The feast of Orlando: private entertainment and public rites in the Mambriano by Cieco da Ferrara

Abstract

Despite their fantastic content, chivalric poems of the 15th and 16th centuries can become a portrait or a speculum of the actual reality. This happens in a particularly significant way in the Mambriano by Francesco Cieco da Ferrara, a poem composed between Boiardo’s and Ariosto’s masterpiece, and closely linked to the Gonzaga family. Here, resorting also to a close interplay with some episodes of Inamoramento de Orlando, Francesco Cieco uses the representation of parties and feasts to propose contents quite unusual for chivalric literature and to sketch the portrait of an ideal court, based on harmony, pacification and the search for the common good.