From Canon to Curiosity: The Ariosto–Tasso Debate and Its Reception in Seventeenth-Century English Literary Culture

This chapter examines the reception of the Ariosto–Tasso controversy in seventeenth-century England. While Orlando Furioso and Gerusalemme Liberata were available in private libraries, read and translated by English writers, it remains uncertain whether the debate that shaped the reception of the two poems in Italy soon after the publication of Liberata was fully understood. The Italian polemic, which focused on poetic structure, invention, and moral intent, appears to have circulated later, filtered through French neoclassical criticism and tailored to address English critical concerns. Rather than simply reproducing theoretical discussions, English responses often relied on selective interpretations of the poems. The epic works were valued mainly for their literary and imaginative qualities, with little attention paid to the polemical texts and their original contexts. Thus, the controversy was refracted through individual interpretive frameworks. It was the direct reading of the poems that enhanced the English epic.