Canone letterario e lessico delle emozioni nel Medioevo europeo: un network di risorse on line (bibliografia, manoscritti, strumenti multimediali)

The team of research of the University of Milan will identify and study the vernacular literary Canon of the Middle Ages - especially focusing on Gaulish-Romance and Iberian-Romance works - and will further investigate its development over the course of time.

Such work is based on the definition of “Canon” as a body of literary works that were extremely successful and had such a strong shaping force - within their genre and on literature in general - that they became the foundation of all medieval Romance culture, alongside the masterpieces of the Classical tradition. While this Canon was not sanctioned by the medieval “scholae” and was therefore more dynamic than its Latin equivalent, it was just as renowned in the literary experience of coevals. The touchstones of this system were selected work by work - and secondarily by their author and genre - and their boundaries were either never defined exactly or, to the least, are hardly identifiable. The exploration of this complex and changing collection of texts will occur within the broader context of vernacular literature (from the early Middle Ages to the 3rd quarter of the 14th century), to be defined through the screening of topic-specific printed and digital repositories and following three different research tracks.

1 - Investigation of preserved medieval manuscripts

A fundamental aspect of the project will be the evaluation of the number of manuscripts transmitting a given literary work up to the entire 15th century. This will give a first, merely quantitative, indication of the success of the work, whilst bearing in mind that preserved manuscripts are only a tiny part of the medieval production. Secondly, the time and space coordinates of the copies, especially for those transcribed in a different region than their original, will help to elucidate how every text - or “constellation” of homogeneous texts - achieved success, in connection with different cultural institutions and different kinds of (foreign) public, as well as the way their success changed through time. Ancient catalogues and similar documents on noble, ecclesial and bourgeois libraries - later dispersed or merged in other collections - will also be a valuable source of knowledge in this attempt.

2 - Textual dynamics of the Canon

A second axes of research will investigate the textual dynamics of literary works, i.e. their aptitude for generating translations, adaptations, rewritings and parodies. This aptitude does not only prove that those works are vital, but also that they are recognized as a Canon, even when they are not referable to a well-defined author.

3 - The perception of the Canon in the Middle Ages

The medieval perception of the Canon can also be evaluated on the basis of the occurrences of the title, or of the author's name in other literary texts (such as the «Divine Comedy» or the parodial “ensenhamens” to jesters), in grammar texts or in medieval literary theory and historiography texts, such as «De vulgari eloquentia»,«Breviari d'amor», «Proemio e carta» by Marqués de Santillana and the Galician-Portuguese «Arte de trovar». Both original works and their rewritings will be investigated using a synchronic approach, trying to determine, on the basis of data quantity and distribution, how, at a given point in time, the Canon shifts towards a “European” way, which is to say how it becomes a model outside of the Romance area (for example, in German and middle-English areas). The European success of some Italian authors, like Boccaccio or Domenico Cavalca (in France and Spain), might also be sampled in order to establish the Canon.

The analysis of all collected data will reveal the evolution of the “ancient Canon” (in specific linguistic regions and, for some major works, in the whole expansion area of Romance literatures), and the diverse reception of literary innovations within Romania.