I’m taking a break from my book project this semester to work on an article-length project about the horses that appear as human companions and as characters in their own right in Renaissance epic poetry, starting from the most famous Renaissance epic, the Orlando furioso. My goal with this project is to put this entertaining and popular narrative poem from the Italian Renaissance into conversion with recent debates about the relative anthropocentrism of pre-modern European culture and its dominant intellectual movement (“humanism”). The research so far has involved the medieval literary precursors to the Renaissance epic in French and in Spanish (also featuring horses!); and aspects of horse care and horse breeding in the Renaissance. I’m also tracing ways in which “anthropocentric” readings of the Furioso have been produced over its long reception history since the sixteenth century.