The Devil’s in the Detail: Translating Merlin’s Father from the Merlin en Prose in Paulino Pieri’s Storia di Merlino

The fourteenth-century Florentine vernacular translation of Robert de Boron’s Merlin reinterprets Merlin as a political prophet commenting on recent events from Italian history. As such, the moral ambiguity surrounding the notion of Merlin’s devil father—who is deployed by Robert as an illustration of the text’s religious ideology—is questioned by the Italian translator, who reinterprets the diabolic in such a way as to reduce its power and autonomy within the narrative.