SOURCE: Hampton, Timothy. “The Body's Two Crowns: Narrative and Martyrdom in Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata.” Stanford Italian Review 9, nos. 1-2 (1990): 133-54.

In the following essay, Hampton discusses how exemplary figures are presented in the narrative in Gerusalemme liberata and the way in which action defines the self, both for those characters and their humanist readers.

1. Imitation and the Epic Hero

“Nothing moves me like the examples of illustrious men,” writes Petrarch in a letter to his friend Giovanni Colonna.¹ With these words the first modern humanist evokes a central topos of the aristocratic humanism that informs Renaissance culture. By asserting the connection between the examples (words and deeds) of the “illustrious men” he has read about in history and liberature (most specifically for him, Scipio Africanus) and the “movements” of the self, Petrarch recalls a principal feature of the humanist appropriation of the past. He defines the question of...