14 - Lancelot in Italy

Summary

The most perceptive student of the Lancelot tradition in Italy may well be Francesca da Rimini. The well-read adulteress provides important evidence that, although no medieval Italian text of the prose Lancelot exists, the story was familiar, at least to the noble and educated, in fourteenth-century Italy. Almost too well known to merit repetition, her discussion of the Lancelot nevertheless raises too many relevant issues not to require yet another look.

‘Ma s’a conoscer la prima radice

del nostro amor tu hai cotanto affetto.

dirò come colui che piange e dice.

Noi leggiavamo un giorno per diletto

di Lancialotto come amor lo strinse;

soli eravamo e sanza alcuno sospetto.

Per più fiate li occhi ci sospinse

quella lettura, e scolorocci il viso;

ma solo un punto fu quel che vinse.

Quando leggemmo il disïato riso

esser basciato da cotanto amante,

questi, che mai da me non fia diviso,

la bocca mi basciò tutto tremante.

Galeotto fu ‘l libro e chi lo scrisse:

quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.’ (Inf. V.124–38)

[‘But if you have such great desire to know the first root of our love, I will tell you as one who weeps and tells. One day, for pastime, we read of Lancelot, how love constrained him; we were alone, suspecting nothing. Several times that reading urged our eyes to meet and took the color from our faces, but one moment alone it was that overcame us. When we read how the longed-for smile was kissed by so great a lover, this one, who never shall be parted from me, kissed my mouth all trembling. AGallehaut was the book and he who wrote it; that day we read no farther in it.’]

This abbreviatio of a crucial moment in the adultery of Lancelot and Guinevere (itself a ‘cover’ for a crucial moment in the adultery of Paolo and Francesca) indicates Dante's (and Francesca’s) knowledge of the story but, as many have noted, it provides no clue as to what version of the Lancelot-Grail might have been available to either the poet of Florence or the lady of Rimini.