Humanism’s Other Inheritance: The Brutal Intertextuality of Boiardo’s Rocca Crudele

In Book I of the Orlando innamorato, Ranaldo travels from Palazo Zoioso to Rocca Crudele, a distinct adventure that exists almost as a separate novella within the poem. At Rocca Crudele, he encounters an exceptionally violent scene that is composed of the most horrific moments of cruelty drawn from classical and vernacular literature. The intertextual referents of Rocca Crudele are completely stripped of anything redeeming, leaving only atrocities as the poem confronts the problem of the imitation of past evils instead of virtues. This paper argues that Rocca Crudele is a place set apart in the world of the Innamorato, where its normally reverential and humanist approach to the past fails temporarily. Rocca Crudele refuses interpretation as a site of pragmatic or moral instruction and instead reflects upon the potential perils of imitation as a pattern of behavior when the cultural legacy of the past is not always exemplary.