At 08:48 10/11/96 EST, you wrote:
>New Member:
>Carol Symes, Department of History, Harvard University
>
>I am currently traveling in France, collecting materials for a dissertation on
>theatre and public spectacle in the town of Arras during the thirteenth
century.
Arras was where Brunetto Latino, Dante's teacher-to-be, and other
Florentines lived, following the Battle of Montaperti in the thirteenth
century, and from where these Florentine lawyers and bankers to the Pope
plotted their return home, by means of Charles of Anjou, in whose train was
also to be Adam de la Halle. Alas, the Neapolitan Archives were destroyed in
the war about what went on next. While still in Arras the exiled Italians
had churned out copies of `Li Livres dou Tresor' as presentation copies to
major European power brokers, Charles, the Pope, the English, etc. That text
includes translations of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Cicero's writings
on rhetoric, and centres on civic government. Its manuscripts can be a
hybrid, Italian scribes, French illuminators, Picard dialect, etc. `Aucussin
and Nicolete' is also likely from Arras in this period. Thus Arras was a
cultural melting pot of great interest and vitality. Look at Brunetto
Latino, Il Tesoretto, Garland; Twice-Told Tales: Brunetto Latino and Dante
Alighieri, Peter Lang, and Robert Davidsohn's volumes on Florence, the
Italian translation of the work being very well-indexed. Arras was a major
papal banking site, at a time when papal politics were deeply into
propaganda against Ghibelline aristocracy and for Guelph republics, the
latter using Humanist education to further their ends. Florence, before
Montaperti, after Benevento, also used `civic liturgies'. I shall be most
interested in what you find. Especially if you were to turn up material
playing off of Terence's Comedies.
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