DOMENICO PIETROPAOLO Alcina in Arcadia Originally a rugged and mountainous region of Greece, Arcadia was idealized into a pastoral garden by Virgil and has since been variously embellished by a host of other poets and painters who have walked in his footsteps for two millennia. In western culture Arcadia is now the name of an earthly paradise of natural simplicity and primordial innocence inhabited by people who experience life as joy, beauty, and romance. This idyll exists in spite of occasional episodes of anxiety due to the realization that inall gardens, whether with an apple tree or not, there may bea snake threatening the social order, and in spite of the constant awareness of the fact that there is no way of escaping from our own finitude. A reminder of that finitude can be found in the phrase ‘et in Arcadia ego’ engraved on pastoral tombstones as if spoken by death personified. Until 1690 Arcadia, whether named or not, was the landscape of pastoral literature and art, but on 5 October of that year, in Rome it also became the name of an academy, a group of poets, composers, artists, and scholars intent on giving their creative activity the appearance of the labour of literary shepherds ~ by assuming pastoral names, by giving themselves a pastoral institutional structure, by governing their meeting through rituals meant to give rise to a pastoral ethos in their company, and, generally, by regarding themselves as a utopian commonwealth or as a fictional democracy. In the pastoral literature of this period, there are two Arcadias: one in the text, sheltering characters from the unpleasantness of life in other genres, and one outside the text, protecting the imagination from the unpleasantness of life in history, literary and otherwise.’ Within a few decades, the academy had established 36 branches in other Italian cities, and had accumulated a membership of over 2,600, including, most of the Italian intelligentsia, many political and religious leaders, and aconsiderable number of foreign men of letters. Its literary ideals reached England early in the century by way of Italian opera, and there it met with generous acceptance as well as strong opposition. The greatest obstacle to its further dissemination was the success of The Beggar's Opera, which was 1 The standard source on the meaning and history of the Latin inscription is Erwin Panofsky’s ‘Et in Arcadia Ego.’ For the early history of the Arcadian Academy, see Storia dell Accademia, an account by its first president, Giammario Crescimbeni; for a more recent source, see Piromalli UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 72, NUMBER 4, FALL 2003ALCINA IN ARCADIA 859 generated by a conspicuously non-Arcadian rhetoric and which, in 1728, took England by storm. Handel's Alcina was, among other things, an attempt to re-establish the earlier commercial success of the Arcadian formula. The story of Alcina is the story of a powerful sorceress and of the vicissitudes of her lovers on an enchanted island. It was first told in part by Boiardo, later again and more fully by Ariosto, and variously imitated in the succeeding centuries in opera, dance, and other dramatic works, the first of which was Francesca Caccini’s theatrical dance La liberazione di Ruggiero in 1625, while the last was an Alcina suite of 1934. Between these two adaptations there are at least twelve others, for a total of four in the seventeenth century, five in the eighteenth, of which Handel's is one, and three in the twentieth.* The libretto of Handel’s opera, derived mostly, but not exclusively, from Ariosto, has remained anonymous, though the librettist’s direct source has been variously identified by scholars. All we know for certain is that Handel got hold of a copy of the manuscript in Italy, at some point before the 2nd of July 1729, which is the date of his return to England from his last trip to Italy prior to his production of Alcina in Covent Garden. As told by Ariosto in the sixth and seventh cantos of the Orlando Furioso,’ the story of Alcina is the story of a foul and repugnant being - a wrinkled, toothless, hairless, and deformed female dwarf (Vil, 73) - with supernatural powers, including the power to create the illusion in others that she is supremely beautiful, so beautiful as to induce even the noblest of knights to lay down his armour without resistance and to walk blindly to his perdition with her on an enchanted island. When the illusory nature of her charms is revealed, her beauty and the beauty of the island both vanish, and she appears in her true nature to the world around her: ‘la puttana vecchia’ (Vi, 79), hideous, evil, angry, and justly punished by the awareness that she has of being forever rejected and powerless. The background against which the story unfolds is the Carolingian narrative of the struggle between Islam and Christianity in the Middle Ages, when the paladins of Charlemagne and their Moorish counterparts, equal to them in fierceness and valour, duelled and jousted throughout the western Mediterranean, waving the colours of their respective armies and pursuing fulfilment in deeds of love and heroism. The perspective from which the story is told is inimical to deformity, material as well as spiritual: the sound of the narrative voice comes to us from the midst of a splendid court community, in which people have achieved for themselves beauty 2 See the works with Alcina or Ruggiero in the titles listed alphabetically by Allacci and inthe Repertorio of the Enciclopedia dello spetiacoto. 