Influssi della lingua e della letteratura francesi medievali nell’Italia settentrionale e il Fondo Francese Antico della Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana di Venezia [thesis]

333 Pages·2010·3.7 MB·Italian

by  Kevin Baker Reynolds

INFLUSSI DELLA LINGUA E DELLA LETTERATURA FRANCESI MEDIEVALI
NELL’ITALIA SETTENTRIONALE E IL FONDO FRANCESE ANTICO DELLA
BIBLIOTECA NAZIONALE MARCIANA DI VENEZIA

by

Kevin Baker Reynolds

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy, Department of Italian Studies, University of Toronto

© Copyright by Kevin Baker Reynolds, 2010
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Kevin Baker Reynolds
“Influssi della lingua e della letteratura francesi medievali nell’Italia settentrionale e il
Fondo Francese Antico della Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana di Venezia”
Doctor of Philosophy, 2010
Italian Studies
University of Toronto

ABSTRACT

This dissertation regards the medieval French literary tradition’s presence in
Northern Italy in the late Middle Ages. This phenomenon produced a corpus of texts
copied or composed by Northern Italian scribes and authors in the French language. The
Italian authors’ command of French verse was, in some cases, imperfect; in others, they
consciously manipulated the French language for creative purposes. Whatever the case,
what resulted was a body of work ostensibly written in French but with a distinctly
Northern Italian flavour. Every work within this corpus presents unique linguistic
features and a distinct blend of French and Northern Italian vernaculars. This cultural
phenomenon, which is commonly referred to as “Franco-Italian,” was no doubt born from
the linguistic proximity of the Northern Italian vernaculars to the languages of France in
the late Middle Ages: absent an autochthonous Italian literary tradition, Northern Italian
literati adapted the languages of France, which had already developed vernacular literary
traditions, as a means for their own literary expression. Northern Italy constituted, in this
sense, a peripheral region of a medieval “Francophonie.”
ii
This dissertation first surveys the nature and function of the Franco-Italian
“language” and then presents a critical historiography of the scholarship surrounding the
most important manuscript collection of French and Franco-Italian works in Italy, that of
the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice. This includes a discussion of all known catalogues
and inventories of the corpus dating back to 1407 and an analysis of two others, until now
largely unstudied, that shed new light on the history of the collection. What follows is an
investigation into one little-known manuscript in the collection, Codex XIV, which
recounts the adventures of Beuve de Hanstone. Codex XIV is unique in the collection
insofar as it was not written in the hybrid Franco-Italian idiom, rather a pure Old French;
consequently, it has received little attention from scholars. This dissertation revisits the
text and its importance in the study of the influence of French literature in medieval Italy.
The dissertation concludes with a series of appendices that display and compare
unpublished inventories of the collection that support the arguments advanced herein.

