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

In the twelfth century, Alanus de Insulis is said to have asked: ‘Whither has not flying fame spread and familiarised the name of Arthur the Briton, even as far as the empire of Christendom extends? … Rome, queen of cities, sings his deeds.’ But, while what is possibly the earliest sculpted depiction of an incident from the Arthuriad appears on the early twelfth-century archivolt of the Porta della Pescheria – the northern portal of the Cathedral of Modena in northern Italy – the study of the Arthurian literature of the Italian peninsula has hardly been a fair field full of folk. As the last such full-length study appeared more than eighty years ago, Allaire and Psaki’s volume is especially welcome.

Psaki’s Introduction explains in part the reasons for the Anglophone neglect of the Arthur of the Italian peninsula. Italian Arthuriana developed much later than the Arthuriana of the British Isles and of more northern continental Europe, and linguistic traditions in Italian territories in the early Middle Ages were complicated as those territories were inhabited by native speakers of Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and French, all of whom shared Latin as their lingua franca. Thus some of the earliest, albeit fragmentary, Italian Arthurian texts were in fact not written in a dialect of Italian but in Hebrew and Greek. However, it was from French that Italian Arthuriana really developed.

Fittingly then, the first four essays here discuss ‘the interface between French and Italian lands in the spread of Arthurian matter’ (p. 2). Keith Busby’s essay shows just how early texts by Chrétien de Troyes exerted an influence on peninsular writing. Fabrizio Cigni shifts critical attention from the copying to the composing of French texts in Italy with particular attention to the Arthurian Compilation written in French sometime after 1270. Marie-José Heijkant surveys Italian versions of the Tristan story written in both French and Italian, which in turn cemented Tristan’s status as the most popular Arthurian character in the Italian tradition. Daniela Delcorono Branca concludes this section of Allaire and Ptaki’s volume with a discussion of La Tavola Ritonda, ‘the only real Arthurian romance of the Italian Middle Ages … [and] 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’ (p. 69).

The Arthur of the Italians can be found more easily in prose romances, short narrative cantari, and Renaissance reprises than in long verse romances, a topic discussed at length in this volume’s next three essays. Stefano Mula looks at the ways in which Italian prose romanciers established narrative threads that were both inter-textual and adaptive. Maria Bendinelli Predelli discusses the Arthurian material in Italian cantari, a genre of anonymous stand-alone non-cyclical narratives, dating from the second half of the fourteenth century, which, strikingly, were not directly adapted from any known French sources. Since the lines marking the transition in Italy from the late medieval to the early Renaissance are often blurred, Eleonora Stoppino concludes the second section of this volume with a study that focuses on geographical centres that helped to diffuse and circulate texts both Carolingian and Arthurian.

The essays in the third part look at Italian Arthuriana beyond the generic limitations of the romance. Roberta Capelli provides a survey of Arthurian allusions in Italian lyric poems from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. F. Regina Ptaki examines Italian prose from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that borrows Arthurian materials to serve any number of narrative purposes. Christopher Kleinhenz concludes with an exploration of the relationship among Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio and Arthurian materials, which were present for each writer as a kind of cultural given whose ‘reception … ranges...