Back to the roots: the Prophecies in “les Propheties de Merlin.” A reassessment of the “textual Group II.”

This project focuses on the “Propheties de Merlin”, a text composed in Italy in the end of the 13th century. Written in French, the text contains numerous allusions to contemporary Italian political events, particularly those related to the conflict between the Guelphs and Ghibellines. The core of the text consists of Merlin dictating mostly political prophecies to different scribes. The prophetic and political sequences alternate with romance material from the “Lancelot”, the “Tristan en prose” and the “Cycle de Guiron le Courtois” tradition, which makes the “PM” thus making it an original Arthurian romance. The surviving manuscripts have been divided into four groups. Modern research has mainly focused on group I (long version) and the romance aspects of the text, whereas the prophetic part has largely been understudied. The questions that arise are whether the political references, that might have been understood by contemporary Italian readers that were familiar with the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict, would have been intelligible to a French audience decades later. Addressing these issues requires a comprehensive reassessment of the tradition. Until now, editions have relied primarily on the long version of the text. The hypothesis that the short version is an abridged version of the long version, is founded on research based on editions of the long version, although it should be tested against the text tradition as a whole. The short version offers a different reading experience, consisting of a dense series of obscure prophecies that should be considered. The present edition, based on manuscript B (Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Cod. 388), aims to make this short version accessible and to better understand the reception of a text strongly rooted in an Italian political context by a French audience.