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SUPPLEMENTARY ABSTRACT

The epic known as Beuve de Hanstone enjoyed immense success especially from
the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries in various parts of Europe, which is attested to by
the numerous manuscript and printed versions of it, in several languages, still in existence
today. Of particular importance are the French and Italian traditions of Beuve of which
numerous redactions exist. Within the Italian tradition we find versions composed in
different linguistic varieties: Tuscan, Venetian (both, in some cases, reflecting Emilian
echoes as well), and the so-called Franco-Italian literary idiom. Franco-Italian refers to a
sort of hybrid language typical of the texts composed or copied in Northern Italy in the
late Middle Ages that drew their inspiration from the French literary tradition and sought
to exploit the prestige that French literature enjoyed at the time, especially given the fact
that the Northern Italian public was probably able to understand French with a little
effort. Franco-Italian was not a daily bilateral means of communication between
individuals, rather a unilateral pathway for the entrance and diffusion of French literary
themes and traditions into Northern Italy.
Various manuscript collections in Italian libraries attest the strong presence of
French in the Northern Italian plain in the Middle Ages. Among the most important fonds
of medieval French manuscripts in Italy numbers the Fondo Francese Antico of Venice’s
Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana. It is comprised of 25 codices composed in one of the
multiple variants of the Gallo-Romance language family; I have chosen to employ the
word “Gallo-Romance” because it embraces not only the linguistic varieties of Northern
France in the Middle Ages (langue d’oïl) but also those of Southern France (langue d’oc)
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and, from a certain point of view, those of neighbouring regions such as Catalonia and
Northern Italy where the Franco-Italian phenomenon was rooted. I discuss at length the
numerous opinions held by scholars regarding the definition and nature of Franco-Italian
in Chapter I.
The Marciana’s Fondo Francese Antico contains some of the most important
monuments of French-influenced literature in Italy from the late medieval period, such as
the fourth and seventh codices containing versions of the Chanson de Roland; the fifth,
containing the Prise de Pampelune; the sixth, Aspremont, which is also found in the
fourth codex; the eighth, Aliscans; the tenth, Gui de Nanteuil; the nineteenth and
twentieth, Fouque de Candie; and twenty-first, Entrée d’Espagne. What’s more, this
collection possesses not one but two early versions of the very popular legend of Beuve
de Hanstone, one in the fonds’s fourteenth codex, the other in the very important
compilation known as the Geste Francor that makes up the thirteenth codex.
At the centre of the study of the Marciana’s collection is the first published
document that lists and describes the manuscripts housed at the Marciana: Anton Maria
Zanetti’s “Appendice d’alcuni manuscritti in lingua francese antica” (1741). Similarly
indispensable are the various indices created by previous collectors: the 1407 inventory
of manuscripts belonging to the Gonzagas, dukes of Mantua; the 1713 documentation
executing the testament of a sixteenth-century Venetian nobleman, Giacomo Contarini;
and the 1722 and 1734 accounts of manuscripts belonging to another Venetian noble,
Giambattista Recanati. The examination of such documents is an essential aspect of the
study of the influx of the French language both in the courts and in the piazzas of the
Northern Italian plain. Such an exercise allows the scholar to grasp the extent of the
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diffusion of Transalpine culture in Italy in the past, and to understand precisely how
many and which codices recorded in the registers are still extant, and how many and
which ones have gone missing. In particular the Zanetti catalogue is an obligatory point
of departure for any scholar of the Marciana’s Old French patrimony, for this is the
document that came to define what is now known as the Fondo Francese Antico.
Nevertheless, certain information regarding the individual manuscripts that are described
in Zanetti’s catalogue, and even the authorship of the catalogue itself (until now taken at
face value), must be revisited. The present work proposes to shed light on precise
information relative to the Venetian collection and in particular to one of its less-studied
codices, as well as to provide an in-depth analysis of the influence exercised by the
French language in Northern Italy that is well illustrated in the Marciana’s Fondo
Francese Antico.
***
The student of the Romance languages and their literatures often begins from the
notion that there are essentially five Neo-Latin “languages,” that is the so-called national
languages, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, and Rumanian, or perhaps that there are
seven, insofar as even non-specialists generally recognize Catalan and Provençal as
languages due to their literary, cultural and/or political prestige, whether current or
historical. Linguists and philologists however recognize in Romance Europe a much
more complex variety of idioms and prefer to group together more closely related dialects
into “families,” whose borders correspond grosso modo to those of the larger European
states of today: Ibero-Romance refers to the languages of Spain and Portugal; Gallo-
Romance those of modern-day France and of a few neighbouring regions; Italo-Romance
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those of the Italian peninsula and of Sicily; and Balcano-Romance all of the Romance
varieties of Southeast Europe, contained mostly within the boundaries of modern-day
Romania. Some Romance linguists and philologists classify Alpine and Sub-Alpine
varieties known as Rhaeto-Romance, as well as the traditional dialects of Sardinia, as
“Italo-Romance,” often for non-linguistic reasons. In fact, it is normal for many scholars
to cite not only purely linguistic data but also socio-linguistic criteria in determining the
classification of languages, and in our case the Romance languages; that is to say, the
rapport that local languages have with their respective national languages, or the fact that
speakers of local languages usually have at least a minimal competence in the national
language of the country in which they live. As a result, Sicilian, Tuscan, Piedmontese,
and maybe even Friulian dialects could be considered by such criteria as “Italo-
Romance,” not because they are mutually intelligible, but in part because the speakers of
one or of the other dialect would also be able to communicate in Italian, or at least to
adapt their own dialects to resemble more closely the common national language.
The question of the Italo-Romance family is however much more complicated
than what it would seem on the surface. First of all, the Sardinian dialects are so different
in purely linguistic terms from the other Italian dialects that they cannot be classified as
Italo-Romance. Similarly, the languages of the extreme Northeast of Italy and of South-
eastern Switzerland, the “Rhaeto-Romance” idioms, demonstrate certain common
linguistic traits that differ greatly from the “mainstream” Italo-Romance varieties. And
finally, the speakers of the Swiss Rhaeto-Romance dialects (known as “Romansch”)
regard German as their “language of culture” or “roof language” rather than Italian.
Therefore, linguists must often limit their definitions of Italo-Romance to those Neo-
vii
Latin varieties that are native to the territory south of the Alps and to the surrounding
islands, excepting of course the local languages of Sardinia1 and those of the north-
eastern border regions.2 But the other most important classification of Romance Europe is
that which divides the region in two: Western Romania and Eastern Romania (though
some would confer unto Sardinian a position apart). The latter of the two major divisions
includes the Balcano- and Italo-Romance families, whereas the former includes the
Ibero-, Gallo-, and Rhaeto-Romance families. The border between these two main parts
does not run through the Alps, which are seen to separate grosso modo Italo-Romance
from Gallo- and Rhaeto-Romance; the border is instead the cluster of isoglosses
commonly known as the La Spezia-Rimini line (it would be perhaps more accurate to
speak of the Massa-Senigallia line), which divides Northern Italy from Central and
Southern Italy. This classification associates the dialects of Northern Italy with those of
the Rhaeto-, Gallo-, and Ibero-Romance families based on a series of phonetic and
morpho-syntactic factors; in fact, the majority of the Italian dialects of the area north of
the Massa-Senigallia line are called “Gallo-Italic” (a classification which does not,
however, include the Venetian dialects) precisely because they share a Celtic or “Gallo”
(from the Gauls) substratum with those of France.
Like other Romance linguists and philologists, Lorenzo Renzi uses traditional
terms like “Italo-Romance domain” to allude to all varieties spoken in Italy and in
neighbouring regions today, but introduces an original classification of Romance Europe
that divides in two what is usually meant by such a designation, as does the bifurcation of