3, Textual references are to Segre’s edition. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 72, NUMBER 4, FALL 2003860 DOMENICO PIETROPAOLO and refinement and so feel entitled to a goodly measure of self-compla- cency and self-congratulation. Handel's opera is concerned with only a brief part of the story: the episode in which Ruggiero, a handsome Moslem knight and the legendary progenitor of the Duke of Ferrara, who was Ariosto’s patron, is rescued from Alcina’s possessive love, while her former lovers, who have been transformed by her into animals, trees, rocks, and rivers, reacquire their freedom and flee the enchanted island. There are, however, several significant modifications, made necessary chiefly by the differencebetween opera and the chivalric epic, since deriving dramatic dialogue from a poetic narrative always involves some degree of dramaturgical interven- tion. And in fact, the story was altered, as we read in the English Argu- ment of the first edition, ‘for the better conformity of drama’ (2).' Ugliness and violence make fine description and narration but would lack decorum on stage in periods that do not have a highly developed taste for realism, a speaking bush is not nearly as spectacular as a wild animal, while journeys on winged horses would prove much too awkward and too noisy for the production technology ofan eighteenth-century theatre like Covent Garden, Consequently Alcina is shown only in her beautiful state, Astolfo is turned into a lion rather than a myrtle, and the story is limited to a period in which there is no need for flying in and out of the island. A few other dramaturgical changes have to do with the preferred structure of operatic texts, which at the time tended to develop two love stories simultaneously, a fact thatmakes necessary the possibility ofa relationship between Morgana and the character she knows as Ricciardo, Other changes may be due to the aesthetics of performance, which, in opera as much as in spoken drama, values the ethos of sexual ambivalence and cross-dressing, which is probably the reason why the Ricciardo loved by Morgana turns out to be a woman, none other, in fact, than Ruggiero’s beloved Bradamante disguised as her brother. A few changes in character- ization, due to the less misogynist and more sentimental character of the period, include the transformation of Melissa into Bradamante’s tutor Melisso and a more benevolent representation of Alcina and Morgana, who in the opera are moved more by love and by a desire to be loved than they are by evil and lust, and so are ultimately closer to the characters described by Boiardo than to those of Ariosto, The set in which Alcina’s seduction of Ruggiero takes place, in Ariosto as well as in the opera, is a knightly version of the Arcadia of lyric poetry - a vast pastoral landscape dominated by a magnificent castle. The pastoral element comes to it unaltered from the bucolic tradition, which depicted the countryside ina state of eternal spring, devoid of conflict and populated by individuals whose only care is the fulfilment of simple 4 All textual references are to this 1735 edition. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 72, NUMBER 4, FALL 2003,ALCINA IN ARCADIA 861 desires. The castle belongs instead to the knightly traditions, in which a castle routinely provided structure and orientation to the continuous journeying of heroes in pursuit of glory. The superimposition of these two elements gives aesthetic body to a conception of the fabled land in which the rustic huts of shepherds and the simple pleasures of their lives are replaced by a sumptuous courtly architecture that is no doubt a much more appropriate stage for the sybaritic celebration of love planned by Alcina, Surrounded by this set, Alcina is at her most captivating as a woman, now possessed of a beauty calculated to give men, as soon as they enter the playing area, the courage to free themselves from the social conventions that have hitherto forced them into the inordinate self- discipline of knighthood Like the Arcadia of bucolic poetry, Alcina’s island exists only in the imagination of those who suspend their disbelief. In