Half-Serious Rhymes

Byron, in Don Juan, called Pulci (1432 84) sire of the half-serious rhyme, and modelled his style on Pulci s major work, the Morgante. The phrase identifies the ambivalent quality of Pulci s verse, which was his distinctive legacy to the romantic epic 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 Pulci s 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).