Orlando Furioso

Love is central to the chivalric romance genre. Poets writing about Arthurian knights and magicians have been inspired by the love songs of troubadours, which, in turn, take inspiration from Sufi love poetry. Patron Marie de Champagne’s court of love in medieval France helped create a kind of secular religion that promoted worshiping a beloved. Orlando Furioso explores the power of love: its ability to instill madness and its relationship to violence, as well as how romantic love affects the love of family, the love of a king, and the love of God.

Orlando’s orgy of bloodshed is due to loving Angelica, who is herself a slave to love. For initially rejecting Orlando, Rinaldo, and other suitors, Love punishes Angelica by causing her to fall for a young Moor named Medor. Angelica carves their names in every available surface, especially trees, and the sight of these love-inscriptions causes Orlando to lose his wits. However, Love also has the power to stop violence; it is more powerful than vices. For instance, Doralice steps in between Rodomont and Mandricard, who have been manipulated into fighting by Discord and Pride. Worshiping a beloved, as taught by the codes of courtly love, makes one able to resist corrupting influences. This occasional positive influence of love makes it comparable to Fortune: “Cupid does not always wreak mischief; if he often does harm, he sometimes does good” (296).

The chivalric romance genre also introduced the idea of powerful people marrying for love, rather than for political alliances. Ruggiero and Bradamant exemplify this. Bradamant wants to marry Ruggiero, but her parents want to use her in a political alliance with Greece. Bradamant is torn between different types of love: “Shall filial duty, then, prevail upon me to abandon you, Ruggiero? [...] I am daughter of Aymon and Beatrice, and I am, alas, slave of love. If I sin I look to my parents for pardon and pity; but if I offend Love, who shall be sufficient to avert his wrath from me” (536-537). Meanwhile, Ruggiero, in order to be with Bradamant, must choose romantic Love over love of his honor and his king, as well as his God. While Ruggiero does prioritize many kinds of love over being with Bradamant throughout the poem, he at first values keeping his promise to Agramant over romantic commitment. However, when Ruggiero is shipwrecked, he changes his mind. He appeals to Bradamant’s God, swearing to become a Christian and “no longer dally with Bradamant but would achieve the honourable consummation of his love” (490). Here, the pursuit of romantic, or “conjugal” (483) love, is aligned with the honorable action of becoming a Christian. When his life is in jeopardy, he comes to believe that his previous ideas of honoring Agramant (who killed his father) and the Islamic God were incorrect. 

In the end, love’s power is occasionally defeated with magic. Rinaldo, a married man, falls for Angelica after drinking from a spring that causes one to fall passionately in love. Angelica visits a different spring, one that has “Ice-cold waters which dowse Love’s flames. Angelica drank from this spring, which gave rise to the hatred Rinaldo inspired in her ever after” (504). At the end of the poem, Wrath, in the disguise of a mysterious knight, leads Rinaldo to the hate-spring, “dismissing all desire for [her]” (504).

Finally, love’s power to instill madness is cured with a quick trip to the moon, where the magical knight Astolfo finds Orlando’s wits. After Astolfo forces a bound and naked Orlando to inhale his wits from the moon-phial, Orlando was “his old self once more, a paragon of wisdom and manliness [...] also found himself cured of love” (472). The titular character of Ariosto’s chivalric romance ends up single, while Ruggiero becomes the ultimate example of the Christian lover who marries for love.