1 Though the northern dialects of Sardinia were imported from the mainland and so are generally
considered Italo-Romance.
2 The more-or-less Lombard varieties spoken in the Swiss Ticino canton and in the Grisons, however,
would be considered Italo-Romance.
viii
East and West Romania, as I described above: his classification groups together Northern
Italian varieties with the Gallo-Romance family,3 indicating even more affinities between
Northern Italian and Southern French (Provençal or Occitan) than between Southern
French and Northern French; he also groups together Balcano-Romance (including the
extinct Dalmatian varieties) with the Southern Italian and Sardinian dialects, though
recognizing in Sardinian an important factor that would associate it more with Western
Romance: the plural in –s (which is present in Ibero-, Gallo-, and Rhaeto-Romance,
including Friulian, but would not associate it with the Gallo-Italic and Venetian
varieties).
If, therefore, it is not possible to speak of a modern-day “Italo-Romance” in
purely linguistic terms, it is certainly even less possible to speak of a united “Italo-
Romance” in the Middle Ages, i.e. before the process, though slow and long from being
completed even today, of homogenization of the Italian dialects as a result of the
influence of Tuscan. That does not negate the validity of speaking today of an “Italo-
Romance domain” as Renzi does, in the sense of the entire area where the population
expresses itself in a local Romance idiom alongside Italian, or where it uses or could use
Italian instead of a local language, especially in certain sectors or registers of discourse.
In other words, this meaning of the concept recognizes the position of today’s Standard
Italian as the “roof language” throughout the entire Italian Republic, as well as in the
areas of Switzerland where a Gallo-Italic variety is spoken and Italian is recognized as an
official language (in the Ticino canton and in some of the Grisons). Naturally, this is not
the place to discuss the increasingly complex socio-linguistic situation of the varieties

3 Renzi’s scheme, however, does not produce any notable structural concordances with the Ibero-Romance
family.
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