I gallicismi nei cantari italiani del XIV e XV secolo

This doctoral dissertation proposes a study of some gallicisms present in a corpus of Italian cantari of the XIV and XV centuries, to better understand the dynamics and methods of reuse of French sources. Critics have recognized in cantari, a genre closely linked to the oral and performative dimension, the result of a long and vast process of reworking the most varied French models, from broad fictional narratives to irreverent fabliaux, progressing through courteous stories. Between the cantari and their presumed models there are numerous analogies on a thematic level: the literary motifs were exposed to a widespread circulation throughout Romance Europe and therefore the points of contact between the octave rhyme narratives and the prose or verses are not surprising. While previous studies have traditionally privileged a thematic perspective to reconstruct the relationship between octaves and sources, this work takes a different approach. The starting point of this thesis was the linguistic analysis of the cantari, in which an attempt was made to trace gallicisms attributable to the model, which gave account, that is, of a deep and marked relationship of derivation. The results of this study were unexpected: the words of French or Provençal origin traced in the cantari do not underline of a dependence on the texts in which the critics had traced the sources but, rather, seem to refer to galloromance literature. The idea of a derivational relationship must therefore be revised, especially because, at least in some cantari, we can glimpse the re-proposition of a topical motif rather than a precise model identifiable in a coded text. The first part of this work offers a wide overview of the relationship that binds Italian to the Gallo-Romance languages - French and Provençal - from its origins, then retraces the history of the studies on gallicisms, as seen in Reto Bezzola's Abbozzo di una storia dei gallicismi italiani nei primi secoli (1925), the first in-depth work in which there is a systematic cataloging of the items. Then a definition of the corpus of the cantari examined is proposed, illustrating the criteria that led to the selection: the choice fell on those texts which, as mentioned, are traditionally considered to be derived from a literary and codified French model. This section is closed by an in-depth study on the tradition of cantari studies and the foundational aspects of the genre itself, with some general conclusions on the relationships that bind cantari and sources based on the information collected in my linguistic study. Some cantari have been chosen as an example (the Struzione della Tavola Ritonda, which rather closely follows the dictation of Mort li roi Arthur; Carduino who re-elaborates topical motifs common to Perceval and Bel Inconnu and the Cantare dei tre preti, the Canzone dello indovinello and the Lusignacca, novellistic cantari that have some distant affinities with the more licentious fabliaux). The second part of this doctoral dissertations is dedicated to linguistic study, organized in lexical cards: after having listed and briefly discussed some of the excluded words, the section on gallicisms is presented. Each sheet is organized into different sub-units: the list of forms found in the cantari and the register of occurrences is followed by the indication of the lemma and the grammatical category. The etymological discussion comes before the sections focusing on the development of the voice in the galloromance area, in the Italian area and, sometimes, in "border" areas, such as the Franco-Italian one. In conclusion, each sheet ends with an analysis of the use that the authors of the cantari make of these words of galloromance origin: for this reason a comparison with the model has always been sought, to reconstruct the relationships that the octaves intertwine with French and Provençal literature.