Performance and Text in the Italian Carolingian Tradition

One of the most fascinating aspects of the chivalric-epic tradition of Italy is the historical dialectic between its manifestations as oral performance and written text. Based primarily on Carolingian lore, the oral and written traditions influenced each other in a symbiotic dialogue across the centuries. John Miles Foley, one of the leading experts on world epic traditions, discusses the interaction of oral and written processes in his book, The Singer of Tales in Performance: "The old model of the Great Divide between orality and literacy has given way in most quarters, pointing toward the accompanying demise of the absolutist dichotomy of performance versus document. . . . Consequently, text can no longer be separated out as something different by species from the oral tradition it records or draws upon; the question becomes not whether but how performance and document speak to one another" (1995:79). The dialectic interaction of oral and written manifestations of Carolingian lore in Italy will be the primary focus of this study. Special attention will be given to 1) the cantari, medieval poems that hail back to the beginnings of the chivalric-epic in Italian literature; and 2) oral performances of epic lore in the Sicilian cunto, which up until the early part of the twentieth century were still part of a living tradition. The epic tradition in Italy, both oral and written, is primarily based on the French chansons de geste, in particular the Chanson de Roland. Foley asserts that the chansons de geste were originally oral-derived texts: "Behind these manuscript-prisoned epics stands a tradition of oral composition and transmission by singers of tales, called jongleurs, although clerical and scribal activity intervened in various ways between oral performance and written record" (2002:177). With specific reference to the