ITHAKA’s Constellate text analysis tools for JSTOR and other repositories of primary and secondary sources offers one way to assess the importance of Astolfo’s lunar adventure in the critical scholarship on Ariosto’s poem. The underlying data contains several limitations, primarily related to the optical character recognition (OCR) process for scanning print versions of less recent articles. Results will naturally skew toward more recent publications that were created with digital word processing tools. The search interface also makes the reporting of results a bit cumbersome, so variations of corpora of JSTOR articles discussing the Orlando furioso and the moon are discussed below.

While Ariosto’s depiction of the moon might be of wide interest to scholars in many fields, it has received less sustained scholarly attention within Italian Studies. A more general search for “moon” within bigrams of JSTOR articles that also use “Orlando furioso” and “poem” produces 928 results. Of the 258 journals that published these articles, 54 specialize in American and English literary studies, 20 in the field of Art History. Together these account for nearly one third of the articles. Only 72 have “Ariosto” in the title; 32 have “Orlando” (with some overlap between these groups). Those with any reference to the moon in the title are even fewer: 5. Ita MacCarthy’s 2009 “Ariosto the Lunar Traveller” stands out among these as being the only one dedicated to Ariosto specifically. 

Based on this representation of the moon’s role in the poem, we might expect it to be of little importance. Fantastical, inspirational, but as yet, at least in materials digitized by JSTOR and accessible through Constellate, only worthy of a few scholarly articles. Admittedly, this survey does not include books or book chapters.