the world of material reality, it is just as illusory as Alcina’s beauty, the countryside rugged and unkempt, and the castle a flimsy theatrical set, ready to fall apart as soon as the pin holding the hinges together is pulled out. The apparent meta- morphosis of Alcina and of the landscape are both consequences of a magic trick that makes use of the reificatory power of the imagination to cause the likes of Ruggiero to see in front of them only manifestations of what they want to see, and to induce them to walk unguarded into a realm of images and illusion they would not otherwise dare explore. For the condition of entry is that men must shed the protective armour of social conventions and make themselves vulnerable before the world. Ruggiero accepted this condition and divested himself of his knightly constraints as soon as he set foot in Alcina’s paradise. He therefore has no difficulty in justifying himself: ‘Servo ad Amor, che va senz‘arme, e nudo’ (I, iv). In this place, where one can walk unarmed and naked in the company of Love, itis not by embracing the ideology of duty and self-discipline that a young, man becomes a knight, but by overcoming all inhibition and by yielding to the transformative power of pleasure. At the beginning of the opera, the chorus offers this principle as one of the defining features of Alcina’s island: ‘qui gli eroi forma il piacer’ - here pleasure is the force that shapes men into heroes, Such heroes, of course, are the very opposite of real knights, Christian or Moslem though they may be, because the process by which they achieve this status reverses the process of religious conversion, which was the ultimate end of the epic struggle in the larger background of the story. Alcina’s island is a land of transformed heroes, divested of their armours, both physical and spiritual, and impelled by love to find dignity in what they have previously shunned. By ‘arcadianizing’ them Alcina negates the action of religion and society and brings the souls of its champions to perdition rather than salvation. This Arcadian landscape in which the work of religion and knighthood are undone is both an illusion and an illusion-creating machine, operated UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 72, NUMBER 4, FALL 2003862 DOMENICO PIETROPAOLO from the inside by Alcina, like a trickster who puts herself at the centre of her act in order to keep appearing herself transfigured by the incantatory process. In terms that are perhaps closer to the baroque visual aesthetics inherited by Handel's age, we could say that Alcina works her magic from within, like a painter who paints himself into a picture of the world and simultaneously represents himself in the act of painting it from somewhere on the surface of the canvas. In the imagination of the intending subject, Alcinaand her Arcadia-like island are related by continuity and reciprocal determination, being made as they are of the same illusory substance and appearing only as functions of each other's existence. The island conceals in its natural material forms - in its flora, in its fauna, and in the landscape itself - the souls of other knights who have yielded to the temptation to experiment with forbidden fantasies. As a whole it is anthropomorphized and described as a happy place by means of a language that can be em- ployed in its literal meaning only for human beings: the island is a ‘felice suolo,’ teems with concealed life, and is treated by Alcina as a visible manifestation of her capacity to love Ruggiero. Being the real possessor of the naturalized souls of fallen knights, Alcina is an extension in human shape of her own garden of delights, and as such she is but the portal to the netherworld of former lovers. When reason awakens to shatter the tricks of the imagination and reveals the illusory nature of the landscape and of Alcina, they are transformed together in an instant and liberation is obtained from both. For these reasons, Alcina could easily say, and mean it literally, ‘here Arcadia c’est moi, and we are both in your mind.’ The ontological continuity between the protagonist and her landscape at the thematic level points to a principle of aesthetic and semantic organization that Handel's opera shares with other operas of the time, especially those set in Arcadian landscapes. This is the notion that the opera, during performance as well as in memory, calls for a double mode of consciousness in the audience, because it is structured simultaneously as two forms of experience. In the first place, it is structured as a temporal experience of images, ideas, and sounds, like the mode of experience through which we receive sequential works that unfold in time in the guise ofa melody. In the second place, it is organized asa spatial experience, like the one through which we come into meaningful contact