Sistemi linguistici a contatto nel canzoniere estense. Indagini stratigrafiche e filologiche delle componenti occitaniche e oitaniche

This work originates from the need to study the troubadours’ language from a different point of view: neither the search for the language of the author, nor the study of the specific scripta of a single manuscript, but an attempt to combine both approaches. As a matter of fact, if the language of the authors is mainly analysed in the introductions to critical editions and in some specific studies mainly dedicated to the most ancient troubadours, scriptological studies are usually included in the analyses of single manuscripts, resulting in a lack of communication between the two lines: if the latter, on the one hand, focus primarily on the so–called “copyists’ language”, on a horizontal and synchronic level prompted by the very nature of the object of research, the former, on the other hand, offer a more vertical and diachronic outlook, without always taking into account the possible writing habits and the copyists’ tics that can be retraced only by a comprehensive study on single manuscripts. It is at the crossroads of these two methods, the horizontal one in codicological studies, and the vertical one in critical editions, that this work tries to find its own path, without presuming to overcome all the problems inherent to a linguistic study on the troubadours, even if we tried to set it on a “three–dimensional” level. In this work, we tackled the object of research in a stratigraphic perspective that allowed us to appreciate the shift between the form of the text at the moment of its production, and its form at the moment of its manuscript reception, going through the breakthrough of the oral and singed reproduction of troubadour lyrical products. The peculiar object of research of this study is the relationship between the two Gallo– romance language varieties of medieval France; even if the epic genre would have been a more fruitful field for the study of mixed forms and lexical and morphological exchanges, we chose to combine the aims of a linguistic study of this type with the search intents on the language of troubadours, with all the ambiguities that the latter implies. A study wanting to investigate the language of the troubadours considering its relationship to the langue d’oïl, for the large extent and indeterminacy inherent to the material character of the corpus to be analysed, forcedly needs to limit its attention on a well–defined object. It is for this reasons that we chose to focus our work not on a single troubadour or on a selection of langue–d’oc poets well–known for their relationships to the North of France – e.g. Gaucelm Faidit, Bertran de Born, Bernart de Ventadorn, Dalfi d’Alvernhe, Raimbaut de Vaqueiras and so on –, but on a well– defined object that could allow us to investigate the influence of the language system d’oïl on that of the troubadours. Among the manuscripts containing an ordered selection of troubadour lyrics, only three contain also well–organised and organically separate collections of trouvère pieces: the Provençal chansonnier W, known in the Old French field as M; the Provençal chansonnier X, known in the Old French field as U; and the Provençal chansonnier D–Da, containing the Old French collection known as H. Thus, considering that the former two, WPr/MFr and XPr/UFr, are mainly collections of trouvère lyrics and that the Occitan pieces they contain already made the object of previous studies, for the present aims we decided to investigate the so–called chansonnier estense, the only one that contains two separate sections of Occitan lyrics followed by an Old French collection already planned in the original structure of the manuscript – as described by the incipit tables.