The many unsolved questions surrounding Franco-Italian as a language system are
complicated by the fact that one is not confronting a unified, codified system, where a
single comprehensive lexicon or grammar might suffice. Instead, there are virtually as
many Franco-Italian “languages” as there are surviving texts. This is not to say, however,
that it is totally random or without its own regulations. There is significant variation,
morphologically and syntactically, from one text to another and not infrequently within a
single text. Such ubiquitous variation prompted some scholars to argue that Franco-
Italian authors were generally either too ignorant of Old French to employ the language
properly, or that they wished, intended, and even believed in some cases that their French
was correct. Nicholas of Verona declares in the Pharsale: “Car çe ne sai nuls home en
Paris ne en Valois/Que non die qe ces vers sont feit par buen françois.” (“For I know of
no man in Paris or in the Valois/Who does not say that these verses are written in good
French.”) Others argued that such authors were sufficiently competent to use the
language correctly but adopted the hybrid Franco-Italian to accommodate linguistically,
as well as thematically, their Italian publics. In the case of the Entrée d’Espagne,
unmistakable and uncommon erudition lends substantial support to the latter thesis.
Recent linguistic work reveals that the two principal language systems are not
synchronic. The French element, the langue écrite, dates back to the earlier French of the
chansons de geste and romans and is thus anachronistic in its interaction with the then
contemporary Italian of the 13th and 14th centuries, which is entered as a langue parlée.
Current research likewise stresses the importance of placing both Franco-Italian
language and letters within the complex sociopolitical, cultural, and historical contexts in
which they developed. Thus, a Franco-Italian Rolandian work of ca. 1325 is likely to
effect some alteration of its 12th-century model in narrative material and character
presentation, as well as in ideological orientation. Indeed, one of the most pervasive
innovations is the elevation of Roland to new, quasihagiographic heroism, while
simultaneously undermining Charlemagne’s role in the earlier French poems. Archaic
epico-feudal mentalities were to be at least partially recast for reception by different
publics in different times.
The cultural and intellectual climate of Venetan-Lombard Italy in the 13th century
suggests explanations for such change. Site of one of Europe’s oldest universities, Padua
was also an important Franco-Italian center. The university began as a studium ca. 1220,
composed of a group of scholars of canon and civic law, joined by grammarians,
dialecticians, and rhetoricians migrating from Bologna. It was most notably the scholars
of the Trivium who gave rise to the Prehumanist movement in the region, characterized
essentially by its enthusiasm for and emulation of Greco-Roman antiquity. Such
individuals as Albertino Mussato and Lovato Lovati recovered texts and documents lost
for centuries and composed elegant writings in the style of the ancient auctores. There is
evidence that Dante and Petrarch were in the region at various times and that the Divina
commedia was known to the Entrée’s anonymous Paduan poet. Humanistic traits have
been noted in several Franco-Italian texts; scholars trace a direct line between the
humanism of Mussato and Petrarch. In the exceptionally active intellectual, artistic, and
literary environment of the period, scholars and clerics mingled easily with the nobility
and with the less learned but vital sector of the mercantile bourgeoisie. Franco-Italian
literature, developed within so fertile an environment and addressed to multiple,
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