with the plastic arts. In this double mode of consciousness, recurrence, which is temporal, is experienced as co-presence, which is spatial. At the aria level, the da capo structure may be seen as a construct with spatial and temporal dimensions, since its full aesthetic effect is dependent upon our ability to conceive of repetition in time also as a form of adjacency in space At the level of direct fruition, when the text comes into contact with the audience, the identity of recurrence and co-presence concerns chiefly the pastoral model found in the libretto and its possible referents in reality, stylized images of which are automatically brought into a relationship of UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 72, NUMBER 4, FALL 2003ALCINA IN ARCADIA 863 adjacency with it at the beginning. In this context the first level of reference, we cansafely assume, is material. The Arcadian landscape in the text unfolds in the mental presence of images of real contempora: ry palaces and gardens, known to the author and the audience alike, and inhabited by the patrons from whose friendship both stand to benefit. The second type of referent is social. The Arcadian landscape of Alcina and of other pastoral operas recalls analogous images of the social world suggested by the structure of power in society. In the contemporary world, the trend to idealize and romanticize the rural environment as a pastoral landscape was made socially desirable by the progressive urban gentrification of landowners, who, especially in England, had every reason to support an art form which assured everyone that there was no problem of conse- quence in the system, guilty as they were of having acquired, through the process known as the land enclosure system, large properties by driving hundreds of small farmers into serf-like destitution. The heroic dimension of Ruggiero, Bradamante, Oronte, and Melisso is a response to the increasing demand for idealizations of the lives of medieval knights, a cultural product made socially desirable by the now almost complete courtization of military leadership throughout Europe, a development which in a few centuries transformed a class of warriors into a class of bureaucrats with the desire to nobilitate their professional ancestors, whose glory they might share by genealogical descent.’ From an ideologi- cal point of view, there can be no doubt that the Arcadia that Alcina has imitated on her island is a politically charged representation of life sanctioned by the rich and powerful - people with aspirations of a historical grandeur not available to them in reality but with the social location to make its symbolic celebration in art universally desirable. The third type of referent concerns recent social history. When he is ready to leave Alcina, Ruggiero blames her for his downfall: he yielded to her because she cast a spell on him that deprived him of his willpower, obfuscated his reason, and made him mistake illusion for reality. What is involved here is a general principle of the phenomenology of mind, which is that when consciousness is unable to dominate something directly, it comes to terms with it indirectly, by jumping into another mode of comprehension with the full strength of belief - as in the tale of the allegorical fox who, unable to grasp the grapes, causes himself to believe that they are sour (Sartre, 61). The mechanism whereby the new attribute is conferred upon the thing in question can be pictured as a form of incantation that induces belief, a transformative act that the subject 5 For a survey of the English farming system and the land enclosure movement, see Tuberville. On the courtization of the military, see Elias, especially chapter 8, ‘On the Sociogenesis of Aristocratic Romanticism in the Process of Courtization’ (214-67), towhich my discussion is much indebted, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 72, NUMBER 4, FALL 2003864 DOMENICO PIETROPAOLO performs on himself, though he may present it as an act of discovery about the real nature of the object. By means of this rhetorical device, Ruggiero, unable to come to terms with his desire to escape from the ideology of duty and to liberate himself from repression, conveniently causes himself to believe that he has been under the spell of an evil being who has the ability to appear as a beautiful woman, a supernatural being with the power to subdue morality and reason, a being as evil and hideous in reality as she appears beautiful and good in illusion. Through this simple mechanism, described by theologians, judges, and doctors of the time with appeals to the devil, to the psychology of possession, and to medical conditions of supernatural origin, hundreds of seventeenth-century men managed to demonize thousands of women and burn them at the stake as witches, women imagined as lust