The Construction of Madness in Orlando furioso by Ariosto and the Mandragora by Machiavelli

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 Mandragora 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.