La tradizione de la Vendetta dei discendenti di Ettore in Italia settentrionale: un nuovo testimone

Abstract

This article examines the manuscript Takamiya 50 of the Beinecke Library (Yale University), which contains two Italian texts: the Libro de l’opere del Grande Alesandro and the Vendetta dei discendenti di Ettore. The first one is a vernacular translation, by Nanni Pegolotti (14th-15th centuries), based on the latin version of the Pseudo-Callistene’s Vita di Alessandro. The second one, the main forcus of the present article, is a kaleidoscopic, perhaps late fourteenth-century anonymous novel that intertwines –in a completely unique way– the Arthurian tradition and the Trojan legend in the narration of the revenge of the descendants of Ettore on the Greeks thanks to the help of King Uter Pendragon and his knights. To date, only one fifteenth-century Tuscan manuscript of the novel, preserved in the National Library of Florence, is known, still unpublished; the traditio must now be updated by virtue of the existence of a hitherto unknown manuscript, linguistically placed in the Northern Italian area. This article critically re-examines previous works devoted to the Vendetta through the analysis of the most relevant loci critici of the textual tradition, in order to highlight the quality of the new codex and to study its most important linguistic peculiarities and its cultural background.