayal of Islam and Islamic culture and locates the two poems in their historical context. Bringing to light unpublished archival material and other little-known historical sources, I argue that Boiardo and Ariosto drew inspiration from contemporary courtly culture which was characterised by openness towards the figure of the foreign prince. Chapter II explores Boiardo's engagement with earlier chivalric literature. It examines Boiardo's use of names and characters from earlier texts and evaluates the Saracens' contribution to the ideology that underpins the poem. It is shown that Saracens play an important role in promoting the ‘Arthurian’ chivalric ideals. Chapters III and IV analyse Ariosto's indebtedness to and departures from his predecessor, suggesting that there is a much greater continuity between the two Orlandos than is allowed by Cavallo and other scholars who are anxious to stress Ariosto's 'conservatism'. While chapter III is devoted to a wide-ranging analysis of the Saracen world in Ariosto, chapter IV deals with a topic that has recently generated much heated debate, namely the climactic confrontation between Rodomonte and Ruggiero and the ending of the Orlando furioso and how it should be understood, and I propose a new interpretation of the final canto by highlighting the concept of honour, a fundamental value for both Boiardo and Ariosto as well as for their early readers and for many chivalric authors alike. In my view, Rodomonte is the true winner of the duel. The significance of his 'moral' victory is examined in the study's final conclusion, where it is argued that it undermines Ariosto’s encomiastic project.

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Miguel de Cervantes’s novel El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha Part One (1605) and Part Two (1615) has delighted readers for centuries. The literary criticism analyzing just this one product of Cervantes’s literary genius is voluminous. In particular, the novel’s structure has received significant scrutiny, and discussions regarding its unity, or lack thereof, abound. This debate rages today with Cervantine experts still espousing various theories. Puzzling over this quandary and asking why a truly convincing explanation regarding the structure has not emerged, we arrive at a partial answer. We believe that there is unity in the Quijote and that Cervantes created a unified work by ingeniously taking full advantage of the elements of both the “Byzantine” and the chivalric literary traditions, combining them in a harmonizing synthesis. Moreover, he resolved the problem of unity within variety by establishing thematic consistency throughout. The purpose of our study is to explore the confluence of the “Byzantine” and chivalric literary traditions in works that precede Cervantes and to examine how Cervantes innovatively worked with this element in the Quijote of 1605. We present a panoramic view of works written between the thirteenth and the mid-sixteenth centuries, which reveal writers’ efforts to combine, consciously or unconsciously, the various characteristics of the “Byzantine” and chivalric literary traditions. For this project, we look at six representative works written in Spanish or Italian that represent significant antecedents to the Quijote and Cervantes’s unique method of synthesizing the traditions: Libro de Apolonio, Libro del caballero Zifar, Orlando innamorato, Orlando furioso, Palmerín de Olivia, Los amores de Clareo y Florisea y los trabajos de la sin ventura Isea. We investigate each author’s approach at coupling the two traditions and determine his/her degree of success in merging them artistically to produce a coherent whole. Our analysis reveals that not only does Cervantes systematically integrate the two literary traditions in his parody, but he also skillfully devises a way to unify thematically the delightful variety in his work. To wit, Cervantes embraces the theme of literature (fiction) and life (reality) and explores the need for distinguishing judiciously between them. / text