personified and then turned into disfigured creatures by the instruments of torture through which they gave confessions. Literary history does not normally use the term ‘witch’ to refer to the likes of Alcina, preferring the somewhat more genteel terms of ‘sorceress’ and ‘enchantress,’ but a witch is what a sorceress or enchantress is when she is not viewed through the purifying language of pastoral euphemism. Literary scholarship may be inhibited by the prospect that the ultimate social context in which the story of Alcina is to be understood is the history of anti-witchcraft trials, but theology, medicine, and the law showed no such reluctance in identifying the character type as an instrument of the devil. In the work that remained the standard juristic source on witchcraft throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries, the Malleus Maleficarum, Circe, the prototype of perhapsall literary sorceresses in Western drama and literature, is identified as a witch, with the full legal implications of the term, on the theological authority of St Augustine (Kramer and Sprenger, 63). We sometimes cause ourselves to forget that the period between Ariosto and Handel, the ages of the glory that were the Renaissance and the baroque, theage of Shakespeare and Newton, isalso the darkest period in the history of European women, demonized and executed on charges of sorcery - up to three hundred thousand of them, according to some esti- mates (Kors and Peters, 12; Bolzoni, 14), In Italy witch trials were relatively rare in comparison to what took place in Handel's two countries of Germany and England, where many more thousands of women, mostly from the unprotected lower classes, were tortured and hanged or burned at the stake. In Italy the anti-witch movement is of a less shameful order of magnitude, but it is by no means negligible: the witch trials of Nogare- do, Como, and various other places in the Veneto and Friuli regions in the seventeenth century are simply less familiar than the Salem trial, but they are comparable in all other respects. Besides, as recently as 1724, when the enlightenment was already on the horizon, a lay nun, who confessed that UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 72, NUMBER 4, FALL 2003ALCINA IN ARCADIA 865 she thought herself capable of having sex even with God, was theatrically burned at the stake with her earthly lover in Palermo, in the presence ofall the upper echelons of society, officially on charges of heresy ~ she with plenty of resin in her hair so that her head might burn more slowly and with a brighter flame (Colletta, 55-56). In 1735, when Alcina was first produced at Covent Garden, England was poised to purge itself of the witch-lust that had burdened its con- science for two centuries, but belief in the existence of witches in the midst of society was still very much alive. You may recall, by way of comparison, that the Salem trials took place in 1692, only two years after the foundation of Arcadia. You may also recall that the last witch trial in England took place in 1712, two years after Handel's arrival in London, that the last one in Scotland is dated 1722, that the philosophical debate on the existence of witches did not start until 1748, and, most important, that the law that put anend to witch trials in England was not passed until 1736, a year after the first production of Alcina. The law states that after 24 June 1736, it would be illegal to try someone on charges of witchcraft, sorcery, and enchant- ments. But the promulgation of this law does not mean that belief in witches suddenly became a thing of the past, for in fact many people, including some of the most enlightened intellectuals of the age, continued to believe in the existence of witches in the midst of society. We are reminded here of a teaching of the contemporary philosopher Vico, who said that, whereas philosophy tells us what people may be, the law, by prohibiting what they want to do, tells us what they are really like (62). Now, you will agree, 1am sure, that to perform Alcina in 1735 at Covent Garden and to speak about it in London the following day in the context of the issues likely to interest the intelligentsia is not quite the same thing as producing it at the Faculty of Music and talking about it at the Munk Centre, Not that we have reason to congratulate ourselves for much, but in 1735 London, when debates leading to the witchcraft law that was finally approved the following year must have been very much alive, men of conscience surely could still hear the cries of helpless girls being turned into the likes of Ariosto’s real Alcina - ugly, hairless, and disfigured - by the instruments of torture used to purify them of their guilt and to give them the disposition to speak their confessions The belief that witches were hiding in the midst of society