Il lessico cavalleresco nell'Orlando Furioso di Ludovico Ariosto

The goal of the present dissertation is to analyze the lexicon of chivalry found in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. By taking into account the structure of the first two verses of the proem, this work has been subdivided into two parts: «The lexicon of fighting», where the terms relevant to the knight’s warfare are analyzed, and «The lexicon of morals», where I deal with the terms describing the characters’ inner world. About the first topic, special attention has been paid to two noteworthy features of the poem: one is the absence of the term duello, notwithstanding the numerous single combats described in the work; the other is the anachronistic appearance of a firearm, which had not yet been invented at the time in which the poem is set. About the second topic, after selecting and summarizing a few episodes where the characters’ moral profiles emerge clearly, I extracted from these episodes the moral terms, paying special attention to the combinations of two (or more) terms and limiting the scope of my inquiry to the cases in which such combinations are used in a strictly moral sense. By analyzing the combinations both from a formal and a semantic viewpoint, paying special attention to the different types of relationship between the members of the various combinations (e.g. synonymy, antonymy or variation), I tried to work out in what sense the poet understood (or chose to interpret) the terms in question; to achieve this, a very useful method has also been to compare Ariosto’s choices with those of other authors.