The Funerary Lament in Medieval Literature (Andrea Ghidoni)

Basic data for this project

Description

"The Funerary Lament in Medieval Literature: Models and Archetypes Between Literature, Religion and Anthropology" The subject of the proposed project will be the funeral lament in medieval literary texts. Planctus (by convention the Latin term is used) can be found in texts of different genres, from epic to lyric, from romance to drama, and is witnessed in all cultures of the European Middle Ages, in medieval Latin, in the various Romance and Germanic languages. The motif requires a character A mourns the passing of character B in a stereotyped form: the deceased may be a relative, a hero fallen on the battlefield, a sovereign or an aristocrat. It can be seen as a simple motif, a circumscribed passage within a broad narrative framework (for example: the mourning of a knight fallen in battle, inside an epic text) but it can also constitute a textual device, a codified literary genre, especially within lyric poetry, in which a poet can lament the disappearance of a real person, giving the text a contextual and immediate function. The griever laments the deceased through formulas or conventional gestures repeated from one case to another (for example: beard and hair torn, list of the deceased's enterprises, damages that the death of the person brings to the world, etc.). Therefore they are traditional literary forms, if not the reflection of real rituals and practices, widespread in folklore and found in almost all human cultures: planctus presents anthropological structures. Aim of the proposed project will be an analysis of the phenomenology of this literary motif on several levels: semiological, historical and anthropological. The approach will be aimed at identifying the main structures of planctus in the various literary genres and linguistic expressions; we will look for common patterns and the way in which the literary application of this cultural theme can diverge based on the context, the literary genre, the people involved in the mourning (mourner and mourned). What will emerge is a poetic of planctus.