The Arthur of the Italians: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval Italian Literature and Culture ed. by Gloria Allaire and F. Regina Psaki (review)

Abstract

GLORIA ALLAIRE AND F. REGINA PSAKI, eds., The Arthur of the Italians: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval Italian Literature and Culture. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014. Pp. xiii, 297. isbn: 978-1-78416-050-1. $130.This volume, seventh in the series Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, is a very welcome addition, for it is the first comprehensive study in English of the legend's impact on medieval and Renaissance Italy since Edmund G. Gardner's The Arthurian Legend in Italian Literature (1930). In 1968, Daniela Delcorno Branca's Tristano e Lancilotto in Italia: Studi di letteratura arturiana provided a much-needed update, but although Italian-language scholarship (such as this remarkable study) is 'abundant, dynamic, meticulous and sophisticated' (1), as Psaki notes in her introduction, Anglophone criticism has been relatively limited. This is one reason why the Arthuriana of Italy has been less visible than that of other nations or regions covered in earlier volumes of this series. Another reason is that there was a relative lag in the development of Italian works devoted to Arthur, compared to other western European nations, in part because the Italian peninsula was extremely multilingual, with some of the earliest Arthurian texts appearing in Hebrew and Greek, as well as Latin. The Italian corpus is thus shared among different languages, with French playing a predominant role.Accordingly, Part One, 'France and Italy,' addresses the interface between the French and Italian lands that participated in the spread of Arthurian texts. Keith Busby describes the cultural colonization that the Italians welcomed in the various courts and city-states of Naples, Veneto, Lombardy, and Florence and demonstrates that Chretien's romances were well known and exerted an influence even earlier than the thirteenth-century French prose romances. Broaching the subject of the French redactions in Italy, Fabrizio Cigni discusses Rustichello da Pisa's Arthurian Compilation (after 1270-74). While exploring this important work, he shows its relation to Guiron le Courtois and charts the progress that is being made in the edition and study of a work that is still unedited and thus little studied.As is well known, Tristan was by far the most popular Arthurian character in Italy. Marie-Jose Heijkant traces the reception of the French Prose Tristan on the peninsula, and after describing the two principal French traditions of that work, she surveys the many manuscripts copied and owned in Italy and the numerous translations and adaptations composed in the vernaculars of Tuscany and Veneto: principally Tristano Riccardiano, Tristano Panciatichiano, Tristano Veneto, Tristano Corsiniano, the Tavola Ritonda, and shorter texts. In these works, Tristan is the exemplary knight and lover, presenting an ideal mirror for the aristocratic aspirations of the new middle class. The Tavola Ritonda is explored in much more detail in the chapter contributed by Delcorno Branca, who sees it as the Italian contribution par excellence to the Arthurian tradition in that, unlike the other Tristan romances, it has a narrative outline that is original with respect to the French tradition and represents 'a holistic attempt to assemble into a single romance the entire Arthurian cycle from Uther Pendragon to the Mort Artu, with Tristan as its focus' (69). The chivalric world it presents, moreover, is characterized by religious and civic ideals that appealed to audiences of varying political and societal tendencies.Part Two, 'Arthurian Material in Italian Narrative Forms,' shows how Arthurian themes, characters, and motifs were exploited by Italian authors. Using examples drawn from the Tavola Ritonda, Tristano Riccardiano, and Tristano Panciatichiano, Stefano Mula demonstrates how the authors used interlace, repetition, and compilation to adapt the long, often convoluted, French romances to the tastes of new audiences. Maria Bendinelli Predelli examines the Arthurian cantari (narrative ottava rima poems that were sung in public), identifying common traits and showing how the canterini (mostly anonymous except for Antonio Pucci) distill traditional romance situations into their most elementary components to make them more easily transmissible to a different culture. …