The old French case system: Three Franco-Italian case studies

The aim of this contribution is therefore to consider and compare one particular linguistic aspect of Franco-Italian, namely the old French case system, in relation to three representative textual samples. Two of these are texts, our understanding and interpretation of which have been greatly enhanced by Gaunt’s own work, namely Le Devisement dou monde (f.fr. 1116, Eusebi 2018; henceforth DM), an original French text produced in 1298 by Marco Polo in conjunction with Rustichello da Pisa in Genova (cf. Gaunt 2013b), and the earliest manuscript (Royal 20 D 1) – and most probably the extant archetype (Barbieri 2020) – of the so-called second redaction, a substantially revised version, of the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César (henceforth HA) made in Naples around 1337-38 (Morcos et al.; Barbieri 2019; Gaunt 2021). The third text is an original translation of Amato da Montecassino’s late 11th-c. Historia Normannorum generally known as L’Ystoire de li Normant (ms. BnF fr. 688, Bartholomaeis 1935), commissioned and produced in Campania, southern Italy, by an unknown translator in the first half of the 14th century (Bougy 2005:78; Lee 2015:95f.). These three case studies which involve different parameters of variation in terms of typology (original composition vs copy with substantial revision vs original translation), diachrony (late 13th vs early 14th centuries), diatopy (north-centre (Genoa, Venice, Pisa) vs south) and diastraty (diversity of intended readerships) will be explored to determine the extent to which different attestations of Franco-Italian can be said to share similar linguistic features, how these, in turn, may differ from textual varieties of French produced within the medieval kingdom of France, and what, if anything, the Franco-Italian evidence might teach us about the distribution, use and eventual decline of the old Gallo-Romance case system (cf. Chabron 2003; Detges 2008; Schøsler 2018; 2020).