War in epic poems: notes on style and language of the representation of war scenes

Abstract

Between duels, battles and sieges, the epic-chivalric poems are full of scenes of war. Starting from some considerations on the authors' ideology regarding war, the paper analyzes various stylistic and linguistic aspects of the representation of war scenes in the major poems of Italian tradition (from Boiardo's Inamoramento de Orlando to Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata), such as the recurrence of situations and formulas, the use of military technical terms and the insertion of realistic details. The aim is to verify how the evolution of the poem between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries has affected the way to describing warlike episodes.