The Orlando Innamorato, written by the Italian Renaissance author Matteo Maria Boiardo, is an epic romance that combines events and characters from the Carolingian and Arthurian cycles, along with themes from ancient and contemporary sources. Boiardo’s epic has a non-linear timeline, allowing him to jump back and forth within his expertly created and intricately interwoven maze of episodes and characters.
This project, entitled “Character Genealogies of the Orlando innamorato,” serves to help readers navigate their way through the complex relationships that Boiardo constructs, and to make them aware of the larger background of familial ties that lies under the surface of the episodic adventures of the characters. The characters in the epic represent a set of extended families, interwoven by marriage and relationships, and reaching back to the mythic past. Starting with the Orlando innamorato, I hope to eventually expand this project to include the Orlando furioso as well, so that further comparisons can be made between Boiardo’s epic and Ariosto’s continuation of it.

The first portion of the project covers the familial relationships of Brandimarte and Fiordelisa. Clicking on a character’s name opens an index, showing every book, canto and verse in which they appear within the text. Clicking on the index entries will then take you to that specific canto within a digitized version of the text.

The electronic edition of the text is as follows: Orlando Innamorato, written by Matteo Maria Boiardo, curated by Aldo Scaglione; Collection: Clasici Italiani, Torino: Unione Tipgrafico-Editrice Torinese, 1984. Published online by Alberto Barberi as a part of “Progetto Manuzio” on LiberLiber , 2nd electronic edition, 30 march 2001.

This text is taken from LiberLiber, under the license: Creative Commons “Attribuzione – Non commerciale – Condividi allo stesso modo 4.0 Internazionale”, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

Tylar Ann Colleluori (Ph.D. candidate, Columbia University Department of Italian)