Renaissance Epic Meets Computation

This project arose as the product of work in an undergraduate seminar - a 3000-level course cross-listed between the Digital and Computational Studies and Italian Studies programs at Bowdoin College. From the beginning of the semester, our goal was to compose and eventually publish a work focused on a digital analysis of Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, an epic poem written in the early 1500s.

In our formation of this project, we drew upon work done in the digital humanities, or informatica umanistica, to analyze the geographies, networks, and textual features of this text. Our work began with the formation of our hypothesis, which involved reading of the poem (in Italian and English) and the formation of data sets, which were both created by us and from the digitalization of pre-existing indices in critical editions of the poem. From there, we began using digital tools for text analysis such as Voyant, Constellate, and various programs in R to extract data from the reading and various data visualization tools such as Gephi to both fuel our curiosities and narrow down our desired area of focus. We then engaged with second scholarship abou the poem's literary and historical underpinnings.

There is a large corpus of academic literature already written on the Orlando furioso. Topics of great academic interest include the role of women in the poem and the interplay between religious groups mentioned in the text. Scholarship also focuses on the various locations mentioned in the poem, and their relevance both historically and contemporaneously to Ariosto. Studies have been done focusing on Ariosto's rather unique writing style, which includes a great amount of humor and sarcasm as well as 'fourth wall breaks' in which he addresses the audience directly in his writing. However, in our work we became more interested in topics that have not always been in the academic spotlight, what we came to refer to in class discussions as 'fringe' subjects outside of the geographic and thematic centers of the poem. In the Orlando furioso, some of these 'fringe' locations include islands that seem to change position in the ocean, lands that may or may not exist, Ariosto's own representation of Dante's hell and terrestrial paradise, and even the Moon. We were supoprted in this with two class visits from Prof. Dan Leisawitz, project director for the digital humanities project Furioso Atlas and author of a seminal study on the connection of these locations to irony (Leisawitz 2022). 

Eventually, our attention settled on the Moon, one of the most unique locations Ariosto uses due to both its non-Earth location but also a variety of literary and structural anomalies present there. It seemed like a good test for the digital tools at our disposal as well.

The narration follows fewer characters than are typically found in the poem, with Astolfo and St. John comprising the singular, uninterrupted point of view for much of the lunar episode. Ariosto increases his use of 'fourth wall breaks', directly bringing the audience into the world of the poem as he makes clear his critiques on chivalry and the humanistic shortcomings of his contemporary society in what Ita Mac Carthy describes as the “mission statement of the poem" (Mac Carthy 2009, 81). Much of the elaborate world building and deep cast of characters also falls away, leaving only a handful of male, Western European figures to explore the world of forgotten things. The section is also ripe with literary references to Dante, Petrarch, and a variety of other poets and writers (see Shapiro 1982). 

While these concepts are what initially drew us towards studying the moon, we attempted to see how the moon appeared both as a potential "turning point" of the poem and as an episode in its own right through various computational tools and existing digital models of the poem, hoping to gain a new perspective on one of the most intriguing and novel sections of one of the most intricate and unique poems in Renaissance literature and the kinds of computation used for cultural analysis. 

In this first iteration of the project, we are a group of five students, all majoring in either Digital and Computational Studies or Italian Studies. Along with the help of our Professor, Crystal Hall, we present this site as a culmination of our work.