FOLENGO, TEOFILO. - Poet, b. at Mantua on 8 Nov. 1491, d. at Campese di Bassano on 9 Dec. 1544. As a boy he studied under a priest in the Ferrarese, and in 1509 he entered the Order of the Benedictines, living until 1525 between Brescia, Mantua and Padua.
In this period the first redaction of the Baldus (Venice 1517) appeared, and the second (Toscolano 1521), in macaronic Latin, and under the pseudonym of Merlin Coccio. Following frictions with his superiors, in 1525 he left the Order, without however giving himself over (as was long written) to a life of pleasure. For five years he stayed away from the Order, publishing in 1526 a poem in the Italian language, the Orlandina, and in 1527 the Casa del Triperuno, in verse and in prose, in Latin, in macaronic and in Italian. In 1530, in order to be readmitted to the Order, he withdrew into solitude near Sorrento, and in 1534 he entered the Benedictines again. In the meantime he had published a poem in octaves, L'Umanità del Figliwal di Dio (Venice ca. 1533). He wrote moreover numerous other hagiographic and ascetic works, among which it is worth recalling the Atto della Pinta. But F. is best known as the macaronic poet, the most felicitous author (more than of the Moschaca, the Zanionella and the Epigrammi, which together with the masterpiece make up the Maccherones, now in the ed. by A. Luzio, Bari 1928) of the Baldus, a poem most rich in ironic humanity, fanciful and realistic at the same time, the fruit of an exquisite literary education and of an unrestrained popular humor. Recent studies, above all those of Billanovich, have erased the image of a worldly and heretical F., restoring to his pure image as a poet a cultural and moral equilibrium, derived essentially from his sacred studies and from his religious habit.
Bibliography6 works
Giorgio Petrocchi