The Ritmo di Sant'Alessio or Ritmo marchigiano su Sant'Alessio is a late twelfth-century metrical vita of the legendary saint Alexius of Rome composed for public performance by an anonymous giullare . It is one of the earliest pieces of Italian literature.
A hagiography is a biography of a saint or an ecclesiastical leader. The term hagiography may be used to refer to the biography of a saint or highly developed spiritual being in any of the world's spiritual traditions.
Saint Alexius or Alexis of Rome or Alexis of Edessa was a fourth-century monastic who lived in anonymity and is known for his dedication to Christ. There are two versions of his life that are known to us, a Syriac one and a Greek one.
A jester, court jester, or fool, was historically an entertainer during the medieval and Renaissance eras who was a member of the household of a nobleman or a monarch employed to entertain him and his guests. A jester was also an itinerant performer who entertained common folk at fairs and markets. Jesters are also modern-day entertainers who resemble their historical counterparts.
The cult of Alexius was mainly promoted by the Benedictines, starting in Italy. In the tenth century a Greek vita was adapted to Latin prose. In the eleventh century his legend, based on the Latin version, was versified in Old French as the Vie de Saint Alexis. Later, in the thirteenth century a second Italian version, De vita Beati Alexii, this time in the Lombard dialect, was composed by Bonvesin de la Riva.
Medieval Latin was the form of Latin used in Roman Catholic Western Europe during the Middle Ages. In this region it served as the primary written language, though local languages were also written to varying degrees. Latin functioned as the main medium of scholarly exchange, as the liturgical language of the Church, and as the working language of science, literature, law, and administration.
Old French was the language spoken in Northern France from the 8th century to the 14th century. In the 14th century, these dialects came to be collectively known as the langue d'oïl, contrasting with the langue d'oc or Occitan language in the south of France. The mid-14th century is taken as the transitional period to Middle French, the language of the French Renaissance, specifically based on the dialect of the Île-de-France region.
Lombard is a language belonging to the Cisalpine or Gallo-Italic group, within the Romance languages. It is a cluster of homogeneous varieties used by at least 3,500,000 native speakers in Northern Italy, Southern Switzerland, and Brazil. The languages closest to Lombard are Franco-Provençal, French, Romansh, and Occitan.
The Ritmo was conserved in a manuscript of the Benedictine convent of Santa Vittoria in Matenano near Fermo, a daughter house of the Abbey of Farfa. The codex is now in the Biblioteca Comunale of Ascoli Piceno, catalogued as XXV A. 51, c. 130 f. According to Bruno Migliorini, the poet also hailed from the Marche, and according to its first editor, Gianfranco Contini, the Ritmo is composed in "a koiné of East Central Italy, whose cultural capital was undoubtedly Montecassino." It has thus many affinities with the Ritmo cassinese : written about the same time (broadly) in the same region, metrically and linguistically similar, Benedictine in religion, and both monastic in provenance and giullaresco in style, designed for popular audience and public performance.
Santa Vittoria in Matenano is a comune (municipality) in the Province of Fermo in the central Italian region Marche, located about 70 kilometres south of Ancona and about 20 km (12 mi) northwest of Ascoli Piceno.
Fermo[ˈfermo]
Ascoli Piceno is a town and comune in the Marche region of Italy, capital of the province of the same name. Its population is around 49,500 but the urban area of the city has more than 100,000.
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The Ritmo is divided into twenty-seven stanzas of varied length. Each stanza opens with four to thirteen monorhyming octonaries or novenaries and closes with a deca- or hendecasyllabic couplet of a different rhyme, often rich or homonymic. The discrepancies and irregularities in the prosody may be attributed to the copyist, but also to the numerous Latinisms and Gallicisms. As it stands the Ritmo is incomplete, stopping abruptly after 257 slow-paced lines, just before the arrival of Euphemian's servants at Edessa. It does encompass Alexius' birth, marriage, exhortations to his wife, flight to Laodicea, and the beginnings of his mendicancy.
Monorhyme is a passage, stanza, or entire poem in which all lines have the same end rhyme. The term "monorhyme" describes the use of one (mono) type of repetitious sound (rhyme). This is common in Arabic, Latin and Welsh works, such as The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, e.g. qasida and its derivative kafi. Monorhyme is also used in the third verse of the American rapper Jay-Z's song "Already Home".
The octosyllable or octosyllabic verse is a line of verse with eight syllables. It is equivalent to tetrameter verse in trochees in languages with a stress accent. Its first occurrence is in a 10th-century Old French saint's legend, the Vie de Saint Leger; another early use is in the early 12th-century Anglo-Norman Voyage de saint Brendan. It is often used in French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese poetry. While commonly used in couplets, typical stanzas using octosyllables are: décima, some quatrains, redondilla.
Decasyllable is a poetic meter of ten syllables used in poetic traditions of syllabic verse. In languages with a stress accent, it is the equivalent of pentameter with iambs or trochees.
