Old Occitan Philology in Italy: The Troubadours in Recent Past, Present, and Future

Abstract

Old Occitan Philology in Italy: The Troubadours in Recent Past, Present, and Future Walter Meliga The philology of Old Occitan literature has traditionally been very active in Italy. Old Occitan is frequently present in the field of studies of Romance Philology and is extensively taught in universities as a consequence of the long-standing Italian interest in the troubadours (although under a very different perspective from the American one, see Paden 2013), starting at least from Pietro Bembo’s statements in Prose della volgar lingua, 1525 (see most recently Pulsoni 2019) on the importance of Old Occitan poets and language for the birth and development of the Italian poetic tradition and literary language, up to the junction with modern historical-philological studies from the second half of the nineteenth century. In this essay I intend to offer a brief retrospective of Old Occitan philology in Italy at the beginning of this century — with some necessary incursions into earlier times and some indications on future development — in the context of troubadour studies, discussing: (1) critical editions and editorial practice, (2) interpretation of texts, (3) manuscript tradition and channels of transmission, (4) historical documentation, (5) reception and survival, (6) early troubadour studies, (7) literary history, (8) bibliography, (9) Old Occitan studies in 16th–17th centuries, and (10) dissemination. This presentation has no pretensions of completeness — as important areas of investigation have been omitted, notably metrics, genres (questioned by Asperti 2013) and music (on which Carapezza 2020), and many critical studies, including in areas addressed here. I just intend to briefly consider some research paths I consider important, characteristic of Italian philology and still promising, thinking particularly of young scholars following in our footsteps with excellent preparation and method. The same applies to the bibliography, not surprisingly largely Italian, dating from the last twenty years, with the presence of older (sometimes much older, but still important) works or works from abroad. This rather extensive bibliography, an integral part [End Page 77] of this discussion, is nonetheless incomplete, compendious, and somewhat one-sided, as it reflects my biases, not to say di necessità full of references to my own writings for reasons of brevity in the exposition of my point of view. CRITICAL EDITIONS It is no secret that troubadours form a large part of Old Occitan literature and literary studies, even more so in Italy. For Italian philologists, publication activity on the troubadours has always been important: more than 4/5 of all troubadour editions (critical editions or editions with a high philological profile of individual poets or collections of texts) published since 2000 are the work of Italian editors (see in the bibliography below, 2. Troubadour Editions since 2000), although sometimes non-Italian entries treat very important authors and genres (Gaunt, Harvey and Paterson 2000, Harvey and Paterson 2010). This is in the line with a pre-eminence that emerged in the previous decades (it is the “miracolo filologico” of which Paden 2013: 51 speaks with humor). In general, these works are remarkable for their effort to reconstruct the text, for their commentary and linguistic analysis — as an example, I would like to specifically mention Borghi Cedrini’s outstanding 2008 edition of Peire Milo. It is necessary to redo old editions, to adapt them to the most advanced form of Lachmannian method, in particular as this took shape within Italian neo-Lachmannism from the 1950s onwards in works by eminent scholars such as Gianfranco Contini, Aurelio Roncaglia, d’Arco Silvio Avalle, Cesare Segre, and Alberto Varvaro, almost all of whom were also excellent provenzalisti. Lachmann’s method remains the best editorial procedure for medieval texts, even for lyric texts possibly subject to interference of orality in transmission. As Contini observed (1986: 32, in a study first published in 1977), orality is not a “chaotic state” that justifies any editorial operation, and it presents the same “phenomenology of innovations” as written transmission, only with a greater extension of variations. Renunciation of a reconstructive critical edition is all the more serious since, as Avalle demonstrated with his edition of Peire Vidal (Avalle 1960), the troubadour tradition lends itself [End Page 78] particularly well to the use of the Lachmannian method, thanks to the possibility...