Half-Serious Rhymes: The Narrative Poetry of Luigi Pulci

Byron, in Don Juan, called Pulci (1432ñ84) ësire of the half-serious rhymeí, and modelled his style on Pulciís major work, the Morgante. The phrase identifies the ambivalent quality of Pulciís verse, which was his distinctive legacy to the ëromantic epicí of the renaissance, a genre he effectively initiated. Half-Serious Rhymes examines the nature of that ambivalence, tracing its origins in the circumstances in which Pulci wrote and the conflicting expectations of his audience at a time of rapid cultural change; more generally, it seeks to increase our understanding of Pulciís poetic technique, which inevitably brings it into the debate about his relation to and use of his sources (most conspicuously the anonymous Orlando Lauren-Ziano).