York prof organizes symposium celebrating 500 years of ‘Orlando Furioso’

Featured image shows the poster image for the symposium

An international symposium celebrating the quincentenary of the first edition of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso will run Nov. 11 and 12, and attract a distinguished group of scholars to explore the Italian epic poem.

ariosto-poster-d3Taking place at Alumni Hall, Old Victoria College at the University of Toronto, the event is organized by York University Professor of Italian studies and graduate humanities Antonio Ricci.

Ricci is a book historian who specializes in the print culture of the Renaissance. He is also this year’s York Fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.

Hosted by the Centre for Reformation & Renaissance Studies at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, the symposium participants will consider the poem’s fortunes from the perspective of reading.

Approaching the question from a broad range of disciplines, the speakers will discuss the kinds of readers intended by Ariosto, the modes of reading envisaged by printers and editors, as well as those enacted by critics, translators and writers, and the visual readings imagined by artists. The hope is that the exploration of the Furioso’s complex historical reception will contribute to an understanding of the evolving experience of reading in the digital age.

The first edition of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso was printed in Ferrara in 1516, and the radically innovative romance-epic quickly affirmed itself as a bestseller. Over the past five centuries, it has exerted a profound influence on literary traditions and offered a rich source for the visual arts, theatre and music.

Several members of the York University community will participate, including: Mark Jurdjevic (Glendon College), Leslie Korrick (York University), Guillaume Bernardi (Glendon College) and Barbara Swanson (SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow, Dept. of Visual Art and Art History)

To register for the symposium, visit this link. For the program outline, go here.

For more information on the symposium, contact the Centre for Reformation & Renaissance Studies.