Serena Piccirillo
Serena Piccirillo
Between Identity and Otherness. The Muslim East and the Construction of the “Turk” in Italian Renaissance Epics (1532–1573)
The project investigates Italian chivalric poems composed and published between 1532, the year of the definitive edition of the Orlando Furioso, and 1573, the period of peak poetic production linked to the victory at Lepanto. This chronological framework enables a unified examination of the development of the chivalric poem between Ariosto and Tasso, with particular attention to a wide corpus of texts currently considered "minor" or non-canonical, yet marked by extraordinary creative vitality and deeply rooted in the publishing culture of the sixteenth century.
The research focuses on how these poems contribute to the literary and cultural construction of the relationship between East and West, and, in particular, to the definition of Muslim otherness and the figure of the “Turk,” within the context of Mediterranean and Ottoman-Christian conflict. The project analyzes the narrative, rhetorical, and figurative devices through which chivalric poetry helps shape the imagination of the Islamic East, relating it to the political, ideological, and religious dynamics of the period.
Special attention is given to the material and editorial dimension of these texts: the poems are considered not only as literary works, but also as printed books, integrated within the vast production machinery of sixteenth-century Venetian publishing.
The project thus weaves together textual analysis, the study of editorial practices, and reflection on narrative and symbolic geographies, examining the role of cities, borders, and Mediterranean spaces in shaping the conflict between Christianity and Islam, and critically questioning the applicability of contemporary anthropological categories of identity and otherness to a sixteenth-century literary corpus.
Research Interests
Italian Renaissance Literature; Philology of Printed Texts; Ariostean Tradition and Dynamics of Reception; Chivalric Epic Poetry; Literature and the Construction of Cultural Identities.
