| As epics, Ariosto's and Spenser's great Renaissance poems offer literary representations of history. Examining the terms that the texts themselves set up for the interpretation and representation of history, we can see them participating in--and commenting on--the change in historical paradigms that was one of the hallmarks of the early modern period. In their representations of dynastic history, both poems register the conflict between an essentially providential view of history and an emerging, more modern view of history as simply the realm of human power struggles.;Part II of the study turns to The Faerie Queene, juxtaposing Spenser's treatment of history in the prophetic passages from Books I-III with the problems of representing current English history as Justice in action in Book V. The conflict between opposing paradigms of history does much to explain the traditional difficulty of Book V's later cantos. Spenser, politically committed to the providential view, can only regard the emerging concept of history as morally evil. The gap between the two, which Ariosto contemplates with irony, is for Spenser a source of anguish.;Part I explores the prophetic art passages in Ariosto's poem. The original prophecy in Canto III and its partial fulfillment in Canto XLVI show the providential claim that the princely dynasty is the tool of Providence, if not the manifestation of a providential imperium, in constant juxtaposition against a more cynical view of the Estensi as Machiavellian politicians motivated by power, without resolving the contradiction. Each of the other three prophetic art passages in the Furioso examines and questions an aspect of the ideology of the providential claim: in Canto XXVI, the prince as an honorable knight, in Canto XLII, the prince as patron of the arts, and in Canto XXXIII, the idea of imperium itself. Throughout the poem, Ariosto uses the two paradigms of historical meaning to critique each other in a dialectic that is never resolved. |
