Uberto and Philomena as a bridge between the oral tradition of the cantari and the written one of the courts: Close Reading as a tool for the investigation of philological and linguistic aspects related to the manuscript tradition of the work.

Chantal Pivetta,Department of Italian Studies, University of Lund

I am developing a research project that will result in a digital critical edition of Uberto and
Philomena, a narration in octaves of a chivalrous subject. The work has been written around 1410
by Andrea de Simone, author of whom we have little information. It had a good circulation during
the Italian Renaissance, with a total of eight editions starting from the editio princeps (1475) to the
last printing (1533). To date, three manuscripts remain, which represent my main source of
investigation.
The text has been defined as a novellistic cantare, most likely intended for recitation in the square
in three different days. I will investigate not only the brevity of the story, which led to a series of
formal and stylistic choices, but also the relationship between orality and writing. The use of IT
tools related to Close Reading allows me to easily identify algorithms able to explain several
phenomena. The results obtained so far suggest different information on the copyists and their
choices, but at the same time they make it clear that the text was in an intermediate section, almost a
bridge, between the oral tradition of the cantari and the subsequent refined chivalric literature of the
courts.
This prompts me to consider aspects of Distant Reading as well, providing me with valuable
suggestions on the possible relationships between some cantari and subsequent works by Boiardo
and Ariosto.
My contribution will show some practices adopted within my philological and linguistic study and
the unexpected solutions that some tools can offer. This is in line with the idea that digital softwares
can help researchers (sometimes with contradictory results compared to the human work previously
conducted!). However, they cannot fully replace the researchers in their role, as naturally a human
interpretation is required.