La Tavola Ritonda: magic and the supernatural

The Tavola Ritonda is the conventional title given to a work of Tuscan origin, composed by an anonymous author during the first half of the 14th century, who translates, abridges and re-elaborates the Prose Tristan, the imposing thirteenth-century French romance. One of the principal questions the Tavola Ritonda attempts to answer is how to define the supernatural. The very breadth of its sources and its adoption of a detached and autonomous attitude limit the Tavola Ritonda to reconciling conflicting arguments: on the one hand, magic, being an essential legacy of Arthurian and Grail lore, as well as that of the cantari; on the other hand, the fact of speaking to the new audience of medieval communes in Italy, which imposed a certain sceptical detachment from the merveilleux [marvellous]. The objective of the present work will be to examine the treatment of magic in the Tuscan and Po Valley redactions (in Palatino 556) of the Tavola Ritonda, considering how it is recast and to what extent it is marginalized (though never completely eliminated), and, finally, how it is refunctionalized in a “scientific” sense, as well as in the sense of the Christian miraculous.