Rassegna europea di letteratura italiana | 2019 | N. 53-54

According to Macrobius’ mappa mundi, the inhabited lands have the shape of a chlamyd expanse. Chretien de Troyes uses this statement to describe the mantle of Érec (vv. 6728-6735), which represents royalty. The commentary on Macrobius by Guillaume de Conches allows us to understand the importance of embroidery with the four liberal arts. The allusion to Henry II Plantagenet and his nickname “curt mantel” seems evident.

The article illustrates what the moralization of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in medieval commentaries consisted of. After a brief summary of the main exegesis of the work that arose between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, the research examines above all the commentary readable in Vat. Lat. 1479, probably produced in the first decades of the fourteenth century. This exegesis offers a particularly significant example of moralization as in it the exegete reads in an allegorical key every myth described by Ovid and completely transforms its contents, making it a text suitable for the formation of the good Christian. It is thus intended to demonstrate not only that the auctores were read together with the glossae that accompanied them, but also how easy it was that Dante and any medieval reader had more in mind the interpretation offered by the comments than the text of classical poets and prosators.

The article aims to present some examples of cultural transfert linked to the fable tradition, showing the evolution of some of the fairytales of Alexandre Neckam’s Novus Æsopus, a silloge created in the 12th century. Some études de cas will be proposed which will highlight the process of reworking the morals of the fables analysed, thanks to a comparison with the vulgarisation of the Neckam collection: an anonymous text in Old French made in the 14th century known as Isopet ii de Paris. Both collections, the Novus Æsopus and the Isopet ii de Paris, are the result of a double translatio: on the one hand the Novus Æsopus is a perfect example of an intralingual translation, since it was made on the basis of the Latin tradition of Romulus; on the other hand, the Isopet ii de Paris represents the case of an interlingual translation, since it was composed in Old French starting from Neckam’s mediolatin work.

The article aims to trace a thematic path on the theme of ‘fat’ and its implications from the Latin classics to the Provencal troubadours. Without necessarily assuming, at least in this phase of research, a direct frequentation of the classics involved here by troubadours, we will therefore consider some occurrences involving the semantic area of fat and the verb ‘to fatten up’, in ancient Provencal poetry. The aim is to emphasize the transformation (from corporeal to metaforical) of the adjective ‘pinguis’ and the verb ‘pinguesco’ from classical Latinity to Middle Ages.

This paper aims to offer an analysis of the privileged loci of authorial intention in Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie, in which the author leads a metapoetic reflection on his work as a writer and a translator of Latin sources. First, the work focuses on the extended prologue which provides some important declarations about the poetic of the author himself and the inner purpose of his mise en roman. Afterwards, we’ll examine the ‘authorising’ interjections such as the references to sources and the truth assertions, by which the authorial voice break into the narration, in order to assure his public about his tale’s authenticity. Finally, we’ll try to show how the metadiscursive strategies used by Benoît de Sainte-Maure are very similar to those of the new vernacular historiography of the twelfth century.

The article focuses on the intertextual relationship between the episode of Cavalcante, in Inferno X, and the Virgilian episode of the meeting between Aeneas and Andromache, in Aeneid book III. The analysis intends to show how the mourning figure of Ettore’s widow represents the model on which Dante built the tragic figure of Guido Cavalcanti’s father.

The article takes a look at the answers provided by the Commedia to the question of the fate of virtuous non-believers, comparing them to the solutions proposed by Scholastic theologians and especially by Thomas Aquinas. In particular, I will try to shed light on how Dante, reworking the sources available to him, elaborated a consistent and original philosophical doctrine, in which the idea of the fully virtuous charachter of the pagans’ actions and that of their absolute lack of actual sins coexist with the acknowledgment of their eternal condemnation.

This study springs from an in-depth analysis on the symbolism of weaving in the Divine Comedy. The important occurrence of the image of the fine thread in some key episodes of classical mythology is well known. Equally well known is Dante’s constant reference to classical sources, specifically within the metaphor of weaving. Starting from this premise, we intend to present an analysis of the literary images of the fine thread/the ‘subtle’ in the Comedy, as well as in its sources in order to see with what semantic connotations such an image has spread until it has reached Dante.

The ancient Commedia commentary tradition appears to be interesting concerning its compositional features since it offers the possibility to study how a variety of sources has been exploited and re-functionalised. This can lead to an investigation about the practices of translation from Latin, in particular regarding organic commentaries written in vernacular such as the Chiose alla ‘Commedia’ by Andrea Lancia, who widely re-used Classics in his work. The paper aims to clarify, as far as it is possible, the recurrence of the Classics into this text and to analyse the presence of syntactic Latinate phenomena typically investigated in Romance studies, such as accusativus cum infinitivus, ablativus absolutus and the present participle with verbal value. For this purpose, the corpus of notes containing translations from the Classics has been analysed and compared to other translations by Lancia and by other authors of his period.

In this article I will focus on two cases of ‘connection’ between Petrarch’s notes written in the margin of his books and his literary production. The first one concerns a passage of De Otio religioso that reflects the Petrarch’s reading of Cicero’s Tusculanae disputationes and Pro Sulla. In the second part of the essay I will analyze the stratification of a marginal note about the benefit of the death added by Petrarch on his copy of Augustine’s De vera religione.

