“Take me Down to the Paradise City”: An Ecocritical Approach to Paradise Spaces in Italian Renaissance Epic

Abstract

In 1966, A. Bartlett Giammatti noted that most earthly paradises in Renaissance Epic are dangerous imitations of the healing space of Eden as represented in Dante’s Divine Comedy, and are usually found wanting by some higher standard. This article revisits paradise spaces in the Renaissance epics of Ariosto and Tasso from a perspective informed by human geography and ecocriticism. How are these spaces informed by the broader “epic” geographies of the works that contain them? What can their deceptive designs and perceptible affordances (whether true or false) tell us about their authors’ and the genre’s underlying ecological values? The article demonstrates how such liminal heterotopic spaces are not only temporally or spatially inaccessible, but indeed also demonstrate an early modern version of the “Tragedy of the Commons” while excluding characters unable to escape their own selfhood.