Europa romanza: sette storie linguistiche by Lorenzo Tomasin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Europa romanza: sette storie linguistiche by Lorenzo Tomasin Alberto Gelmi Europa romanza: sette storie linguistiche. By Lorenzo Tomasin. Turin: Einaudi. 2021. xiv+234 pp. €25. ISBN 978–88–06–24189–6. When it comes to putting erudition and dissemination in dialogue, Lorenzo Tomasin is someone to learn from. His recent Europa romanza builds on his previous and more technical research published in several prestigious journals of Romance linguistics and philology, the author's specialty. In this book, which has caught the attention of non-specialist readers, Tomasin elegantly weaves a fresh narrative that unfolds seven stories of European merchants and their milieu. Using letters, wills, legal reports, private and public documents that juxtapose and even blend two or more vernaculars in just the turn of a paragraph, Tomasin investigates the still understudied phenomenon of multilingual texts. Each chapter opens with a text and the history behind it, often including its archival wanderings. From there, Tomasin tackles wider issues of Romance philology, drawing compelling parallels between the literary and the non-literary domain. Specifically, Europa Romanza consists of seven stories, covering more than two centuries, from the beginning of the fourteenth to the latter half of the sixteenth. Chapter 1 introduces readers to the mercantile writings that form the backbone of the book. Guglielma, the author of the opening text, is a Venetian widow. Her case not only exemplifies the interference between Provençal and her shaky Italian, but also illuminates female literacy in the Middle Ages. In Chapter 2 a legal dispute demonstrates how a non-literary text (a deposition) preserves the original Sicilian to a significantly greater extent than volgarizzamenti from Sicilian to the Tuscan vernacular did regarding courtly poetry roughly at the same time. Chapter 3 focuses on Romania Judaica, i.e. Jewish communities living in the Romance-speaking world. Tomasin surveys the interactions between a Semitic and non-Semitic language and system of writing, looking at the so-called Elegia giudeo-italiana, composed in Italian but in Hebrew script. Chapter 4 presents the fascinating figure of Bartol de Cavalls, a merchant of cheese and a copyist of literary texts. In one letter Bartol complains about his son, employing a language that hovers between Catalan and Italian. This phenomenon is germane and yet distinguished from the sheer alternation of languages that we witness in a troubadour such as Raimbaut de Vacqueiras, in the Carmina Burana collection, or more generally the vast corpus of Franco-Italian literature. Chapter 5 starts with an inspection of Isabelle Hamerton's will, casting light on the Romance element of English: this of course happened mainly via French, but Tomasin insists also on the weight of Italian, thanks to many merchants dispatched to the British Isles and the several teachers active in England, among whom Michelangelo and John Florio. Chapter 6 moves to Switzerland, the limen that separates the Romancesphere from the germanophone world, and looks at teaching tools such as dictionaries and language-learning manuals for merchants who, in the case of German and Romance languages, could not possibly hope for an expedient learning experience by ear only. Finally, Chapter 7 provides additional examples of linguistic interpenetrations in the Germanic area, this time in the music arena. [End Page 504] Tomasin's work is truly interdisciplinary: the author's background in linguistics provides the springboard into larger issues of cultural exchange. The methodological strategy that amplifies the scope of individual case studies is reminiscent of the best lessons from twentieth-century Romance philology: one is especially reminded of Erich Auerbach and Ernst Robert Curtius, whom Tomasin considered at length in his previous book, Il caos e l'ordine: le lingue romanze nella storia della cultura europea (Turin: Einaudi, 2019), of which Europa Romanza is in many ways a continuation. At the same time, Tomasin is here working as a meticulous historian excavating European archives, open to the stimuli of microhistory, especially in his attention to those spaces of hybridity (multilingualism, in this case) that challenge many of our narratives and disciplinary boundaries. By looking mostly at Northern Europe rather than at the Mediterranean (as the author admits), Tomasin inevitably relies on a Germanic vs. Romance divide as constitutive of...