Boccaccio well known Juvenal’s Satirae since his early youth. Their influences on his oeuvre have been generally explored, yet the critical studies usually quote the sixth and the tenth Satira. This paper aims to analyze the role of the fifth Satira – in which Juvenal treats the relationship between patronus and cliens – in Boccaccio Epistola xiii to Francesco Nelli. Both works exploit the mensa inaequalis motif to highlight the negative treatment that the rich and mighty reserve to the literati. When the Certaldese escaped from Niccolò Acciauoli’s court in Naples, he showed to had learned Juvenal’s moral teaching : who demonstrate to be willing to tolerate humiliation is worthy to receive it. The writing of the Epistola xiii is mostly read as the result of hatred accumulated during the Neapolitan period, yet the presence of Juvenal as a model helps to reinterpret the Epistola as a proud literary compensation for the damages suffered.

The article inquires the philosophic sources behind the representation of passions in Boccaccio’s tale of the scholar and the widow (Decameron viii 7), with particular regard to Aristotle’s libri morales (i.e. Nicomachean Ethics and Rhetoric) and Thomas Aquinas’ treatise de passionibus contained in the second part of Summa Theologiae. Textual evidence indicates that the scholar’s psychological characterization combines Aristotle’s observations on wrath and compassion with Thomistic thoughts on the causes of anger and the role of memory when passion arises.

The myth of Arachne and Minerva told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses became very popular in the Middle Ages and the early modern period, especially in the visual arts. This article analyses some relevant examples in order to understand the relationship between these images and the ancient and medieval sources. Besides, the article sheds light on some important reflections by famous scholars, in particular Aby Warburg, about the great variety of meanings of Ovid’s mythology.

The myth of Europa had considerable success over the centuries because of its polysemic character and flexibility. During the Middle Ages, this myth did not have a large iconographic diffusion ; rather, it survived in Christian literature acquiring moralizing and allegorical meanings, especially with the circulation of the Ovide moralisé. In the following centuries, this semantic plurality is reflected in a rich iconographic production that allows us to appreciate the variations and reinterpretations, making this myth a ‘hermeneutic laboratory’. Our investigation will be guided by a philological approach which will allow us to highlight the dense textual and visual substrate of Paolo Veronese’s compositions. The analysis will emphasize on Veronese’s iconographic inventions throughout different Ovidian passages, as well as through the verses of Moschus and the Achille Tazio’s ekphrasis, including their relative vernacularizations. These inventions were able to give life to a real ‘semantic expansion’ of the myth.

In medieval French literature the Judgement of Paris finds its place in a variety of texts, including the Ovide moralisé, Pierre Bersuire’s Ovidius Moralizatus, Les Eschéz d’Amours, Evrart de Conty’s Livre des échecs amoureux, Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea and in the literary works dealing with the war of Troy, such as Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie. The Judgement of Paris is variedly recounted and interpreted by these literary sources and variedly depicted in the illuminations that decorate the manuscripts. The article outlines and analyses how the Judgement of Paris is interpreted and depicted in fourteenth-century French medieval manuscripts and subsequently it investigates the reasons behind a shift in the iconography of this episode that occurred in Epistre Othea manuscripts produced after 1450 in the Burgundian milieu (Oxford, Bodl. MS 421 ; Erlangen, UB MS 2361 ; Aylesbury, Waddesdon Manor MS 8 and The Hague, KB MS 74 G 27).

The essay aims at exploring the methods of moral refunctionalization of the classic myth in the genre of love complaint (spread in the late fourteenth century). Starting from a corpus of six poems, the mythological archetypes on which the narratives are based will be identified in order to find the sources, the reading criteria, the contribution offered by medieval vernacularizations and comments.

The medieval recovery of Ovid’s Metamorphoses has always aroused interest among scholars. Since the classical myths received a moral interpretation, many allegorical commentaries were composed to explain the tales told in the Metamorphoses. The Ovide moralisé, which was written at the beginning of the 14th century, provides the first complete French translation and commentary of the Metamorphoses, therefore it must be considered a touchstone for the reception of Ovid. Through an analysis of the tale of Marsyas, this paper aims to clarify how the vernacular poet amplified and modified the classical myth to didactic purposes. The Ovide moralisé shows a lot of points of interest, above all a strong relationship with the mythographic and encyclopaedic tradition. Besides, the article offers a complete Italian translation of the fable of Marsyas and an explanation of its allegorical meaning in comparison with other examples of reworking of this myth in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, especially from Luca and Luigi Pulci’s works.

This study considers Heinrich von Veldeke’s Eneit (after 1183) and Albrecht von Halberstadt’s Metamorphoses adaptation (1190), two expressions of the so-called ‘reception of antiquity’ at the Thuringian court of the Ludowinger. Veldeke rendered the Aeneis into German through the old French Roman d’Eneas, whereas Albrecht adapted Ovid’s carmen directly from a Latin source text. Past philological investigations supported the idea that Albrecht knew Veldeke’s Eneit and was possibly influenced by it. Since no direct comparison has been carried out so far, this paper aims at reassessing this hypothesis by means of text analysis. With this purpose, the tragic story of Dido (Verg. Aen. 4 e 6) and Iphis (Ov. Met. 14) have been put to the test, as the two tales share various content commonalities : indeed, they deal with the narration of an unrequited love which leads the protagonists to commit suicide. A comparative lexical and stylistic examination supports the argument of contiguity and provides also evidence for a parallel conception of minne, which is described by using similar linguistic and poetic devices.