The Reception of Troubadour Poetry in 16th-Century Italy: from The Questione della Lingua to Giammaria Barbieri's Arte del Rimare

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The lyric poetry produced by the Occitan troubadours between the 12th and 13th centuries is at the root of the European poetic tradition. Despite its importance, it was mostly disregarded throughout Europe between the late 14th and 15th century. The situation changed when Italian scholars rediscovered it at the beginning of the following century. The rediscovery of Occitan in Renaissance Italy has received some attention in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and found systematisation in a fundamental 1911 monograph by Santorre Debenedetti, after which there have been multiple contributions to the theme which explored aspects that he neglected. No new monographs have been produced, however. The principal aim of my work is precisely to produce a new monograph on the Cinquecento rediscovery of Occitan, studying it in the context of the century's linguistic debate, known as Questione della lingua. By adopting this point of view, I hope to address a research question that Debenedetti leaves unanswered, namely, if - as he rightly says - the scholars that rediscovered Occitan worked in isolation from one another and proved unable to cooperate, then how is it possible that they all focused their attention on the same subject at the same time? The intellectuals that will be studied include: Angelo Colocci, Pietro Bembo, Benedetto Varchi, Lodovico Castelvetro, and Giammaria Barbieri. The thesis will explore the relevance and significance of the fact all these scholars were at the same time at the forefront of the Questione and of the recovery of the troubadours. The study is also intended to update Debenedetti's 1911 study, since, as well as incorporating the conclusions of more recent scholarship, it adopts a new approach that is attentive to both the Italian language question and to questions of chronology. As an appendix to the thesis (but also a further major aim for the research), I will edit the unfinished treatise Arte del rimare written by Giammaria Barbieri in the 1570s, in which the Occitan studies of the century reach their culmination.The thesis itself will reassess the existing bibliography and the works of the scholars involved in order to probe how their work on the troubadours intersected with their discussion of the Questione. During the first year, I have focused on one of the very first contributors to the Questione, Angelo Colocci, who was also the first Italian in the century to come into possession of a troubadour manuscript. Colocci used the manuscript to learn its forgotten language, and once he had mastered it to some extent, he began identifying linguistic and literary similarities between Occitan and other Romance languages and literatures. This led him to perceive Romance medieval poetry as a unity and to develop a 'comparative method' not dissimilar from the one that characterises contemporary Romance philology and linguistics. Colocci's perception of these connections between different linguistic domains led him to develop a linguistic theory that actively encouraged recourse to other languages as a means to enrich one's own. Thus, Colocci's case offers an excellent example of how troubadour poetry was used as a source to justify one's theoretical positions in the Questione. Similar studies will be undertaken for the other figures listed above.For the edition, I will use the methods of authorial philology and genetic criticism in order to reconstruct the various phases of Barbieri's work on his book. For missing leaves in the extant manuscripts, I will have to rely on the only existing edition of the work, a 1790 print dating to before the pages went missing. For the parts that only survive in the print, I will adopt the reconstructive methods of traditional philology. So far, I have transcribed the entirety of the original manuscripts in Bologna thanks to a travel grant from Oxford University, and I have done the same with an exemplar of the 1790 print kept at the Taylorian library.