Audience and Quattrocento Pastoral: the Case of Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia

This paper examines the two versions of Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia in relation to their original audiences. Its goal is to propose a new interpretation of this classical Renaissance work and to rethink current notions of audiences and readers. On the one hand, I examine Sannazaro’s contacts with the culture of humanism, and in particular with what Christopher Celenza labels “culture of disputation”. On the other hand, I seek to reconstruct the audience of Arcadia’s two versions within Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of “field” and “habitus”. The results of this study are a deeper understanding of the text in light of the author’s close relationships with Ippolita Maria Sforza’s court and Giovanni Pontano’s intellectual community.Also, this study seeks to overcome the dichotomy between implied and empirical readers by rethinking the problem of audience in a broader sociological framework.