L’identificazione dei personaggi nella Chronique di Ernoul e Bernard le Trésorier : strategie testuali e varianti

The Chronique that goes under the names of Ernoul and Bernard the Treasurer is a good example of the problems raised by the study of how characters are mentioned in a chronicle where, proper names refer to historical figures. The interplay between named and unnamed characters in the Chronique is not only due to the kind of historical information available to the author: it also reveals the author’s point of view on the narrative. The study of variant readings in the manuscript tradition shows how some tendencies in rewriting the text that are constant in some groups, and in some individual copies. Scribes mostly relied on the context to gather the information on the character’s names, and sometimes on a more extensive knowledge of the text. There is only small evidence pointing to the use of external sources.