UC Berkeley

The Baldus, a lengthy macaronic epic crafted over the course of a lifetime by one of Italy's greatest poets, is a masterpiece of Christian serio ludere which presents to readers a rousing and protracted rebuttal to the Platonic critique of poetry. This dissertation performs a three-chapter examination of the language, genre, and text of the four editions of the Baldus, those curated by Teofilo Folengo, with the aim of illuminating how the diachronic and synchronic features of his epic, as well as his use of a mixed-language style, Macaronic, in dozens of texts linked to this central project, are not simply `symptomatic' expressions of the convergence and conflation of humanist cultures, vernacular literary traditions, and ancient and medieval Latinities in a single text, but are rather highly generative, extraordinarily influential, and totally coherent parts of an anti-epic whose fictitious author, Merlin Cocaio, aims to outdo both Virgil and Homer---the greatest poets of the Western classical tradition---in macaronic verse. I demonstrate how three aspects of this poem---its language, genre, and textual presentation---interact with 'para'- and intertextual materials in the macaronic book and with an encyclopedic range of sources, to form a poem, collection, and even formalized prosodic system for Macaronic. Known to modern readers by way of the final, posthumous edition (1552), the Phantasia Macaronicon as the Baldus was titled in the 1521 'Toscolana' edition) was not only read by many of the most prominent Italian poets of its moment, but is alluded to and imitated by important writers operating outside of Italy's tightly-controlled borders, including Rabelais and Cervantes.