Dal provenzalismo di Pietro Bembo alle biografie trobadoriche di Jean de Nostredame

Abstract

This work aims to better define some issues related to sixteenth-century Italian Provençal studies and the role they played in the debate on the Italian language and in supporting the rebirth of interest towards troubadours beyond the Alps. The first part of this thesis discusses the so-called ‘language question’ and the figure of Pietro Bembo that represents the most obvious link between the question itself and sixteenth-century Provençal studies. Bembo’s interests concerning Provençal are highlighted and clarified by examining the Occitan section of his rich library, the notes he left on some songbooks and Federico Fregoso's speech on this poetic tradition, contained in the first book of Prose. Also, the first part of this dissertation follows the traces of the edition of Tutte le rime de’ poeti provenzali insieme con le loro vite (all the rhymes of the Provencal poets, together with their lives). The project was perhaps initiated by Bembo between the late '20s and the beginning of the '30s of the sixteenth century. This project’s phantom, hovering over the discussions of the greatest scholar of that time, has enormous merits: it stimulated research into and the preservation of the Occitan lyrical tradition, it gave the following century a rich baggage of grammatical texts and laid the foundations for the fortune of Provençal studies in our country and beyond. The work wasn’t published but the expectations of the public were already high: the publishing market demanded news about these poets and their poems, both sought after but obscure. The second section of this thesis deals with the text Les Vies des plus célèbres et anciens poètes provençaux, published in 1575 by Jean de Nostredame, procurator in the regional parliament at Aix-en-Provence. The collection appears in Lyon, first in the Italian version (Le vite delli più celebri et antichi poeti provenzali) and then in the French one. The work, despite being the result of a peculiar blend of fantasy and reality, is presented as the completion of Bembo’s editorial project. The lies, cleverly intertwined with many real elements, make Nostredame’s work not only fascinating, but also extraordinarily problematic; in the last part of this thesis, the investigation moves towards the author’s falsification strategies. The aim of the second part of the research is to reveal the debts, both ideological and in content, contracted by Nostredame’s biographical collection with the Italian debate on language and Italian studies on Occitan poetry. The first Italian translation of Nostredame’s text is also an object of investigation with its enormous, though undeserved, influence on the Provençal studies of future centuries. Some inventions contained in the collection have remained vital for centuries and have marked, for better or worse, even the studies of great modern philologists. Without claiming to be exhaustive, the final part of the work attempts, therefore, to demonstrate how Nostredame’s collection owes its existence to numerous factors such as the sixteenth-century debate about language, the institutionalization of fourteenth-century authors, the philological investigation initiated by Italian scholars around Petrarch and his sources and, above all, the extraordinary success of Bembo’s Prose. [edited by Author]