in large numbers began in the early Renaissance and kept on growing as a mi- sogyny of hitherto unknown proportions became common among men of culture. Even the humane and highly civilized Ariosto went as far as to invent, with a lightness of touch that has enabled him to avoid moral 6 Witchswimmingcontinued tobe popular throughout the eighteenth century, afactthathas prompted Owen Davies to suggest that the people ‘were never made properly aware of the illegality of the actions resulting from their beliefs’ (91), UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 72, NUMBER 4, FALL 2003866 DOMENICO PIETROPAOLO. condemnation, the fact that Morgana and Alcina were sisters born of incest, knowing full well not only that incest was regarded by all as a source of evil without any possibility of redemption but also that the Dominican inquisitors of his day considered incestuous birth a sufficient cause for investigation on suspicion of propensity to witchcraft” It must have been for Ariosto easy to do this, as a man working in a court dominated by other men. A woman composer, Francesca Caccini, who commissioned a libretto on the Alcina episode — from a man, to be sure, Ferdinando Saracinelli - but for a production before the Medici court, when the cultural life of the Medici was very much under the influence of two other women, Christine of Lorraine and Magdalen of Austria, had a strikingly different attitude. Her Alcina, not being acceptably beautiful to society, has enclosed herself in her castle in order to avoid persecution, but she is turned into a beautiful woman by Ruggiero’s love, for as long as that lasts (see Caccini), In Handel's opera, which appeared when the violence against sorcer- esses was on the wane, there is a fair amount of the sense found in Caccini’s dance. The librettist ignored Ariosto’s insistence on the mono- lithic evil of the two sisters, passed in silence over the detail of their incestuous birth, and, as a consequence, treated both sisters more like women in love - more playfully Morgana, and more passionately Alcina. In her compassion and in her love, Handel’s Alcina is miles away from the misogynist creation by Ariosto. The aria ‘Ah! Cor mio!’ in which Alcina reaches the highest expression of her womanhood would be inconceivable to Ariosto, as would be the frolicsome and yet profoundly human sentiments of ‘Tornami a vagheggiar,’ whether sung by Morgana (as in the 1735 edition) or by Alcina (as in the 1736 edition). But, though distant from Ariosto’s, the story is not quite the feminine creation of Caccini’s dance, which in the Alcina tradition must be regarded as an exception. And that is because Arcadia, whether inside the text, as a dream of country lyricism from the comfort of an upper-class perch in the city, or outside the text, as a make-believe utopian ritual of artists and academics tired of the vulgarities of life and art, is very much a man's world, peopled by champions of urbane masculinity and by maidens designed to represent only projections of their desires and aspirations. In the Arcadian landscape inside the text, which is to say in the fiction created by the artist, Alcina, or any other sorceress generated by the same 7 Orlando Furioso vii, 42: ‘son quest'altre due nate d'incesto.’ In the Malleus Maleficarum Kramer and Sprenger mention incest as the result of inordinate lust (philocaption) provoked by the devil (178), but by the end of the sixteenth century Jean Bodin, in his De ‘Magorum Daemonomania (1598), classifies it as one of the fifteen indictments that warrant execution. See also the list in Bolzoni (40). UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 72, NUMBER 4, FALL 2003ALCINA IN ARCADIA 867 mould, could be portrayed as a source of unequalled pleasure and then rejected as a false maiden ona mission of individual and social disruption ~a snake among the flowers, like the infamous one camouflaged in the apple tree of Eden, which in Michelangelo's panel in the Sistine chapel (it seems relevant to recall) is depicted as a bare-breasted woman. And so Alcina, possessed of demonic beauty, is imagined as creating her own Arcadian world ona parallel blueprint, almost as if she wanted to say, like the personification of death in the best-known iconography of pastoralism, Itoo am here - ‘Et in Arcadia Alcina’ - where you would have never expected to find her. It is for her intrusion into the world of the beautiful people that she and her landscape have to be undone. However, in the Arcadian landscape outside the text, or in the institutional context in which the text is produced, the Arcadian academi- cians, grave and sombre though they may be, yield easily to her fascina- tion, if only through a screen of metaphor and analogy. Nowhere is this clearer than in the literary theory of the Arcadian academy of the first two decades