TNA Fellow Floriana Ceresato

The digital franco-italian “Anseïs de Carthage”

Anseïs de Carthage is a chanson de geste datable to the second quarter of the 13th century. This ancient French epic poem is composed of irregular decasyllabic stanzas and belongs to the Cycle du Roi. It tells the story of Anseïs, a young Charlemagne’s nephew, crowned new king of Spain by his uncle the emperor after the Roncesvalles events, at the end of the war against the Saracens. The chanson is preserved in four manuscripts containing the whole text, in a manuscript containing the acephalous text and in six fragmentary codices. Thus far, four critical editions of the poem exist. The first purpose of the project is to achieve a digital edition of the franco-italian Anseïs de Carthage. The second objective of the project concerns the lexical and linguistic analysis: the lexical data about the franco-italian Anseïs de Carthage could be processed to determine the degree of linguistic hybridization of the manuscript at different levels: phonetic, morphological, semantic. Furthermore, the analysis of the data could show the graphical variation phenomena inside the text and the occurrence of significant epic vocabulary.

TNA presentation: Floriana Ceresato in ‘DH and Medieval Romance Philology: Two Case Studies’: Seminar at the University of Galway, 3 July 2024.