Contextualizing the Moon

Canto 34 follows Astolfo on his journey into Hell, the Earthly Paradise, and Heaven. Canto 34 begins with Astolfo chasing the Harpies into their subterranean cavern, where he meets the shade Lydia. She recounts a 30-octave long story from her life, after which Astolfo remounts his hippogriff. It flies him to the top of a nearby mountain from where he can see the Moon. He meets Saint John atop the mountain, who explains that they must head to the Moon to find Orlando's wits so they can return them to him. There, Astolfo sees, among other things, piles of treasure, a large lake, and, finally, a pile of wits, each stored in a small container. After reclaiming his own vial, he takes the flask with Orlando's wits and proceeds to a palace where the Fates and Father Time stay.

Canto 35 begins with a break of the fourth wall where Ariosto addresses his own poetic ability. Then, Astolfo sees bundles of thread from which the lifespan "threads" of future people would be drawn. One brightly glowing bundle represents the life of Ippolito d'Este. Saint John then explains the significance of all they have seen, at which point Ariosto leaves Astolfo to talk about Bradamante.

Notably, the Moon is not an indexed entry in Reynolds' translation, technically eliminating it as a data point! This raised a related question about geographies of absence (places that should or could have been mentioned like the New World, but weren't).

The Moon is both an unusual episode and one that seems to fit right into the fabric of the poem. In the spirit of the course, we wondered if the computational tools and digital models could capture any of the things that felt so unique about this episode. We embarked down this specific path trying to stay aware of how the relationships and characters are visualized also changes the lens on the narrative. Importantly, the unique things might carry more weight than word counts - top words are a distraction (especially in a poem where so many things are repeated). The moon is an inversion of many behaviors, virtues, and relationships seen earlier in the poem, but you keep reading the poem “as usual” after the deep criticism present during these octaves. Ariosto set up this exceptional space, pushing us towards ironic interpretation. (Leisawitz 2022) Could digital tools add more layers to that interpretation? It seemed a worthy challenge to the tools and our data that helped us to learn more about the text and digital analytical methods.

We consider fourth wall breaks (Ariosto's asides to the reader), intertextual tension with Dante's Comedy, character identities with particular focus on Astolfo, a network analysis of character interaction frequencies, episode length, scholarship, and spatial references. (A brief summary of our analytical digressions along the way is also part of this project site.)

The question mark in our subtitle indicates our hesitation to conclude that the computational tools and digital methods can indeed reveal the exceptional status of the moon in the Orlando furioso. Overall, our hypothesis about this turning point was not supported by counting characters introduced before and after the episodes, their densities, their interactions, or episode lengths (which turned out to be relatively inconsistent aross the poem). We were able to support the claims in secondary scholarship that the poem becomes more Eurocentric as it works towards the plot resolution and conclusion. 

While the available data on spaces and secondary scholarship on the poem obscured trends, a future course can add depth and specificity to the spatial data to better understand this dimension of the poem.  In addition, there is more work to be done on contextualizing Ariosto's address to the reader in this episode, perhaps by collecting more refined data in the next iteration of the course (ways other than vostr* for breaking the fourth wall, tone of these asides, contexts, etc.). Similarly, paying closer attention to Astolfo's interactions with other characters (not just St. John), would provide more context for understanding the gender imbalance of his time on the Moon - particularly when combined with Ariosto's aside to female readers (vostre) in particular. We also wanted to know how many of the lost, mundane objects on the moon had been mentioned elsewhere in the poem. Relatedly, we wondered the extent to which economic relationships between the Este in Ferrara and some of the more exotic objects might add a layer of interpretation to this episode. 

Good results point to more questions like these rather than definitive answers!