Aspetti del meraviglioso nelle letterature medievali. Medioevo latino, romanzo, germanico e celtico, Etudes réunies par F.E. Consolino, F. Marzella et L. Spetia, Turnhout, Brepols, 2016
In the occidental medieval literature, the literary genre of bestiary can be considerate a collec... more In the occidental medieval literature, the literary genre of bestiary can be considerate a collector of mirabilia. After a short resume on the general features of this genre, in this paper I try to identify the addressees of the late XIII century prose bestiary Libro della natura degli animali and its cultural provenance. The widespread presence of preachers’ image in a lot moral interpretation of animals features (particularly in the cock, the panther, the swan, the partridge and the calandra lark’s chapters), which are different compared to the traditional interpretations of Latin bestiary, points out that this work was destined to assist this category in their preaching activity, but in a second phase the numerous connections to many aspect of the middle class and merchants’ life, contained in some chapters (especially the chapters of stork, crow and wolf), allowed a direct fruition within these social classes, as the codicological characteristics of the witnesses written after the middle of XIV demonstrate.
So this bestiary was conceived to make accessible the interpretations of animal world to a low educated audience, and its anonymous author had to remove all the theological, exegetic and mystic references usually employed to explain the animal features that could be referred to the world of mirabilia. This action was achieved through the elimination of the words relates to the semantic sphere of meraviglioso, and interpreting the only two occurrences of these words (in the chapters of phoenix and weasel) as a testimony of God’s power and glory.
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So this bestiary was conceived to make accessible the interpretations of animal world to a low educated audience, and its anonymous author had to remove all the theological, exegetic and mystic references usually employed to explain the animal features that could be referred to the world of mirabilia. This action was achieved through the elimination of the words relates to the semantic sphere of meraviglioso, and interpreting the only two occurrences of these words (in the chapters of phoenix and weasel) as a testimony of God’s power and glory.
In this essay, I offer some hypothesis on the Giacomino Pugliese’s song Isplendiente, especially about prosody and interpretations of some passages. In the previous editions, it is possible to observe a widespread wavering in the metric interpretation of the fronte, usually interpreted as single verses, double verses or verses with internal rhyme. Therefore, I discuss the main criteria useful to understand if a sequence of short verses can be interpreted as hemistiches of a single long verse or not. Then I identify the most economic hypothesis in a metric structure involving a fronte with two novenari with internal rhyme, and I offer a new reconstructive edition of the text.
Nel presente contributo si intende in primo luogo offrire un saggio di interdisciplinarità, esercitato sul piano ecdotico ed esegetico su tre composizioni canoniche del Trecento: una chace adespota, Umblemens vos pri merchi, e due cacce, Nell’acqua chiara e Caciando per guastar intonate da Vincenzo da Rimini e Zacara da Teramo. La restituzione del testo critico, operazione resasi necessaria a causa di troppe inesattezze riscontrate nelle edizioni precedenti, offre lo spunto per tracciare una linea di continuità all’interno dell’intero XIV secolo, riguardo a uno specifico impiego della tecnica canonica quale mezzo ‘mimetico’, funzionale alla resa sonora della concitazione implicita nella scena descritta (un’impresa eroicomica a sfondo pastorale e due scene di mercato). Benché sia evidente la distanza a livello stilistico tra le tre composizioni, si riscontra l’impiego delle medesime strategie compositive, tendenzialmente sempre più orientate verso la dimensione ‘rappresentativa’, arrivando, nel caso di Zacara, addirittura a sacrificare l’intellegibilità del testo al di fuori dell’esecuzione polifonica.
The second half of the essay therefore shifts its attention to the manuscript Parma, Bibl. Palatina, Parmense 1081, the only source to attribute to Nicolò del Preposto, Petrach, Boccaccio and Sacchetti certain texts set to music by «Ars nova» composers (Nicolò himself included). Studying the history of the textual tradition the Parmense manuscript reflects (wich, beyond the lyrics already mentioned, contains various poems by Petrarch and by minor Trecento authors), this section focuses on the relationships between this source, the manuscript Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 40.43 and the «estravagante» tradition of the «Rerum vulgarium fragmenta» (even in the so-called Pre-Chigi form). Analysis of this web of manuscripts reveals that the attributions in the short cycle of «Ars nova» song texts must be considered largely reliable, given that the scribe copied from sources circulating among the Florentine cultural elite during the last 30 years of the 14th century - the milieu in which the texts themselves and their musical settings were penned.
In this paper I examine at first the heterodox nature of Jehan Bretel’s (Prince of the Arras’ Puy) chansons, in which he expresses his frustration relative to the precepts of courtly love, offering a love ideology founded on a more pragmatic value, in opposition to the ideology accepted by traditionalist trouvères (for example Robert del Castel). Analyzing more texts, as the jeux-partis and other verses composed by some poets near to Jehan Bretel (especially Jehan de Grieviler and Lambert Ferri), it’s possible perceiving a common line, expressed by coherent topics and vocabulary, that opposes at vacuity of fin’amor a love where the woman is a partner appropriate to the lover, with whom achieving a committed relationship that will become perfect with the marriage. Then I contextualize this new love-ideology, called amour soufisante, in a general anti-courtly tendency of Arras literature, and I try to express a historic-sociologic hypothesis that could explain the origin of this heterodox love ideology.
Talks by Davide Checchi
Nel presente intervento, condotto secondo un approccio filologico al contempo testuale e musicale, illustreremo due casi in cui un passivo rispetto del testimone e la pratica dell’esecuzione «on manuscripts» comportano al contrario un tradimento anacronistico nei confronti del testo, sia nella sua concezione d’autore, sia in funzione della comprensione della mouvance. Nello specifico verrà presa in considerazione la tradizione del madrigale Di novo è giunto di Jacopo da Bologna e della ballata di Landini Conviensi a fede• fé, con particolare attenzione alle varianti dei mss. Londra, British Library, Add. 29987 e Firenze, Bibl. Nazionale Centrale, Panc. 26, solitamente descritti come manoscritti d’uso e quindi idealmente vicini alla prassi esecutiva medievale e perfetti rappresentanti della mouvance.