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Renaldini's Ruggeretto at Billingbear: Hoby's 1554 Copy, Cupid at the Gallows, the Whale, and the Underworld

Mixed Ready evidence packet

Topic: Renaldini's Innamoramento di Ruggeretto at Billingbear

Source-Control Position

The Billingbear/Audley End copy of Panfilo de' Renaldini's Innamoramento di Ruggeretto is unusually important because its route into the later Neville library is not merely conjectural. Dunstan Roberts identifies Audley End object 81035068 as a book owned by Sir Thomas Hoby. The title page carries Tho[mas] Hoby at its foot and, at its cropped head, Venetijs. Tendit in ardua Virtus. 1554. The 1780 Billingbear catalogue records the book, and the modern Audley End spreadsheet describes the surviving object as a half-calf quarto.

This does not establish that Henry Neville (c.1563-1615) acquired or annotated this copy. It does establish a concrete chain worth pursuing: a book bought or inscribed by Hoby in Venice in 1554 later entered the Billingbear catalogue and survives at Audley End. The Hoby and Neville families were personally connected through Bisham, the Cooke sisters, and the 1562 baptism at which Henry Neville's mother and grandmother were godmothers to Hoby's daughter.

1. Correct Identification of the Book

Several local working notes had incorrectly called the work Lodovico Dolce's. The author is Panfilo de' Renaldini, described on the 1555 title page as Panfil di Renaldini da Siruolo Anconitano. A second local note had paired the Renaldini with Poggio's Facetie. Roberts identifies the two Audley End Hoby books as Renaldini's Ruggeretto and Boccaccio's Decamerone. Poggio is a different Hoby-book trail.

The printer also requires correction. Roberts's appendix calls the 1554 book a Giolito imprint, but Luca Degl'Innocenti gives the specialist bibliographical statement:

l’Innamoramento di Ruggeretto di Panfilo de’ Renaldini, la cui prima e unica edizione, impressa da Comin nel 1554, è impreziosita da ben 46 silografie originali

That is: the first and only edition was printed by Comin da Trino in 1554 and ornamented with 46 original woodcuts. The Giolito connection is visual rather than an imprint: Degl'Innocenti says the Renaldini woodcuts depend on the illustrative model established by Giolito's 1542 Orlando furioso.

The book was therefore a deliberately illustrated continuation of Ariosto, not simply an undifferentiated romance. Its 46-canto and 46-image architecture echoes the 46 cantos of the definitive Furioso. The woodcuts then had their own afterlife: Degl'Innocenti traces them into editions of the Furioso printed by Rampazetto (1562), Ghedini (1577), and Conzatti (1672, 1678). One book at Billingbear thus belongs both to the textual continuation of Ariosto and to the migration of Ariostan visual culture.

2. The Hoby Copy and Its Route

Roberts's physical description should govern future photography:

Tho[mas] Hoby at the foot of the title page

and, partially cropped at the head:

Venetijs. Tendit in ardua Virtus. 1554.

The phrase locates Hoby in Venice and dates the inscription. Both this book and Hoby's Boccaccio carry his motto and the date 1554. Their present bindings are late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century; they are not Hoby-period bindings. That makes title-page margins, cropped edges, sewing, pastedowns, and removed earlier structures particularly important.

Roberts documents the later catalogue sequence:

The Renaldini therefore appears to have moved separately or to have been omitted from one intermediate catalogue. Direct inspection of D/EN/F37 and the 1834/1877 Audley catalogues could clarify this.

3. What the Poem Contains

Renaldini continues the Ariostan world through Ruggeretto, son of Ruggiero and Bradamante. The 1555 text opens by naming that descent:

Di quel buon Ruggero, / Che già in Francia passò con Agramante, / Di lui nacque un leggiadro Caualliero, / E de la sua consorte Bradamante.

The poem is not only martial. Each canto carries an allegory directing the reader toward gli effetti della virtu, e del vitio. Three large imaginative structures deserve separate research.

3.1 Cupid tried and nearly hanged

Francesco Lucioli identifies cantos XVI-XVIII as an Amore alla gogna or Amore alla forca sequence: six knights defend Cupid against six women warriors who want him executed. The 1555 text brings the scene to the scaffold:

Moia Cupido, Moia Cupido, e la scala ascendea, / Giunt’era quasi à l’ultimo suo strido / E già la fune al terzo s’auolgea.

The sequence matters because it converts the conventional armed Cupid into a public defendant, prisoner, and threatened victim. It combines allegory with the form of a court tournament and dramatizes opposed judgments about erotic desire.

3.2 The whale as an inhabited world

The 1555 witness describes a whale arriving during Ruggeretto's struggle with the sea:

Giunse una gran Balena, che soffiando / Inghiotti Ruggeretto, e Bellatesta.

