La Voie d’Enfer et de Paradis di Pierre de l’Hôpital (XIV sec.). Edizione critica e studio dei processi di trasmissione e rielaborazione del testo.

This doctoral thesis is mainly devoted to the philological investigation and the realization of the first critical edition of the Voie d’Enfer et de Paradis, the only composition attributed to Pierre de l’Hôpital, which dates from the first third of the fourteenth century and belongs to the ancient French visionary tradition of allegorical journeys to the afterlife (7608 verses). The critical edition is based on all extant manuscripts and the contribution of the indirect tradition of the text, and it is also accompanied by extensive investigations into the poem’s peculiar narrative and semiotic structure, as well as its literary, theological and historical-cultural context, with particular attention both to the study of the sources and to the processes of re-elaboration and theatricalization to which the same poem was subjected, in the second half of the fourteenth century, by two of its unedited rewritings. Moreover, the resulting research work is also provided with an in-depth analysis of the linguistic traits characterising the base manuscript, a substantial commentary on the composition and a complete glossary, including all the words of the poem, the relative inflected forms, the graphic variants, and the verses relevant to each attestation.