Renaissance literary imitation has long been conceived of as an act that implicitly imagines a fictional itinerary through the past, an itinerary constructed through selective references to earlier texts. Forgetting to Remember argues that we must reassess the way we receive the art of imitatio; we must attend as much to the ruptures as we do the sutures in poetic memory. This study examines how three canonical sixteenth-century romance poems—Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata and Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene —use the vagaries of allusion as much as its specificity to approach and revise their own literary history, polemically engage with historiography and even examine the limits of their own representational resources, such as allegory. The project frames its exploration of memory through the way those poems blur the distinction between allusion and topos, between the particularity of reference and the supposed universality of common cultural currency.

The study is divided into two parts. Part One is a general examination of how misremembering shapes representations of the past. Part Two takes a specific kind of universal language, Petrarchism, and demonstrates how its appropriation as a tradition rather than as a source enables revisions of the literary and historical pasts. Each chapter of Forgetting to Remember explores a distinct strategy for the subversion of memory. In Chapter One, falsification of sources allows Ariosto to dissolve the positivistic, Stoic allegory of Virtù overcoming Fortune that his predecessor, Matteo Maria Boiardo, endorsed. Chapter Two argues that in the Orlando Furioso intratextual amnesia, figured by two versions of history, one more memorable than the next, is employed to cast doubt on the telling of history as a narrative of exemplarity. Chapter Three centers on the way that the repression of sources simultaneously facilitates Tasso’s concealment of how transitory the victory over Jerusalem that he celebrates really is while concealing the means of his reconciliation of epic and romance genres. In Chapter Four, contradiction enables Spenser to not only forge a national identity but to call into question the validity of reception history. Woven between these discussions is a series of intermezzi that contextualize these kinds of forgetting by setting poetics in dialogue with the period’s methods of artificial memory and medical and philosophical views on the ethical implications of forgetting.