It is now widely acknowledged that Renaissance humanism joined, rather than replaced medieval chivalry in the Italian courts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The tales of Arthurian knights were read alongside the works of Cicero; theatrical revivals of Greek tragedies were performed following jousts and tournaments. But this form of knighthood has generally been regarded as one far removed from the practicalities of daily existence. Instead, the image of the Renaissance knight has been epitomised in Castiglione's presentation of the Sforza commander and courtier, Gaspare da San Severino, as a figure more capable of wielding a jousting baton than of winning a battle.
But is this an accurate reflection of the realities of acting as a knight in the Quattrocento? This paper will argue that the failure of the Italian armies against those of the French and the Spanish in the late 1490s and early sixteenth century has led to a dismissal of the Italian court's continuing interest in knighthood as purely literary. But an examination of the material dimensions of knightly behaviour suggests that this dismissal is unfair. The costs and practicalities of organising the events, which created a sense of the kinship and connections of knighthood (both in tournaments and on the battlefield), were too high to be dismissed as mere play-acting. The need for specialised armour, weapons and horses was met in a number of ways, through gifts, loans, and the purchase of second-hand goods. Extending this to provide for an entire army was neither practical nor feasible. Encouraging elite soldiers to equip themselves, and to practice their skills by providing numerous competitive events, again, had long term benefits in terms of preparation for war. The survival of the image of the heroic knight into early modern period was not only medieval literary fiction, but also a testimony to its continuing flexibility and usefulness.

How many layers of meaning hid under the fiction of the handsome young man riding a white horse out of the blue to save the world, his country and its people or a young girl from a dreadful fate; or, in later centuries, to save society, its economic and political welfare? In the Renaissance different ideals, that of the miles cristianus, of the cavaliere di ventura, and of the condottiere, to mention just a few examples, seem to blend with that of the original society of noblemen, the knights which served as guard of the King from the Middle Ages. In the fifteenth century the question is, as could be expected, even more complicated because religious iconography changed and, what is of special interest in this connection, representations of Saint George influenced representations of the secular knight in the history of painting and sculpture. In this paper I shall first try to outline the development which we find in representations of the knight in painting and sculpture during the fifteenth century; I shall then discuss whether the modern figure, as it emerged in the fifteenth century, is still embedded in the iconography of the knight and his horse in later centuries.

Renaissance civic humanists, thanks to the pioneering work of Hans Baron, are widely believed to have opposed the system of mercenary warfare in general use throughout the later middle ages and Renaissance, and to have favored the development of civic militias (Baron 1955, Bayley 1961) manned by citizen-soldiers. This doctrine of civic humanism is believed by many historians to have prepared the ground for the development of modern national armies. Closer examination of the early Renaissance sources, however, reveals that some of the key texts used by earlier historians to make this argument have been misread; and that humanist advocacy of civic militias really begins only in the early sixteenth century. Early Renaissance humanists did not oppose the mercenary system. Instead they advocated reform of contemporary knighthood and the creation of special orders of civic knights. The civic knighthood of the early humanists implied a rejection of medieval French knighthood and a return to the ideal of the ancient Roman miles. It proposed creating a new order of men, of wealth and ancient ancestry, who would in wartime take special care of the military affairs of the commonwealth and in peacetime act as protectors of the weak, especially the poor, widows, religious persons and orphaned children. This new classical ideal of civic knighthood was not, however, confined to Renaissance republics (as one might imagine from the literature on civic humanism) but was promoted by humanists working for signorial as well as for oligarchic regimes. As an example of this, one may mention in particular the treatise of Michele Savonarola, dedicated to Leonello d'Este, De militia inermi seculari (preserved in Modena, Bibl. Estense MS lat. 114 [alpha W 6 6]).

La trasformazione subita dagli ideali della cavalleria e dalla figura letteraria del cavaliere fra il XII e il XV secolo corrisponde al passagio dalla società cortese a quella borghese e mercantile del XII e XIV secolo, a quella umanistica del XV. Il genere del "contrasto" fra il chierico e il cavaliere e fra il borghese (o il contadino) e il cavaliere, riflettendo la fine della società feudale, è espresso in toni di forte carica satirica, che trovano solo parziale corrispondenze nella novellistica del '300 (ancora affascinata dal "mito" del cavaliere cortese) e poi nelle facezie di Poggio Bracciolini e del Poliziano.
Per quanto riguarda la commedia umanistica, il mutato ruolo sociale della cavalleria, che tende a configurarsi o come compagnia di ventura, oppure come mondanità raffinata e dalle belle maniere, e d'altro lato, la centralità degli ideali pedagogici nella cultura dell'Umanesimo comportano la marginalità del personaggio, pur di origine classica, del miles gloriosus, a favore della figura dello studente scapestrato, nuovo protagonista della scena umanistica.

