This article considers Annibal Caro’s religious sentiments during the years of his most intense comic and paradoxical production: the pre-Tridentine period from 1536 to 1543, a time of tense expectation in Rome for significant Church reform. Although Caro’s religious beliefs never raised suspicions of heterodoxy, we shall see that both his paradoxical prose in Berni’s style, and his only comedy (which he conceived at the request of the Duke Pier Luigi Farnese but was never authorised by Caro to be represented or published in his lifetime), show that Erasmian influences and suggestions from Boccaccio and Aretino allowed him to safely engage in a discourse of religious dissent. Cet article analyse la position religieuse du lettré Annibal Caro durant les années de sa plus intense activité comique-burlesque : la période pré-tridentine de 1536 à 1543, où il composa des proses paradoxales à la manière de Berni, et son unique comédie, conçue à la demande du duc Pier Luigi Farnèse. Caro n’autorisa pas, de son vivant, la représentation de celle-ci, et la comédie ne fut publiée que de manière posthume. Nous verrons que, bien que les sentiments religieux de Caro n’aient jamais suscité de soupçons d’hétérodoxie, ce furent des influences érasmiennes, ainsi que des suggestions venues de Boccace et de l’Arétin, qui lui permirent d’élaborer un style discursif masquant sa polémique contre les faiblesses morales de l’Église.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Moroncini, A., (2025), "Érasme, l’Arétin et Boccace dans l’invention du discours comique-burlesque d’Annibal Caro", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Moroncini, Ambra. "Érasme, l’Arétin et Boccace dans l’invention du discours comique-burlesque d’Annibal Caro." Renaissance and Reformation 40 (1): 2017. 67-90. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v40i1.28448. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.