'Cantari' arthuriens: romances italiennes du XIVe siècle by Daniela Musso (review)

The cantare is a distinctively Italian form for epic, chivalric, and Arthurian material, specific to the peninsula and to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There are twenty Arthurian cantari, most anonymous, in octaves of hendecasyllables (mostly rhyming abababcc), ranging from a few hundred to thousands of lines. The seven anonymous cantari presented in this collection are mostly from the second half of the fourteenth century, and all are preserved in single manuscripts. The Italian Arthurian material deserves to be better known among both Italianists and non-Italianists alike. The corpus has been championed by eminent Italianists such as the late Michelangelo Picone, Maria Bendinelli Predelli (see her excellent open-access overview, 'Cantari arturiani', at <http://mariapredelli.com/?page_id=26> [accessed 2 October 2018]), and of course Daniela Delcorno Branca, the doyenne of Italian Arthurian studies. The virtue of projects such as Daniela Musso's is to move the Italian Arthurian corpus onto the radar of Arthurianists who do not read Italian willingly and do not see the need to do so. Musso's General Introduction, along with her introductions to each text, give an excellent background (sources, forms, conventions) and rationale for reading these works (she perhaps over-emphasizes the simplicity of their original audience). Her seven cantari feature commonalities of theme and character. For example, Carduino and La Pulzella Gaia feature fairy mistresses and shape-shifters familiar from Lanval and Le Bel Inconnu. The cantari of Lasancis, the Falso scudo, and Astore e Morgana foreground the motif of the enchanted arms. Characters from the Arthurian world dominate Galasso dalla Scura Valle and Quando Tristano e Lancielotto conbatetero al petrone di Merlino; the latter presents the competition between Tristan and Lancelot, favoured in the Italian prose romances. Musso translated all but one of the cantari presented here (Carduino was translated by Philippe Walter); the editions are by Delcorno Branca and Pio Rajna. Translating the cantari into prose is practical and fluid for modern readers, although losing rhyme and meter means losing every echo of the orality of the originals. The energy and clarity of these translations will bring the texts to a new audience. If Musso has a tic, it is occasionally to enhance the detail or intensity or ornament found in the original. For example, 'di che la fata gabbando se ne rise' [at which the fairy laughed, mocking] becomes 'alors, la fée rit sous cape, satisfaite de sa ruse' (p. 163); 'Calvano con gran paura' [Gawain with great fear] becomes 'Gauvain, terrorisé' (p. 175); 'scapigliare' [dishevel] becomes 'arracher' (pp. 174–75). In some cases a defensible choice is nonetheless too broad; certainly something that is 'sozza' [filthy, foul] is 'répugnante', but the literal meaning of 'sozza' is narrower than 'répugnante' (Pulzella Gaia, passim). Such quibbles aside, the project is a valuable and welcome addition to the new circulation of Italian Arthurian material in medieval studies outside of Italianistica, and will shed light on the later Arthurian material in non-Italian literatures as well.