Torquato Tasso.
Il Goffredo, Overo Gierusalemme Liberata, Poema Heroica.
Amsterdam; Paris: Elsevier; Thomaso Jolly, 1678.
271 pp.
Text in Italian.
A small 32mo (2 3/8 by 4 1/8") in original vellum boards.
"Tasso" written at top of spine.
A previous owner's name is written in ink on front free endpaper.
Numerous full-page illustrations accompany the text.
Dimensions
w 2.5 in x h 4 1/8 in x d 0.75 in
Very good condition. Some soiling and wear to boards. Light foxing.

Torquato Tasso (1544 – 1595) was an Italian poet of the 16th century, best known for his poem Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1581), in which he depicts a highly imaginative version of the combats between Christians and Muslims at the end of the First Crusade, during the Siege of Jerusalem. Tasso suffered from mental illness and died a few days before he was due to be crowned on the Capitoline Hill as the king of poets by the Pope. His work was widely translated and adapted, and until the beginning of the 20th century, he remained one of the most widely read poets in Europe.
Jerusalem Delivered, also known as The Liberation of Jerusalem (Italian: La Gerusalemme liberata ('The freed Jerusalem'), is an epic poem, first published in 1581, that tells a largely mythified version of the First Crusade in which Christian knights, led by Godfrey of Bouillon, battle Muslims in order to take Jerusalem. Tasso began work on the poem in the mid-1560s. Originally, it bore the title Il Goffredo. It was completed in April, 1575 .
Tasso's choice of subject matter, an actual historic conflict between Christians and Muslims (albeit with fantastical elements added), had a historical grounding and created compositional implications (the narrative subject matter had a fixed endpoint and could not be endlessly spun out in multiple volumes) that are lacking in other Renaissance epics. Like other works of the period that portray conflicts between Christians and Muslims, this subject matter had a topical resonance to readers of the period when the Ottoman Empire was advancing through Eastern Europe.
The poem was hugely successful, and sections or moments from the story were used in works in other media all over Europe, especially in the period before the French Revolution and the Romantic movement, which provided alternative stories combining love, violence, and an exotic setting.



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