Ariosto’s Dialogue with Authority in the Erbolato ❦ Dennis Looney 1. Context for the Erbolato Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533) used the Erbolato, a work in Italian he probably wrote near the end of his life between 1530 and 1533, 1 to defend his youthful decision just after the beginning of the new century to turn away from the philological world of his humanist contemporaries with its focus on scholarship and the composition of verse in Latin in order to pursue a different kind of learning better expressed in the vernacular. In the process of making this defense, he parodies humanism in general, Neoplatonic philosophy in particular, with a serious nod and a wink to the growing interest in some circles of Ferrarese culture to challenge the Church’s authority, doctrinal and political. The Erbolato is a satirical blast aimed at these various brands of authority served up by Ariosto as he grew more independent in the 1 Ariosto’s reference to the Duke of Mantua establishes 1530 as a chronological point before which the work could not have been written since the Gonzaga family received its ducal title in that year. But of course the editor of the irst edition, Jacopo Coppa, could have altered the text to that effect after the fact. In any case, other references, e.g. to Leoniceno after his death in 1524, make it clear that the work was completed at some point in the last eight years of Ariosto’s life, between 1524–25 and 1533. I refer throughout this essay to my translation of the text of the Erbolato and Ariosto’s letters in Ariosto, My Muse Will Have a Story to Paint; the passage on the Duke of Mantua is at 282. For references to the text in Italian, I refer to the edition of Gabriella Ronchi in volume 3 of Tutte le opera di Ludovico Ariosto, ed. Cesare Segre. MLN 128 (2013): 20–39 © 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press