Romance Philology (advanced)

Course title (60 hours and 9 ECTS): The form of prosimetrum: narrative and verses, characters and structure in Boccaccio and in the Decameron.

A (20 hours and 3 ECTS): Reading and interpretation of some excerpts from Boccaccio's works (from minor works to «Decameron»).
B (20 hours and 3 ECTS): Observations of Textual Philology.
C (20 hours and 3 ECTS): Linguistics Considerations.


The course is addressed to students of the Degree Course in Humanities, whose surname starts from A to H that have already taken the first year course of this subject. The students who intend to take the exam for 9 ECTS will attend all the three Parts; students who intend to take the exam for 6 ECTS will attend Part A and Part B.

The advanced course further explores the insight into Romance Philology provided in the first year course according to a strategy that maintains a comparative view of Romance Language and Literature, and studies more in detail the linguistic problems and deals with the principles of textual criticism, and the philological dimension of the texts. This year's programme will mainly look into the theme "The form of prosimetrum: narrative and verses, characters and structure in Boccaccio and in the Decameron". Reading some excerpts of Boccaccio's works (from minor works to «Decameron»), we will reflect upon issues as Boccaccio and the relationship with the poetic tradition and the prosimetrum; significant intertexts for the formation of Boccaccio's poetics; the structure of the Decameron. The texts will be interpreted against the background of inter-textual connections, considering the literary genre, interpretive and philological issues. The Part A will present the theme of the monographic course. Part B introduces the students to the guiding principles of textual criticism and its application in relation to Romance medieval texts and their manuscript tradition. Part C will focus on the Linguistic features of the text proposed in the course.

Other Information for the students

1. Non-attending students are invited to see the Professor at the office hour for any information regarding their exam.
International students or Erasmus incoming are invited to contact the Professor of the course.
The examination mode for SLD students and/or students with other disabilities will be agreed upon with the Professor in accordance with the competent Office.
2. Students of Degree Courses other than Humanities can substitute Teaching unit C (Linguistics) with other studies agreed with the Professor.
3. The students interested in a Thesis in Romance Philology (Three-year degree or Master Programme) are advised to contact the Professor in time in order to define the subject of the Thesis.

Parts A-B (40 hours, 6 ECTS): Marie de France's 'Fables' and the tradition of the 'Isoptes'

The Fables (or Aesop) of Marie de France are the oldest and most extensive vernacular collection of Aesopian fables in a Romance language: the author drew on both the repertoire of Aesop and Avian, which had been variously reworked between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and a wider repertoire of fables whose sources are often difficult to identify, but which sometimes find correspondences in the Oriental tradition. In addition to the Fables of Marie de France, the French Middle Ages have also left us other collections called 'Isopet' ('Little Aesop'), which sometimes present the same fables in a different form. Finally, Marie de France's Fables had an important echo in Italian literature, which is unusual for a text related to this literary genre. In this part of the course we will read some fables from the Fables of Marie de France and compare them with the versions of the Isopets and the Latin sources. We will then analyse the translations of the fables into Italian and discuss how to make a modern translation of a medieval text. We will then present the problem of reconstructing the text of the Fables, which will serve as an example to illustrate the problems of editing a medieval text written in a romance language; for those students who wish to do so, it will be possible to practise transcribing manuscripts and collating texts.

Part C (20 hours, 3 ECTS): Elements of the Historical Grammar of Medieval French

The aim of this part of the course is to accompany the reading of the passages in Parts A-B with an in-depth study of the morphological and syntactic structures of medieval French and with a presentation of its main phonetic features in historical perspective, with attention to the diatopic features that we can recognise in the texts. Examples will be taken from the texts analysed in class. The participating students, who will be given a text to work on for this part of the course, will be able to discuss the various aspects of the work with the teacher during class.