『롤랑의 노래』에서 『실성한 올란도』로: 사라센의 르네상스?

Abstract

The increasing tolerance for the Saracens characterizing the evolution of the Carolingian epic from La Chanson de Roland (c. 1100) to Orlando Furioso (1516-32) does not attest a commensurate progress in the Western attitude towards Islam. History tells otherwise: bitter antagonism between the West and the Islamic East was not quite mitigated in the early sixteenth century, as it had never been in the preceding centuries. As far as the literary portrayal of the Saracens is concerned, a more interesting, and possibly more important, factor might be a pair of complex socio-cultural changes that were generated within the Western civilization itself and brought about the making of the High Middle Ages and, later, of the Renaissance. The rise of the romance (and of romance chivalry) in the late twelfth century and its further development in the thirteenth century opened a way to romanticize the Saracenic other and decentralize the ideal of the crusades in fictional narratives, whereas the Humanist project of recovering, interpreting, and emulating classical antiquity in the Italian Quattrocento and Cinquecento helped establish a metonymical relationship between the Greek (thus pagan) classical texts and the imaginary pagans from the Near East and Africa, who serve as de facto heirs to the long-lost Greek civilization.