L’Entrée d’Espagne is a fourteenth century Franco-Italian poem, probably composed by its unknown Paduan author at the early Visconti court, which defined a literary trend of the Renaissance; by transforming a typical epic matter – Charlemagne’s conquest of Spain – into a chivalric poem, it successfully hybridized epic with classical sources, references to the Breton romances, and European conceptions (or misconceptions) of medieval Islam. This study traces the major influences upon this important work of art, including the backdrop of early fourteenth-century Northern Italian politics. It examines the gradual weakening of the figure of Charlemagne in the poem as a reflection, above all, of the diplomatic and military tensions between France and the early rulers of Milan.
Originally published in 1993, The Medieval Charlemagne Legend is a selective bibliography for the literary scholar, of historical and literary material relating to Charlemagne. The book provides a chronological listing of sources on the legend and man is split into three distinct sections, covering the history of Charlemagne, the literature of Charlemagne and the medieval biography and chronicle of Charlemagne.
Ambivalence towards kings, and other sovereign powers, is deep-seated in medieval culture: sovereigns might provide justice, but were always potential tyrants, who usurped power and 'stole' through taxation. Rebel Barons writes the history of this ambivalence, which was especially acute in England, France, and Italy in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, when the modern ideology of sovereignty, arguing for monopolies on justice and the legitimate use of violence, was developed. Sovereign powers asserted themselves militarily and economically provoking complex phenomena of resistance by aristocrats. This volume argues that the chansons de geste, the key genre for disseminating models of violent noble opposition to sovereigns, offer a powerful way of understanding acts of resistance. Traditionally seen as France's epic literary monuments - the Chanson de Roland is often presented as foundational of French literature - chansons de geste in fact come from areas antagonistic to France, such as Burgundy, England, Flanders, Occitania, and Italy, where they were reworked repeatedly from the twelfth century to the fifteenth and recast into prose and chronicle forms. Rebel baron narratives were the principal vehicle for aristocratic concerns about tyranny, for models of violent opposition to sovereigns and for fantasies of escape from the Carolingian world via crusade and Oriental adventures. Rebel Barons reads this corpus across its full range of historical and geographical relevance, and through changes in form, as well as placing it in dialogue with medieval political theory, to bring out the contributions of literary texts to political debates. Revealing the widespread and long-lived importance of these anti-royalist works supporting regional aristocratic rights to feud and revolt, Rebel Barons reshapes our knowledge of reactions to changing political realities at a crux period in European history.
Il volume raccoglie gli atti del XXème Congrès International de la Société Rencesvals pour l’étude des épopées romanes (Sapienza - Università di Roma, 20-24 luglio 2015) e presenta lo stato dell’arte e le ricerche in corso sull’epica romanza medievale propriamente detta, sulla sua posterità nell’età moderna e sulla produzione non romanza a essa correlata, offrendo un panorama ricco ‒ se non completo ‒ degli attuali orientamenti scientifici e dei risultati raggiunti. Per il congresso di Roma ‒ cui hanno preso parte studiosi provenienti dall’Europa, dal Nord e dal Sud America e dall’Africa ‒ sono stati proposti i seguenti temi: I. Rome et l’Italie dans les chansons de geste; II. Phénomènes de cyclisation: grandes et petites gestes; III. Le XVe siècle: proses et renouvellements; IV. L’histoire des recherches sur la matière de France; a questi si aggiungono gli interventi raccolti nella sezione Varia.
