Tra filologia e antropologia del testo. Usi e implicazioni del folklore nel Roman de Renart

This study, entitled “Between philology and textual anthropology. Uses and implications of the folklore in the Roman de Renart”, aims at exploring the ways in which folk culture is involved in the composition of the branches of the Roman de Renart. The basic thesis is that the use of particular folkloric motifs does not consist in a passive, “Renardized” representation, but that these are selected and adapted following the peculiar interest of the narrators, who express – more or less consciously – the values of a feudal secular culture that precisely finds in folklore a tool to emancipate itself from the hegemony of a competing ecclesiastical culture. This, therefore, remains the essential core of every Renardian fiction and the real object of investigation to be followed to deeply understand the mechanisms that have overseen the creation and fortune of the fox tales. In order to approach it, this work makes use of the support of critical insights provided by anthropology and ethnography, as the only suitable sciences to understand why certain characters and plots have been chosen, among the many that the folk repertoire offered. In fact, if the identification in the texts of the multiple layers of culture that animate them, first of all the one that comes back to the oral tradition, calls into question the dialogism postulated by Bachtin, the very adoption of the character of the Trickster, as Renart is, finds an explanation in the light of a world carnival vision that this literary archetype conveys, and that the authors and the audience of the branches wished to propagate. In the same way, in this study, the characteristics of Hersent, the she-wolf, are led back to a specifical archetype of the Feminine, to which she is bounded by a series of “family resemblance” she shares with other female characters, related to the image of the sorceress, the vetula or the go-between who, like the Trickster, expresses a vision of the world of clear popular matrix. Here as elsewhere, the validity of the proposed interpretations is based, above all, on the use of a comparative method, according to which the study relies, among many others, on the materials and methods provided by Vladimir Propp and Eleazar Meletinsky, whose historicist approach has been followed. The study is formally subdivided in two macro-sections of whom the first involves transversally all the branches, in order to trace some of those common denominators that have allowed to consistently ascribe the various texts (different in chronology, degree of authorship and cultural orientation) to a common “roman de Renart”. Obviously, in the first place this is about the main characters, i.e. the animals among which, for the reasons mentioned above, the fox Renart and the she-wolf Hersent have been favored; after the characters, the subsequent object of investigation is a place, the only one that, in addition to the court of the king, retains its own stable physiognomy in the various branches, that is to say Malpertuis, Renart’s home. This too is a highly informative element of the perception that author and audience have of its inhabitant, since the symbolism that surrounds it makes it a fully-fledge liminal place, forbidden to whoever tries to approach it, in open antithesis to the only big social pole of the Roman, that is the royal court. The second section of the thesis verifies the general assumptions by applying the analysis to three branches: the III (Renart et les anguilles), the XIII (Renart le noir) and the XVII (La mort et procession Renart), chosen as representative samples of the main modes of composition of Renardian texts. The postulate is that the recourse to the folkloric repertoire can ideally produce three types of stories, that is: those consisting in readjustments of plots known from the oral tradition, and this is the case of branche III; those consisting in new reworkings of such plots, and this is the case of the death of the fox in the branche XVII; those, finally, created ex novo, in which the folkloric material is present only in a reflected manner, as it happens in the branche XIII. In the first chapter, il is displayed the evolutionary pattern of the two stories that form the skeleton of the branche III, first propagated orally and then “Renardized”, to ascertain the extreme ease with which, first in the course of their propagation and then in the text of the branche, they are modified to be adapted to the narrative needs of those who have passed them on, whether the communities in which they circulated or the author who set them in writing. In the second chapter, consecrated to branche XIII, it is punctually explored the text of the récit to observe how, in this branche written by a late author, the folkloric elements appear in a reflected manner by now, that is to say that their presence is not so much voluntarily sought as an “accidental” presence, because they were inherited together with the plots of the previous branches that the author emulates. The motif of the disguise, which serves as the leitmotiv of the whole story, is also deprived of its original folkloric implications, to support an equation entirely internal to a Christian symbolism, between the black dye with which Renart camouflages himself and his equating to a demon. On the other hand, the very possibility that this equation is admissible indirectly confirms Renart’s trickster vocation and the author and audience agreement on this, as well as on the deeply disturbing feeling that the character of the fox had to arise in the collective imagination. The chapter closes with a comparison between the vulgate version of the branche (the one reported in the reference edition by Ernest Martin) and the one, conspicuously divergent in several points, hosted in Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal manuscript 3334 in Paris, signed H. The last analysis is related to to the story about the death of the fox, whose already known connection with the folkloric and ritualistic tradition has been extended here to a particular type of rural ceremonies, concerning the death and rebirth of the Carnival, proposing that the author of branche XVII follows precisely the framework of these specific seasonal rites in his description of the triple fake death of Renart. Perhaps, taking inspiration from processions and celebrations still staged in his time.