Jerusalem Delivered

About

Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata (1581) is the supreme Italian Renaissance epic: the First Crusade told through the lens of Ariostean romance, with its central love story between the knight Tancredi and the Saracen warrior-maiden Clorinda among the most affecting episodes in Italian literature. Fairfax's 1600 English translation was enormously influential — Spenser read it, Dryden admired it — and is itself a work of real beauty. The epic's mixture of Christian theology, classical machinery, and chivalric romance gives it an extraordinary range of tones and registers.