Huon d'Auvergne is an early modern romance-epic written in Franco-Italian, a hybrid literary language. Huon d'Auvergne has remained largely unedited, with only selected segments appearing in print. Far better known is the Tuscan prose version by Andrea da Barberino, dated to the early fifteenth century. One of the first, if not the first, work to incorporate Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy with direct quotes from Inferno, the romance-epic's language has kept it from wide appreciation. The poetic form, language, and narrative content of the four extant witnesses demonstrate how a synoptic, or simultaneous, online edition of the multiple manuscripts can fulfill the need for reliable texts as well as research about the tradition and trajectory of its exemplars. An edition project is underway as of January 2013. [1]
The only surviving witnesses of the work are four manuscripts:
The manuscript texts are not all the same; they hold different and independent versions; these are usually divided into three parts: prologue, epilogue and central part.
The prologue (present only in the P manuscript) and the epilogue (present in manuscripts B and T) are extensive, and narratively independent. [2]
The central part appears in all of the four manuscripts, though with many differing details:
Andrea da Barberino also produced a prose "romanzo" called Storia di Ugone d'Alvernia in Tuscan prose (in five known manuscripts) where, during the narration of the infernal catabasis written in terzine, the prose functions as a gloss, appearing between poetic lines to clarify meanings details. [7] [8]
The structure of this English entry is based on that of the Italian entry, Ugo d'Alvernia.
The Cantigas de Santa Maria are 420 poems with musical notation, written in the medieval Galician-Portuguese language during the reign of Alfonso X of Castile El Sabio (1221–1284). Traditionally, they are all attributed to Alfonso, though scholars have since established that the musicians and poets of his court were responsible for most of them, with Alfonso being credited with a few as well.
The chanson de geste is a medieval narrative, a type of epic poem that appears at the dawn of French literature. The earliest known poems of this genre date from the late 11th and early 12th centuries, shortly before the emergence of the lyric poetry of the troubadours and trouvères, and the earliest verse romances. They reached their highest point of acceptance in the period 1150–1250.
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Andrea Mangiabotti, called Andrea da Barberino, was an Italian writer and cantastorie ("storyteller") of the Quattrocento Renaissance. He was born in Barberino Val d'Elsa, near Florence, and lived in Florence. He is principally known for his prose romance epic Il Guerrin Meschino, his I Reali di Francia, a prose compilation of the Matter of France epic material concerning Charlemagne and Roland (Orlandino) from various legends and chansons de geste, and for his Aspramonte, a reworking of the chanson de geste Aspremont, which also features the hero Ruggiero. Many of his writings probably derive from Franco-Italian works, such as the Geste Francor, that includes versions of the stories of Reali di Francia and dates to the first half of the fourteenth century. His works, which circulated at first in manuscript, were extremely successful and popular, and were a key source of material for later Italian romance writers, such as Luigi Pulci (Morgante), Matteo Maria Boiardo and Ludovico Ariosto.
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