Il sistema dei generi nella poesia lirica romanza medievale

Abstract

The present work analyzes the so-called 'system' of lyric genres within medieval romance literatures, selecting as field of investigation the Occitan, Old French and Galician-Portuguese traditions. The aim is to verify the solidity of the lyrical taxonomies developed in the modern era, determining to what extent they actually correspond to the data obtainable from the analysis of ancient sources and questioning the applicability of the concepts of 'genre' and 'system' to the medieval literary context. To this end, the present work deals separately with the three traditions, identifying within each of them some significant research areas to reconstruct the degree of distinctive consciousness possessed by the authors and the public of Troubadour poetry. The study starts from the analysis of the author's metageneric terminology; through the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the terms used in the practice of self-designation of the text and in the metapoetic reflections have been identified some genres well recognizable at the time of production of the lyrics, while other categories have been proved to be devoid of an explicit acknowledgement by the authors or provided of a still uncertain degree of specialization. At the terminological level the three linguistic areas have shown some inevitable points of contact, but each of them then has distinguished itself for having developed a range of terms functional to the specific repertoire. The study of lyric texts has been accompanied by the examination of the manuscript tradition, always with the aim of finding information related to the degree of recognizability of generic categories. Initially we have focused on the individual manuscript witnesses, studying the phenomenology of the generic ordering criterion within the anthologies. For each tradition, an overall picture has been presented through a wide range of cases, which took into account the presence of generic sections and more or less explicit groupings of typologically homogeneous texts. A very diversified scenario has emerged: not only each lyrical tradition, but also the single manuscript witnesses show that they have made independent choices in the distribution of the texts and in the emphasis given to the different genres. Analogies and differences have been further underlined at a later stage, when the discussion has taken the point of view of the textual categories, analyzing in a transversal way the position and the weight of the single genres within the manuscript tradition of romance lyric. The study of the chansonniers has led us to focus on a further aspect: the paratextual apparatus, although marginal compared to the lyric text, are in fact the bearers of a great deal of information related to the genre of poems. In all the three lyric traditions analyzed, the rubrics have proved to be fundamental in providing confirmations or additional data in relation to the degree of recognizability of some genres and to the perception that copyists and compilers of songbooks had of them. The data emerged from the survey carried out within the lyric tradition have been then compared with those obtained from the analysis of external (but chronologically not too distant from the era of production of the lyrics) textual corpora, as in the case of the Provençal vidas and razos or the first Old French novels with lyrical insertions. Also medieval treatises have proved to be a particularly profitable research area: they manifest the will to offer, for the first time in a systematic way, a comprehensive overview of medieval lyric genres, although the witness of the artes poeticae is the result of a retrospective reflection and concerns in a very unequal way the three lyric traditions. On the basis of information gathered within the ancient sources, we have proceeded to a critical examination of the repertoires published in the modern era, trying to highlight their strengths and problematic aspects; the operation has led to a reconsideration of some categories of doubtful legitimacy, such as the Provençal sirventes-canso and the Galician-Portuguese escarnio de amor. Although it cannot be denied that medieval authors had the perception of the existence of certain textual categories (corresponding to our 'genres'), the overall picture is so differentiated - not only between different repertoires, but also within the same repertoire - that speaking of 'one' system of genres has proved to be substantially groundless for the complex of medieval romance lyric.