Francigena
The Francigena collection consists of a series of articles, studies and editions published on the website of the annual journal of the same name on Franco-Italian and French writings in the Middle Ages in Italy, born in 2015 and flanked from 2020 by a series of monographic volumes.
During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, French language and literature quickly spread across Europe and the Mediterranean thanks to an intertwining of political, commercial, and cultural influences. During the same period, in Italy and in Veneto, especially, a number of local authors started to write their works using a hybrid and artificial language, Franco-Italian (or Franco-Venetian), in an attempt to reconcile the prestige of the dominant French models (for example, their chansons de geste, or Arthurian novels) and the need to be understood by their audience.
Various important works have been written in this hybrid language, such as l'Entrée d’Espagne, Les histoires de Venise by Martino da Canal and Il Milione by Marco Polo. Along with others, Francigena is dedicated to these works. This magazine is published annually online and accepts contributions dedicated to the entire spectrum of phenomena that can be listed under a Franco-Italian categorisation.These range from epic poetry written in a mixed language to various types of texts written in langues d’oïl by Italian authors (for example, French documents written by Italians in Angevin-ruled Naples, as well as, of course, the ‘French of Italy’ by Brunetto Latini, Rustichello da Pisa, and others), together with various transcriptions and circulations of texts written in langues d’oïl in the courts and scriptoria across the peninsula.
Some of these works have only been published in old editions that do not adhere to the quality standards of modern philological science or they have still not been published. A starting point for researching articles to publish in “Francigena” is therefore curating new critical editions that make this vast literary heritage available to readers.
The language used in these texts has always seemed elusive to academics. Some of the works are written in a very correct form of French, where you can just about detect the influence of an Italian dialectal substratum (especially Venetian), whereas other texts are written in a veritably mixed language, where French and various forms of Vulgar Italian coexist in dynamic equilibrium. Studying interference between the different linguistic systems in each of the single pieces of work, with their hybrid forms that cannot be found in old varieties of French nor in northern Italian dialects, is a secondary, albeit important, point of research for “Francigena”.
But the themes of the magazine are very broad and include reading, analysis, and commentary (metric, stylistic, rhetorical, etc.) of Franco-Italian literary texts, their classification within the Romance tradition, comparative studies between various works belonging to the same genre or textual format (for example, epic poetry), the historical and geographical contextualisation of texts, events, historical figures, and much more. “Francigena” also welcomes papers whose style is more specifically historical or historical and artistic, with the aim of pursuing an approach that is as multidisciplinary as possible and covers a wide spectrum of topics.
Starting in 2020, Francigena is flanked by a series of volumes inspired by the same criteria as the journal.
“Francigena”
Year established: 2015.
Sponsoring institution: Department of Linguistics and Literature - University of Padua.
Issued: yearly.
Magazine’s languages: all Romance languages, German, and English
Management:
Giovanni Borriero, Università degli Studi di Padova
Francesca Gambino, Università degli Studi di Padova
Scientific committee:
Carlos Alvar, Universidad de Alcalá
Alvise Andreose, Università degli Studi e-Campus
Francesco Borghesi, The University of Sydney
Furio Brugnolo, Università degli Studi di Padova
Keith Busby, The University of Wisconsin
Roberta Capelli, Università di Trento
Dan Octavian Cepraga, Università degli Studi di Padova
Simon Gaunt, King's College London
Bernhard Huß, Freie Universität Berlin, Germania
John Hajek, The University of Melbourne
Marco Infurna, Università di Trento
Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas, Université de Lille 3
Giosuè Lachin, Università degli Studi di Padova
Stephen P. McCormick, Washington and Lee University
Luca Morlino, Opera del Vocabolario Italiano, CNR
Gianfelice Peron, Università degli Studi di Padova
Lorenzo Renzi, Università degli Studi di Padova
Andrea Rizzi, The University of Melbourne
Raymund Wilhelm, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria
Zeno Verlato, Opera del Vocabolario Italiano, CNR
Leslie Zarker Morgan, Loyola University Maryland
Editorial board:
Alessandro Bampa, Università degli Studi di Padova
Chiara Cappelli, Università degli Studi di Padova
Rachele Fassanelli, Università degli Studi di Padova, Editor in chief
Marco Francescon, Università degli Studi di Trento
Luca Gatti, Università degli Studi di Padova
Federico Guariglia, Università di Verona
Serena Modena, Università degli Studi di Padova
Fabio Sangiovanni, Università degli Studi di Padova
Benedetta Viscidi, Università degli Studi di Padova
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