FOLENGO, Teofilo. - Poet, born in Mantua on 14 Nov. 1491, died at Campese di Bassano on 9 Dec. 1544. As a boy he studied with a priest in the Ferrarese region, and in 1509 he entered the Benedictine Order, living until 1525 between Brescia, Mantua and Padua.
During this period appeared the first version of the *Baldus* (Venice 1517), and the second (Toscolano 1521), in macaronic Latin, under the pseudonym of Merlin Coccio. Following disagreements with his superiors, in 1525 he left the Order, though not (as has often been written) to lead a dissolute life. For five years he remained outside the Order, publishing in 1526 a poem in Italian, the *Orlandino*, and in 1527 the *Caso del Triperuno*, in verse and prose, in Latin, macaronic and Italian. In 1530, in order to be readmitted to the Order, he withdrew into solitude near Sorrento, and in 1534 he re-entered the Benedictines. Meanwhile he had published a poem in ottava rima, *L’Umanità del Figliuol di Dio* (Venice c. 1533). He also wrote numerous other hagiographical and ascetical works, among which it is worth recalling the *Alto della Pinta*. But F. is best known as a macaronic poet, the supremely gifted author (more than of the *Moschaea*, the *Zanitonella* and the *Epigrams*, which with the masterpiece make up the *Maccheronee*, now in an ed. by A. Luzio, Bari 1928) of the *Baldus*, a poem rich in ironic humanity, at once fantastic and realistic, the fruit of refined literary training and of an uninhibited popular vein. Recent studies, especially those of Billanovich, have dispelled the image of a worldly and heretical F., restoring to his pure image as a poet a cultural and moral equilibrium derived essentially from sacred studies and the religious life.