La Tavola Ritonda tra intrattenimento ed enciclopedismo

This thesis analyses the role of the Tavola Ritonda, a Tuscan rewriting (beginning of the 14th century) of the Prose Tristan, a 13th century French compilation, in the outline of the Italian medieval literature. The Prose Tristan achieved for the first time the merging of the Arthurian world with the legend of Tristan and Iseult and it quickly became a very successful work. This is the reason why, by the end of the 13th century, the Prose Tristan crossed the boundaries of France and reached Italy, where it was translated by anonimous compilers and brought up to date to adapt the legend to a different literary aesthetics. The first chapter points out the various approaches of the Italian interpreters to the Tristanian matter through the analysis of the prologues and of the epilogues of the Italian translations: the Tristano Riccardiano, even if mutilated, is the first attempt of a bourgeois interpretation of the legend; the Tristano Panciatichiano makes an anthological choice by juxtaposing several Arthurian romances, while the Tristano Veneto is the most faithful and complete Italian translation. Among the Italian Tristan romances, the Tavola Ritonda is the most original rewriting, capable of combining the bent to the entertainment typical of this cultural production too summarily labelled as Trivialliteratur and an evident disposition to encyclopaedism. Chivalry is presented at the same time as a game, a literary amusement, and as a duty, a concrete possibility to promote the civil commitment. In the Tavola Ritonda the chivalric past is recovered not only because it feeds a mythology that influences the collective immagination as much for aristocracy as bourgeois, but also because it represents the cultural scenery on which to pin new literary materials. The Tavola Ritonda is actually subjected to a project of strong moralization and rationalization of the Tristanian legend: the merveilleux is marginalized and reinterpreted in scientific terms; a new dialogue is established with the contemporaneity, clearly recognizable over the patterns of reasoning, the large number of proverbs, a different use of toponymy influenced by the Italian geography. The countless hints to the medieval lyric poetry and to the philosophical, scientific and religious production are as many ways to transform the myth of Tristan and Iseult in a sort of encyclopaedia, capable of creating an original dialectic between different literary and light non-literary genres.