or so of the eighteenth century. As early as 1700, Giammario Crescimbeni, president of the academy, stated in his theory of verisimili- tude that it is perfectly legitimate for a poet to introduce sorcery and sorceresses into the plot so long as in the end the reader is allowed to infer that all supernatural powers ultimately derive from God, since anything else would undermine the credibility of the story (La belleza, 157). In 1706 Ludovico Antonio Muratori, the undisputed arbiter of Arcadian taste in the northern states of Italy, went one step further, observing that sorcery and poetry are related analogically, both being concerned with causing wonder and delight in the presence of things that have nothing wonderful or delightful to commend them (291). In 1708 Gianvincenzo Gravina, founding member of the Academy and the jurist who framed its laws, argued with considerable cogency that poetry is a species of sorcery whose enchantments do not lead to bewilderment but to enlightenment and to the imaginative expansion of the mind (208) — that is why we can say that Homer, the greatest of all poets, is also the greatest sorcerer of literary history: ‘il mago piu’ potente e l’incantatore piu’ sagace’ (203). By the early 1720s the language of sorcery must have become so common in Arcadian literary theory that Pier Jacopo Martello, one of the most admired poets and critics of his generation, could call rhyme a witch - using the unambiguous and non-euphemistic term strega - that seduces one out of one’s mind, and could claim, satirically, that the Arcadians, so seduced, had become its worshippers (562-65, lines 170 and 211). ‘Et in Arcadia’ indeed, in its poetics as well as in its poetry, working both enchantments. from within However, to enchantmentas anaesthetic experience there corresponds, as if on the other side of the same medal, the dark spectacle of the social history of sorcery. To be sure, the two sides are kept politely apart by UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME {UMBER 4, FALL 2003868 DOMENICO PIETROPAOLO cholarship, as if they existed in separate realities with separate histories, as if the world of music, plays, and stories had no roots in the world of material circumstances and social structures in which these products of the imagination are marketed as consumer goods. Scholarship at times follows the lead of the art that it studies, and in doing so it comes dangerously close to a conception of its task in the pastoral mode. Many times this separation is fruitful, perhaps even essential, for without it the technical questions of form, technique, and chronology could probably never be answered effectively, requiring as they doabstraction from larger contexts. But beyond the world of the narrow focus of the discipline, when form, technique, and event are looked at from the outside and seen as aspects of a finished performance, packaged with a pretty libretto and marketed for a profit, the inadequacy of the separation begins to emerge, as does the need to relate what is inside to what is outside the pastoral boundary. Behind the glory of the baroque, there are darkness and guilt of enormous proportions, and it is the task of scholarship to explain their point of contact with art. The world of sorcery in opera and poetry has a social correlative of frightening magnitude, about which it does not sing but which it causes nonetheless to come to the foreground of consciousness, like the sounds of untouched violin strings vibrating sympathetically with one that is plucked. What general inference, if any, can we draw from all of this? Only that art and scholarship are a more modest product of the imagination and of the intellect than is sometimes claimed on their behalf, that they do not transcend the limitations of the community in which they are produced, and that they each serve a convenient ideology. Whether it is possible to argue that either of them could ever be totally innocent, 1 would not presume to ask. But it must be conceded that the art and scholarship that come to us through the pastoral mode are surely the least innocent of all. WORKS CITED Repertorio, Enciclopedia dello spettacolo. Allacci, Leone. Drammaturgia, accresciuta e continuata fino all’anno MDCCLY. Venice: Pasquali + Ariosto, Ludovico. Orlando Furioso, Ed Cesare Segre. Milan: Mondadori 1969 Bodin, Jean. De Magorum Daemonomania. 1598 Bolzoni, Farncesco. Le streghe in Italia, Rocca San Casciano: Cappelli 1963 Caccini, Francesca. La liberazione di Ruggiero dall'isola di Alcina. 1625. Ed Alessand- ro Magin. Florence: Archivium Musicum 1998. 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Witchcraft in Europe 1100~ UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 72, NUMBER 4, FALL 2003Copyright of University of Toronto Quarterly is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.