Mariantonietta Acocella's study explains that the whale contains another world. Her abstract traces the episode to Ariosto's Cinque canti, the father Ruggiero's history, and Jonah, with penitential significance attached to shipwreck. It is not merely a monster episode: it is a nested-world and moral-reformation structure. Acocella also places it among episodes praising conjugal love against both unrestrained passion and an unnaturally austere chastity.

3.3 Chimera, hell, earthly paradise, Philosophy, and Music

Francesco Fòffano summarizes a still larger journey. Ruggeretto rides a chimera into a dark wood populated by Harpies, reaches a foul river where naked souls wait for the infernal boatman, enters Charon's vessel, and passes Cerberus, Minos, demons, sinners, and punishments. He then rises from hell to earthly paradise and the blessed realm, where Theology is accompanied by Philosophy and Music.

The 1555 text confirms the ascent:

Giunti dunque al terrestre Paradiso, / Un angelo trouaro tutto armato / Di lucid’arme, e con turbato uiso, / Con uoce altiera, e col brando snudato.

It later identifies Music and divides its forms:

Musica è detta ... Euterpe ... insegnaui qual fia / De la musica humana la radice, / L’instrumental, e celest’harmonia.

This is a much broader intellectual poem than its short catalogue title suggests: chivalric continuation, moral allegory, infernal journey, encyclopedic ascent, music theory, and an image cycle all occupy the same object.

4. Shakespeare Research Avenues, with Folger Text

No direct source claim follows merely from the presence of these motifs. The useful next step is to compare structures and language, beginning with exact Shakespeare text rather than remembered summaries.

4.1 Cupid as hangman and hanged figure

Renaldini places Cupid at a literal gallows. Much Ado About Nothing makes Cupid himself a comic executioner. Don Pedro says of Benedick:

PRINCE He hath twice or thrice cut Cupid's bowstring, and the

little hangman dare not shoot at him.

Source: Folger, Much Ado About Nothing 3.2.10-11, FTLN 1254-1255, act 03 scene 02, Folger online.

Hero later joins Cupid, arrows, killing, and entrapment:

HERO

If it prove so, then loving goes by haps;

Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps.

Source: Folger, Much Ado About Nothing 3.1.111-112, FTLN 1233-1234, act 03 scene 01, Folger online.

The verbal inversion—Cupid as condemned figure in Renaldini, little hangman in Shakespeare—is worth tracing across Italian and English Cupid literature. It is an avenue for source comparison, not yet a distinctive borrowing.

4.2 Armed Cupid and transformed effects

Renaldini's threatened Cupid and Brusantino's exchanged bows belong to a larger field of stories in which Cupid's weapon changes or loses its normal effect. Oberon gives an exact Shakespeare instance:

OBERON

Flying between the cold moon and the Earth,

Cupid all armed. A certain aim he took

At a fair vestal thronèd by the west,

And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow

As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts.

But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft

Quenched in the chaste beams of the wat'ry moon,

And the imperial vot'ress passèd on

In maiden meditation, fancy-free.

Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell.

It fell upon a little western flower,

Before, milk-white, now purple with love's wound,

And maidens call it “love-in-idleness.”

Source: Folger, A Midsummer Night's Dream 2.1.162-174, FTLN 0526-0538, act 02 scene 01, Folger online.

The research question is not simply whether both texts contain Cupid. It is whether the narrative machinery—Cupid armed, the intended shot frustrated, the weapon's effect transferred elsewhere, and desire redistributed—shares a more specific print tradition. Brusantino's Love/Death exchange supplies the better Italian comparator and is developed in the adjoining topic.

5. Research Program

  1. Photograph every page of object 81035068, prioritizing Hoby's inscriptions, reader marks, damaged/cropped areas, and all 46 woodcuts.
  2. Collate the 1554 object against the public 1555 witness line by line and image by image.
  3. Map the Cupid trial across cantos XVI-XVIII: accusers, defenders, charges, verdict, tournament protocol, and allegories.
  4. Map the whale sequence against Jonah, Ariosto's Cinque canti, and other inhabited-monster narratives available before 1600.
  5. Transcribe the chimera/hell/paradise ascent in full and identify its Dantean, Petrarchan, encyclopedic, and musical sources.
  6. Compare the 46 woodcuts with Giolito 1542 and their later reuse. The visual sequence may have circulated independently of Renaldini's words.
  7. Search early English print for translations, descriptions, and named allusions to Ruggeretto, Renaldini/Rinaldini, Cupid at the gallows, and the whale episode.

Quoted Source Passages

The controlling quotations are embedded with their contexts above: Hoby's title-page inscriptions; Degl'Innocenti on Comin and the 46 woodcuts; the 1555 descent from Ruggiero and Bradamante; Cupid at the gallows; the whale swallowing Ruggeretto; the earthly-paradise ascent; the classification of Music; and the exact Folger passages from Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Renaldini quotations currently use the public 1555 witness; they are not represented as direct transcriptions of Hoby's inaccessible 1554 copy.

Notes on Access

6. Citations