“One’s first encounter with any of these
epics can be somewhat jarring; they are far and away the most wildly
farraginous and gloriously irresponsible masterpieces in Western literature.
They are at once heroic, comic, allegorical, lyrical, satirical, fabulous, and
(occasionally) dark; they move with alarming ease between the metaphysical and
the ribald, the allegorical and the brutal, the spiritual and the grotesque. The Innamorato might almost seem formless but for the
ingenuity with which Boiardo continually weaves the innumerable strands of his
story together into ever more diverting designs. At any moment in the story, a
paladin might find himself confronted by a giant Saracen astride a galloping
giraffe, or trapped in an enchanted castle oblivious of his own name, or beset
by an army of demons, or challenged by an ogre, or lost in a fairy otherworld
full of the most exquisite enchantments, or at the mercy of a sorcerer. And
Boiardo—even more than Ariosto—is so irrepressibly inventive a fabulist that
one often has the feeling that, but for the author’s mortality, the story need
never come to an end.” — David B. Hart
