The Paradox of Chivalric Madness

Ariosto’s and Cervantes’s Madness Representations Inadvertently Impact Disability Perception

Abstract:

This study investigates the connection between madness and critiques of the chivalric romance genre in two late Renaissance works, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote de la Mancha. The satire of chivalric romance in these works of fiction caution against nascent modes of thinking in imperial societies for the implementation of chivalric ideas to inspire and promote imperial conquests in Latin America through juxtaposition with the Muslim and Moorish conquest in the Maghreb and through metaphorical island governance. In order to make such critiques, these novels implement the madness of their parodic knights to disguise their critiques. This practice establishes a precedent which later literature can employ to make sociocultural critique covertly, to the detriment of disability representations as literary devices or metaphors.

In the domain of literary and philosophic expression, the experience of madness in the fifteenth century generally takes the form of moral satire.

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

But if the essential world-views implicit in the concept of art…are in every respect revealed by art, then art has got rid of this content which on every occasion was determinate for a particular people, a particular age, and the true need to resume it again is awakened only with the need to turn against the content that was alone valid hitherto…in Italy and Spain, when the Middle Ages were closing, Ariosto and Cervantes began to turn against chivalry.

G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art

To see a published version of this paper, please click on the following link to the Humanities Journal special issue entitled “Discourses of Madness,” from 2024:

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/13/3/87

---