Jerusalem Delivered: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Jerusalem Delivered, credited to Torquato Tasso, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso. Translated by Edward Fairfax. Read by Thomas A. Copeland. The First Crusade provides the backdrop for a rich tapestry of political machinations, military conflicts, martial rivalries, and love stories, some of which are complicated by differences in religion. The supernatural plays a major role in the action. Partly on this account, and partly because of the multilayered, intertwined plots, the poem met with considerable contemporary criticism, so Tasso revised it radically and published the revision under a new name, La Gerusalemme Conquistata, or "Jerusalem Conquered," which has remained virtually unread, a warning to authors who pay attention to the critics. The original poem influenced Edmund Spenser, whose unfinished epic, The Faerie Queene, is still more complicated in plot than Tasso's poem and, being an allegory, affords the supernatural an even greater share in the action. In Milton's Paradise Lost, the council in hell (first half of Book II) owes much to Tasso's similar scene in Book IV. (Someone with sufficient background in Old English might profitably compare the tirade of Satan in Book IV to the remarkably similar speech of Satan in the Anglo-Saxon Genesis.) Moreover, Milton's decision to write in English rather than in Latin, then the language of international discourse, was due in part to his visit to Tasso's patron, Giovanni Battista Manso, who advised him as he had advised Torquato Tasso before him, to dignify his native language by employing his talents in bold defiance of custom and precedent. Had Petrarch had the benefit of Manso's advice, his great epic, The Africa, might now eclipse his off-hour doodlings, the sonnets about Laura. The text is the Gutenberg Project's version, corrected in certain places by consulting editions, also in the public domain, published in 1749, 1844, 1845, and 1901; A Dictionary of the Italian and English Languages, by Joseph Baretti (Venice, 1795); The Oxford English Dictionary; and an edition of La Gerusaleme liberata itself (Paris: Victor Masson, 1836). (Summary by Thomas A. Copeland)

Recording facts

• Recording title: Jerusalem Delivered
• Author credits: Torquato Tasso
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 20
• Listed recording duration: 14:39:21

Catalogue topics

• poetry
• history
• crusade

Track guide

1. 01 - Book 1 — 41:21
2. 02 - Book 2 — 48:22
3. 03 - Book 3 — 34:49
4. 04 - Book 4 — 44:57
5. 05 - Book 5 — 40:07
6. 06 - Book 6 — 52:59
7. 07 - Book 7 — 51:55
8. 08 - Book 8 — 38:01
9. 09 - Book 9 — 45:49
10. 10 - Book 10 — 35:19
11. 11 - Book 11 — 39:10
12. 12 - Book 12 — 49:38
13. 13 - Book 13 — 37:55
14. 14 - Book 14 — 37:30
15. 15 - Book 15 — 30:58
16. 16 -Book 16 — 35:12
17. 17 - Book 17 — 44:52
18. 18 - Book 18 — 47:14
19. 19 - Book 19 — 59:44
20. 20 - Book 20 — 1:03:37

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.