Vix imitabilis : La Griselda polacca fra letteratura e cultura popolare

Petrarch’s Griselda story - the Insignis obedientia et fides uxoris, a version of the last novella of Boccaccio’s Decameron - is the poet’s one and only translation from vernacular into Latin. The tale is notable in the way that it has spread into all European literatures, with a huge number of translations and free renderings. The vitality and continued transmission of the Griselda story - which is one of the basic characteristics of a chapbook (Volksbuch) – makes it a natural benchmark to define tastes in popular literature of readers of times gone by, from the 16th century to modern times. The evolution of the Petrarch tale in Polish re-tellings – which is the theme of this study – has until now been only partially analysed, since it has generally been regarded only as a literary “echo” from Boccaccio, even though the Petrarch version has been the direct or indirect source for all Polish Griseldas. The first chapter examines all the relevant structural and semantic displacements, involving either the plot or the features and functions of characters, introduced by Petrarch in his interpretation of Boccaccio’s original, and which have had an impact on subsequent literary reworkings. In the fundamental quest for accurate historical-literary systematization, we have focused on questions of bibliological and textual-philologic criticism – sources, genetic relationships between different texts, interactions with German and Russian versions. Petrarch’s original text, which makes up the Appendix of the work, designed to support such an approach, is accompanied by a critical apparatus of Latin variants belonging to the “Polish” branch of the Insignis obedientia genealogical chart. Chapter II is entirely concerned with the diffusion of Petrarch’s story among Polish humanists. The Latin text was known in Poland from around 1433, and was widely disseminated, within a vast corpus of orations, epistles and epigrams of contemporary Italian humanists; and the seven “Polish” manuscripts of 1440-1460 offer a well-defined version, unknown to scholars and editors of the Petrarchan work. Chapter III focuses on the historical-literary contexts of Polish recastings of the tale, imitated directly or indirectly from Petrarch’s version. Particularly notable is the anonymous Historyja znamienita (…) o Gryzelli, from c.1551, the first novella in Polish literature, which is here carefully re-examined on the basis of a newly found copy, which offers an earlier version than the one hitherto known. Moreover, the discovery of a 19th century chapbook edition of the Historyja allows us to evaluate the vitality of the prose style of old Polish fiction. The final chapter concentrates on the literary genetics and typological factors. Having surveyed in detail the terminology of literary genres, applied in modern studies to old Polish fiction prose and poetry, specifically including the Griselda stories, we advance a typology, based on the immanent poetics of each single analysed work and taking into account the types of novella plot and characters. This typology could reflect in the most comprehensive way the evolution of the Griselda story in Polish literature.