Abstract

The objective of this paper is to make an approach to the concept of madness in two significant works of Modernity: Orlando Furioso by Ariosto and Mandrake by Machiavelli. Although both are authors of Italian Renaissance humanism, they make a different approach to the events of their time, which drive the writing of their works, and which reveal the close relationship between the political and social events of the moment in the case of Machiavelli, and the reference to classical and medieval sources in Ariosto. The methodology used in this work constitutes a documentary review of the sources, in order to establish a parallelism between them.