ALAMANNI, Luigi. Gyrone il cortese.

Quarto (219 x 160 mm.), [8], 180 leaves; text printed in italic on two columns. Uniform light browing but a fine copy in contemporary limp vellum, manuscript title on spine.

The first edition of this popular Italian work which ‘marked the transition from chivalric romance to epic poem' (Jossa, ‘Romanzo', 13).Luigi Alamanni (1495-1556) was an author and diplomat, who spent most of his life in exile in France after taking part in a conspiracy against Giulio de' Medici. He was especially renowned for his bitter satires and Virgilian poetry. Written in ottava rima, Gyrone il cortese is his major excursion into non-classical genres. It was indeed an adaptation, commissioned by his patron Francis I, of the medieval romance Guiron le Courtois – extremely successful in the Renaissance – on the adventures of the namesake Breton knight-errant, especially present in the romance Palamedes.The sources of Alamanni's adaptation were not printed editions of the poem, but two manuscripts: a (probably illuminated) armorial presenting the lives and blazons of the knights of the Round Table, and a slightly different version of the story, both containing details absent in print (Montorsi, ‘L'autore rinascimentale', 190-211). Although the fundamental model was the fragmented narrative of the chivalric poem magisterially employed by Ariosto, Alamanni paved the way, through experimentation with verse and narrative, for a transition to the more Aristotelian epic poem, closer to Tasso's later works (Comelli, ‘Il Gyrone il Cortese', 399).‘Bonne édition qui a été imprimée sous les yeux de l'auteur' (Brunet I, 126).WorldCat locates 24 copies in the US (Penn, WU, Chicago, Newberry, Cincinnati, Akron, Princeton, Brown (Hay), Claremont, UCB, HRC, KU, Iowa, UM, Illinois, Minnesota, Indiana, Duke, BYU, Folger, Columbia, NYPL, Mass, Yale); COPAC locates 11 in the UK.

EDIT16 CNCE 605; Brunet I, 126' Pettigree & Walsby, French Books, 52122; Fairfax Murray, French Books, 4; Gamba, Testi di lingua, 21.Montorsi, ‘L'autore rinascimentale e i manoscritti medievali', Romania 127 (2009), 190-211; S. Jossa, ‘Dal romanzo cavalleresco al poema omerico', Italianistica 1 (2002), 13-37; M. Comelli, ‘Il Gyrone il Cortese di Luigi Alamanni e la tradizione cavalleresca italiana', in Boiardo, Ariosto e i libri di battaglia, ed. P. Vecchi Galli et al. (2007), 399-418.