The figure of the female knight, combining "feminine" beauty with "masculine" valour and prowess at arms, haunted the imagination of the Italian chivalric poets of the Renaissance, and represents one of their most distinctive additions to the array of characters and character-types they inherited from the Carolingian and Arthurian traditions. Owing much, in their initial, fourteenth and fifteenth-century incarnations to classical prototypes such as the Amazons, these figures gradually developed a more complex and varied profile, especially as the popular, oral tradition of chivalric romance was adopted and transformed in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth century by sophisticated court poets such as Matteo Maria Boiardo and Lodovico Ariosto. This paper will attempt to give an overview of the development of this character-type in Italian chivalric poetry between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, taking into account both the works of canonical authors such as Boiardo, Ariosto, and Torquato Tasso, and many lesser-known texts, including a number of late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century poems by women, which offer interesting evidence of women readers' responses to these "paradoxical" and challenging figures. A particular focus of the paper will be the way in which literary representations of female knights serve as the focus for a problematisation of gender identity, analogous to that found in the many treatises of the period which address the problem of women's nature and role. It will be argued that an important context for this debate on gender, in both its literary and intellectual manifestations, are the changes that this period saw in the social roles of elite males, and the threat that these changes posed to traditional martial and chivalric constructions of masculinity. This is not, however, to say that the challenge to conventionally defined gender boundaries embodied in the figure of the female knight should be seen simply as a function of a crises in male identity; on the contrary, this figure would prove sufficiently polyvalent to serve as an emblem of female empowerment to women writers as they sought to negotiate themselves a space within the traditionally masculine literary realm.

Nella letteratura cavalleresca italiana tra '400 e '500, le armi appaiono un trito contenuto, sempre più dominante e sempre meno significativo. Ridotto a un puro divertimento poetico, questo motivo si carica tuttavia, sotto l'effetto sia della cultura umanistica (Poliziano, Pulci) sia della satira e dell'ironia di elementi più moderni.
Nell' "Orlando innamorato" del Boiardo, la "conversione" all'amore del guerriero puro, Orlando, è, proprio come l'apparizione di Angelica 'cosa nova', in quanto l'amore è sì, motore di gare cortesi e di prodezze cavalleresche ("le dilettose istorie"), ma anche di una strenua affermazione individuale (consona con la "virtù" dei tempi) e di socialità. L'amore - e la correlativa cortesia - confermano tra l'altro l'evoluzione della rappresentazione del gentiluomo verso la civiltà cortegianesca in piena espansione.
Questa sensibilità moderna si accentua nell'Ariosto come lo dimostrano la sua profonda repulsione per la guerra e il suo sorridente distacco - mediante l'ironia o la satira - dai duelli e altri scontri cavallereschi (cfr. le armi volgari usate dal pazzo Orlando e altre derisioni di conflitti e di strumenti bellici). Il che non toglie che le geste dei suoi cavalieri, vezzeggiati nel canto poetico, non recuperino con molta serietà: sensi umani, ideali signorili e concordia interindividuale.
Composto, come l' "Orlando furioso", fra il fragore dei conflitti militari, il "Cortegiano" del Castiglione, con le sue laboriose ambiguità e contraddizioni rispetto alle armi e allo statuto del gentiluomo, testimonia il disagio del cortigiano di fronte a una realtà storica sempre più sfavorevole ai nobili "disarmati", provvisti delle sole competenze della cultura letteraria e mondana.
Le dispute castiglionesche sembrano preannunciare i tempi senza guerre, in cui le armi perderanno la loro finalità professionale e "cavalleresca". Vediamo allora il gentiluomo indotto ad affermare la propria identità nella letteratura e nella pratica dei duelli, o negli spettacoli fastosi e ornamentali delle corti dei principi assoluti.

