(Dis)placing the foreign in early modern Europe: The example of Tasso's Gierusalemme

Abstract

Torquato Tasso, Italy's foremost early modern poet, engaged with issues of otherness throughout his complicated life and career—in no small part because of his own itinerant and often marginalized status. His first try at what would eventually become his monumental Gerusalemme liberata—an unfinished poem he wrote when he was 16, called simply “Il Gierusalemme”—gives us a glimpse into an early attempt to define epic as a space for welcoming in the stranger. The stranger was as much a character for Tasso as it was a parola pellegrina or foreign word, the latter a particular obsession of Tasso's. Dedicated as he was to seeing the vernacular not as “just” Tuscan, but as capacious enough to include other dialects as well as Latin and neologisms, Tasso quickly found enemies in Florence's Accademia della Crusca, which insisted on a much purer view of the Italian tongue. By connecting Tasso's theory of hospitality to the questione della lingua as it was being fought over in late 16th-century Italy, this article argues for a capacious understanding of both this early experimental work of Tasso's, as well as his later poem.