Orfeo Tamburi. Un profilo inedito / Un profil inédit.

Presentazione di Gualtieri di San Lazzaro. A cura di Nerio Tebano. Testo Italiano e Inglese. Roma, Il Cigno Edizioni 1971, cm.24,5x34, pp.228, num.figg.e tavv.bn.e a col. legatura ed.in tutta tela, cofanetto. Coll.L'arte dei Maestri.

,Translation by Sandra C. Malicote and A. Richard Hartman. New York Italica Press 2014 cm.14x21, pp.300, brossura,copertina figurata a colori This "chanson de geste" records the exploits of the young knight, Aiol, as he reclaims by word and deed his father’s and mother’s unjustly stolen heritage. He gains the love of a Saracen princess who converts when she is convinced, by his warrior prowess, of the truth of the Christian god. He then aids the French King Louis in ending a debilitating war led by rebellious vassals and (in an allusion to the Fourth Crusade) similarly helps Emperor Grasien, king of Venice, to end his own war against an enemy to the East. Aiol’s deeds ultimately bring justice to the kingdom of France. But the poem is far more than the tale itself. "Aiol," like many other crusading and romance epics, recreates both the Christian culture of the West and the Islamic culture of the Levant. Poets writing in medieval French created richly textured literary metaphors or fictions about both the Christian and Muslim world, and they were themselves well aware that even though they were treating historically-based materials, they were also fabricating fictions and fictive truths, tropes and figures as literary art. "Aiol’s" literary allusions and fictive representations suggest a sophistication on the part of the chanson’s authors, who wrote for courts that knew well and first-hand the Muslim world. By the time of "Aiol’s" composition there had long been fruitful cultural, trade — as well as military — interaction between the “two worlds.” Islamic scholars were respected in intellectual circles in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and translators briskly adapted works of Arabic science and medicine for the readers of Latin Europe. Around 80 Old French epics are known from surviving 13th-century manuscripts. These were preserved and passed down by the aristocratic families who had commissioned them and financed their preparation. These poems, often called genealogical epics, served a number of purposes, from entertainment at important courtly occasions, such as marriages and investitures, to edification and instruction in the vernacular of the courtly world. Excerpts of these “songs of deeds” or "chansons de geste" were also publicly sung after Sunday Mass for the entertainment and instruction of the ordinary people. The institutions of the monarchy, social class, marriage and the family are explored and developed in a poetic enterprise that gave life to what might otherwise have become an academic debate. Dialectical argument structures the entire work into a richly instructive, psychologically compelling and socially pleasing whole. Taken together with "Elye of Saint Gilles," "Aiol" has become known as the "geste de Saint Gilles," because both poems relate events in the lives of Julien of Saint Gilles, a literary epic hero first found in "Le Couronnement de Louis," and Julien’s son, Elye and Elye’s son, Aiol. The 2 poems are preserved in one richly decorated and ornamented manuscript, the BNFfr 25516. It has been proposed that this geste was presented at the Parisian court of Philip Augustus for the lavish, festive wedding in 1212 of Jeanne of Constantinople, countess of Flanders, to Ferrand of Portugal. Jeanne was the daughter of Count Baldwin of Flanders & Hainaut, who had, during the 4th Crusade, been elected emperor of the Latin Empire at Constantinople. Hartman & Malicote’s edition and translation is based on BNFfr 25516 and on the critical editions of W. Foerster & of J. Normand & G. Raynaud. As with their edition of "Elye of Saint Gilles," the editors have chosen simplicity and directness of approach. The translation remains faithful to the spirit and meaning of the Old French poem; creating a lively, interesting and engaging text that allows the reader to savor the rich intellectual and artistic context of the original. Derived from the original Italica Press dual-language edition, the English-only version is ideal for undergraduate use. It includes 11 illustrations, introduction, notes, sample of original French, select bibliography.

Contents: Preface 1. Cuthswith, seventh-century abbess of Inkberrow, near Worcester, and the Würzburg manuscript of Jerome on Ecclesiastes Patrick Sims-Williams 2. The Anglian collection of royal genealogies and regnal lists David N. Dumville 3. The authenticating voice in Beowulf Stanley B. Greenfield 4. The ideal of men dying with their lord in the Germania and in The Battle of Maldon Rosemary Woolf 5. Ælfric's use of discourse in some saints' lives Ruth Waterhouse 6. Caesarius of Arles and Old English literature Joseph B. Trahern Jr 7. A supplement to Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon N. R. Ker 8. The probable derivation of most of the illustrations in Junius II from an illustrated Old Saxon Genesis Barbara Raw 9. The palaeography of the Parker manuscript of the Chronicle, laws and Sedulius, and historiography at Winchester in the late ninth and tenth centuries M. B. Parkes 10. Some problems in interpreting Anglo-Saxon coinage Stewart Lyon 11. Beginnings continued: a decade of studies of Old English prose Milton McC. Gatch 12. Bibliography for 1975 Martin Biddle, Alan Brown, T. J. Brown, Peter A. Clayton and Peter Hunter Blair Index to volumes 1–5. Cambridge University Press 1976, cm.15x23, pp.319, legatura editoriale cartonata, sopraccoperta figurata. Manuscripts are the form of evidence most studied in this volume: the likely seventh- and eighth-century English ownership of a fifth-century copy of a Hieronymian commentary is meticulously reconstructed; an edition and full discussion of the eighth-century Anglian collection of royal genealogies and regnal lists advance our understanding of this difficult material; and it is shown that most of the drawings in the Junius codex of Old English poetry probably derived from an illustrated copy of an Old Saxon poem on Genesis which came to this country in the middle of the ninth century. Vernacular literature is well represented: two leading features of narrative technique are examined, one in Beowulf, the greatest surviving poem of the age, and the other in the works of Ælfric, perhaps its greatest writer of prose. A wide-ranging survey of some of the main problems in the modern-day study of Anglo-Saxon coinage makes a fundamental contribution both to that study itself and to the understanding of it by those in other specializations.