L'inchiesta si svolgerà a partire da una doppia interrogazione su uno degli episodi più famosi sia dell' Orlando Innamorato di Boiardo, sia dell' Orlando furioso di Ariosto : il combattimento dell'uomo contro il mostro per salvare una principessa.
1) Perché mai questi episodi sono sdoppiati, alla stregua delle loro fonti più famose (Le Metamorfosi di Ovidio e la vita di san Giorgio nella Leggenda aurea di Voragine ?)
2) Quali significati sono veicolati attraverso le metamorfosi di un oggetto quasi sempre presente nelle diverse interpretazioni di questa storia archetipale : cinta, laccio, anello, insomma attraverso la presenza costante di un accessorio che serve a immobilizzare, legare, imprigionare, domare. Forse gli elementi di risposte ci diranno qualcosa sulle immagini del cavaliere nel suo rapporto con la donna, con il male e con il territorio nel '400 e '500. Si ricorrerà pure ad alcune rappresentazioni iconografiche su questo tema .

This paper will compare Cervantes' character Don Quixote with Shakespeare's Pericles in order to describe the creation of the modern knight in the Renaissance. As opposed to the idealized, allegorical portraits offered by Edmund Spenser in the Faerie Queene, where a ruling moral intelligence prevails, Cervantes and Shakespeare portray knights who are overwhelmed by the worlds in which they find themselves and relatively powerless within them. Cervantes' character creates his own world of fantastical battles and princesses, while Pericles engages in battles not of his choosing. Both Cervantes and Shakespeare register in these works a rejection of the medieval concept of the knight and inject keen portraits of the disjunction between chivalric romanticism and everyday battles for existence. The paper will aim to describe the differences (and to some extent the causes of these differences) between Cervantes' ironic stance towards chivalry and Shakespeare's recreation of the notion of chivalry in reaction to the new regime under James I.

The 1584 frescoes of the story of Jason and Medea in Palazzo Fava, Bologna, are often regarded as the first great collective product of the Carracci reform of painting, in which Lodovico and his nephews departed from the conventions of the maniera through an alternative idiom drawing on Venetian and Emilian models. The frescoes, and the pointed stylistic citations they contain, have not generally been examined in terms of their distinctive narrative technique, which contrasts markedly with contemporary artistic treatments of heroic narrative, including contemporaneous works by the Carracci themselves. The novelty of the Carracci's first collective production is in large part a result of their concern with the genre of pictorial narrative. It will be shown that a relationship can be plotted in highly specific terms between the artists' approach and contemporaneous theorisations of literary genre, above all the controversies about heroic poetry centered on the chivalric romances of Ariosto and Tasso. This can be traced not only in the approach to style, which is markedly heterogeneous, relentlessly contemporary and vernacular, and modulated in accordance with character and situation, but above all in the approach to the protagonists. The characterization of Jason not only can be aligned with the prescriptions by romance theorists Giraldi and Pigna, but with contemporary concerns regarding the nature of heroic character and behavior, which centered on a collision between ancient and modern (i.e.chivalric) models. It was furthermore within the genre of romance that a highly ambivalent character like Medea could emerge as a co-protagonist in her own right; the wild inconsistency with which she is depicted can only be satisfactorily explained through the treatment of the figure of the enchantress/heroine in contemporary poetic practice.

As the title indicates this paper deals with the representation of the knight in the Scandinavian countries (mainly Denmark and Sweden) during the Renaissance. Scandinavian chivalry is a subject that has not been given very much attention. The development is rather similar to that of the Continent, although the written sources and the extant art objects are comparatively few. In the Middle Ages, the most common way to depict a nobleman was to show him as a knight dressed in contemporary armour. During the Renaissance the situation became far more complex. A new aristocratic ideal was created which demanded versatility and learning in service of the State. Now the nobleman could be presented in many different ways, as a Roman dressed in ancient armour or even as a Goth.

After a brief introduction to the history of Frederiksborg, the architectural genesis of the chapel (1608-17) will be outlined with special emphasis on its unique status in Northern Europe. Modelled on Torgau in Saxony (1544) it surpasses all extant protestant palace chapels in scale and sumptuousness. The chapel at Frederiksborg was finished in 1617, the centenary of Luther's first public appearance.
The sculptural decoration of the chapel constitutes its perhaps most intriguing aspect. Using an antique-inspired vocabulary - especially the motive of triumphal arches carrying reliefs, statues and inscription tablets - the chapel visualises the King's ideal of sacral kingship: the Christian prince, exercising his power by Divine right as an earthly counterpart of God - an ideology that was apparent both in ceremonies and in sermons during the King's coronation in 1596, and anticipates the absolutist constitution of 1660. As a logical continuation of the Chapel's symbolic value, it was chosen as setting for the ceremony when Christian V was anointed (1671), the first Danish king who ascended the throne as absolute monarch. He furthermore stressed the chapel's intimate connection with ancient and medieval ideas of royal power by installing a chapel for the knights of the Order of the Elephant upon the gallery above the altar.