Curiosity and the idle reader: Self-consciousness in Renaissance epic (Dante, Lodovico Ariosto, Italy, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Spain)

Curiosity is viewed with suspicion in the Renaissance because of the persistence of Ancient and Christian traditions that understood it as directly opposed to self-knowledge. Hence, as epic literature blossoms in the Renaissance, a worry arises about the curiosity that might attract readers to other people's stories, and cause the forgetting of the readers' real concerns. This worry expresses itself in scenes that explicitly raise the question of the reader's curiosity, as in canto 26 of Dante's Inferno, and as in the tales of jealous curiosity in Ariosto's canto 43 of his Orlando Furioso and in Cervantes' “The Ill-Advised Curiosity” (in Don Quixote Part I). Such stories show both the danger of curiosity for self-knowledge, and, at the same time, the potential moral value of selfconscious fiction.