Storia della ricezione e ibridismi culturali nel franco-italiano: l’Alterità nell’Entrée d’Espagne [History of reception and cultural hybrids in Franco-Italian: Otherness in the Entrée d’Espagne]

Abstract

This article aims at pointing out new perspectives on the development of that particular literary phenomenon whose common label is ‘Franco-italian’. After presenting innovative approaches to the history of reception in the Middle Ages, my study criticizes the traditional classification of the Franco-italian tradition, in order to indicate how a receptional point of view might enhance the value of geolinguistical areas neglected until now as crucial zones for the emergence of Franco-italian itself. Especially, I draw attention to the Eastern Mediterranean region, where, during the Franco- italian age, there was a ‘protocolonial’ society, in which French people, Venetians, Genoans and Byzantines interacted with each other, in contact with native populations of Palestine, Syria and Egypt; this situation led to a hybridization affecting the entire social, cultural, and literary sphere. From this perspective, my article then focuses on the reception of the Otherness in Franco-italian literary works, investigating a poem that specially thematizes the contact with the East and the Other, the Entrée d’Espagne. As it will be clearly shown, this opus maximum incorporates many different cultural patterns, with unexhausted perspective’s exchanges and mimetism phenomena, between Christianity and Islam, faith and rationalism – what makes the Entrée an excellent representative of so-called “Franco-italian”, a receptional and hybridized cultural tradition.

Keywords

• franco-italian
• reception history in the middle ages
• entrée d’espagne
• east
• otherness
• linguistics
• lexical analysis