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Queens amused and abused: the Orlando Furioso and Ireland

Illustrated lecture, in English, by Eric Haywood, UCD

Of all the knights in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, there is only one who does
not put a foot wrong when coming to the rescue of a damsel in distress:
the King of Ireland! And of all the tourist attractions in the big wide
world that is the knights’ oyster, there is only one which merits a
detour: St Patrick’s Purgatory! Why could that be? And might it explain
why Ireland played such an important part in the life of the poem’s
first English translator, Sir John Harington?Harington undertook the
(very successful) translation, at the request of Queen Elizabeth I,
even as he participated in the plantation of Munster, and later he
traded on the fame it had brought him to try and have himself appointed
Archbishop of Dublin and Lord Chancellor of Ireland. And he was also the
friend of one “auld Haywood”. So come and let another tell you more.“O auncient Knights of true and noble hart!”Born and brought up in Switzerland, ERIC HAYWOOD
is a graduate of Cambridge and Edinburgh universities, and also studied
at the European University Institute in Florence. A former President of
the Association of Teachers of Italian, he taught Italian language and
literature at UCD for close on 40 years, specializing in the culture of
the Renaissance. His research has focused mainly on Renaissance
geography and descriptions of Ireland, the culture of Renaissance
Naples, and Machiavelli’s comedy Mandragola. Currently he is working on: female humour in Mandragola, Petrarch’s rewriting of the last tale of Boccaccio’s Decameron (Griselda), the birth of the myth of Arcadia, the Irish in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and dreams of Hellenism in the writings of Antonio De Ferrariis Galateo (died 1517). In 2014 he was knighted (Cavaliere dell’Ordine della Stella d’Italia) by the President of Italy.

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