The Storia dei paladini di Francia, as noted earlier, combines several Renaissance chivalric works into a single continuous narrative of interlacing episodes. Lodico wove together stories in chronological order, supplied additional background and explanatory details to fill in narrative gaps and smooth out contradictions among the source texts, and sometimes related new adventures to further develop the plot. Despite the resulting sense of both cohesiveness and comprehensiveness, the many source texts incorporated into this massive prose compilation were written in different geopolitical environments and convey distinct ideological perspectives. Thus, the worldview of any particular episode inevitably takes its starting point from the source text.

The eight plays presented in Part Two—from the appearance of Angelica of Cathay in Paris to the final battle of three against three on the island of Lampedusa—are drawn from the central portion of the Storia dei paladini which follows the plot of Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. These two source texts have a prominent place in the cycle as a whole. As Carocci has pointed out, the entire repertory of the Storia dei paladini is constructed around the nucleus of the “‘beautiful story’ of Orlando in love and then furious” (Il poema che cammina 51). What is announced by Boiardo as an embarrassing parenthesis in Orlando's heroic trajectory—that is, the paladin's enamorment of Angelica of Cathay and subsequent disregard of his duty to king and patria—becomes in Lodico's hands “the pivotal point around which the rest of the narrative revolves: the heart and nerve center of the story” (51). In the process, “whereas many other poems are shattered, dismembered and modified, the Boiardo-Ariosto core is faithfully reproduced in its entirety and right down to the details, following the particular narrative arrangement of spacetime of the authors without modifications, displacements, or cuts” (51).

Boiardo's late fifteenth-century Orlando Innamorato created a literary sensation by purportedly exposing a scandalous history: the hitherto stalwart Frankish paladin actually deserted both the emperor Carlo and his own wife Alda to traverse the globe as a would-be Arthurian knight errant seeking to win the affection of the beautiful princess of Cathay.